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I'm not a physicist or mechanical engineer and this is a genuine question - why would we not be able to reliably design anything if we only had statistical mode
by danielmarkbruce 5y ago
I'm not a physicist or mechanical engineer and this is a genuine question - why would we not be able to reliably design anything if we only had statistical models? Empirical formulas are used in various places in science/engineering and seem to work well (with exceptions). As an example - would we not arrive at something like f = ma using statistics and then use it without really knowing why (or maybe all the implications of) f = ma?
- ivalm 5y agoI think the main issue is interpolation vs extrapolation. Statistical models work well within the domain where data is available but have trouble generalizing to where data is unavailable. The very cool thing with physics is that theory was able to make a lot of true but wild predictions that only much later were backed up with experiment. Such powerful theories are very useful for finding interesting phenomena to study/exploit
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoI'm saying "does it matter how we arrive at a model?".