i am reading David Deutsch's popular science book "the beginning of infinity", some of which of which seems to roughly line up with what you are saying here. D

i am reading David Deutsch's popular science book "the beginning of infinity", some of which of which seems to roughly line up with what you are saying here. Deutsch argues that human progress is essentially due to the power of "good explanations", and the circumstances that allow good explanations to be generated, improved, error-corrected, and discarded in favour of better explanations. Deutsch is critical of the idea that we should merely focus on predicting things rather than creating explanations for them. There has been a lot of recent progress and excitement about the application of statistical/predictive ideas to business and industry - machine learning, "big data". However there there has been little (or no) progress in understanding how to generate explanations. Deutsch argues that human creativity is a key component of the scientific method, that is often downplayed. We currently have no good explanation for how human creativity works, because if we did, he argues, we could go and program it tomorrow, and then we would have genuine AI. (n.b. this is all hugely paraphrased and possibly misrepresents Deutsch's arguments. But another of Deutsch's arguments is that creativity on behalf of the human recipient allows ideas to survive transmission through awfully lossy mediums, such as this one)