This week I watched Professor Goodman's interview of Ned Hall. What I found most interesting about the talk was Professor Goodman and Ned's conversation about rules and theories. From what I gleaned rules are more tailored to specific situations and do not involve concepts that can't be directly observed or ones that need separate explanation. Theories on the other hand can often have exceptions since they are more general. In addition, Ned and Professor Goodman highlighted that theories can invoke concepts that can't be directly observed or explained in closed manner. I never really put much thought into the distinction between the two concepts and it was interesting to see Alyssa and Ned demonstrate the difficulty with defining rules, as they couldn't even provide a succinct rule that could be used to delineate between rules and theories.
One question I wish Alyssa asked Ned was if he knew of any situations where making the distinction between rule and theory was especially important. I somewhat get the distinctions at a high level but I am unclear about their utility. For that reason I'd love to hear more examples of how the distinction provided greater clarity or insight. In addition, I would love to know Ned's thoughts on AI potentially becoming more accurate without necessarily becoming any more transparent.
https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954/items/lx-pb:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954:lx_simulation:8bf7271d?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction