This whole idea strikes me as extremely confused. Data mining is just observation. Any extrapolation from data is a theory. Anderson and this author seem to

This whole idea strikes me as extremely confused. Data mining is just observation. Any extrapolation from data is a theory. Anderson and this author seem to be surprised that you can get so far with an incomplete theory that doesn't explain everything. That seems obvious to me -- remember classical mechanics? Here's a particularly bad example: "When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all." "Spelling rules" are a heuristic extrapolation just like the one Google is making, but are probably less accurate! Why is a set of rules designed to be memorable and useful to a human more of a theory than rules that you have to write down, and need a computer to use?