It also incidentally underscores the amazing predictive powers of Noam Chomsky, when he thinks he's describing something that common sense indicates is dumb, and then a few years later someone actually goes out and does it, and does it in earnest, and unironically, and tries to promote it as an actual advance:
So for example, take an extreme case, suppose that somebody says he wants to eliminate the physics department and do it the right way. The “right” way is to take endless numbers of videotapes of what’s happening outside the video, and feed them into the biggest and fastest computer, gigabytes of data, and do complex statistical analysis — you know, Bayesian this and that [Editor’s note: A modern approach to analysis of data which makes heavy use of probability theory.] — and you’ll get some kind of prediction about what’s gonna happen outside the window next. In fact, you get a much better prediction than the physics department will ever give. Well, if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it’s way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won’t get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at — what you’ll get at is an approximation to what’s happening.
But he's saying it is bad to do it that way instead of doing traditional physics because you get no understanding, which is true, but in this study they're not using it as a "physics engine" to pilot aircraft or whatever, they're using it as a trick to generate novel hypotheses, which could then be theorised and investigated properly, not as a replacement to theory.
Unless you have videos of experiments designed to observe measurement devices we have created, on systems we have designed, it's all useless.
The only useful thing in figuring out how nature works is creating truely novel experimental circumstances and measuring them with novel devices created for that purpose.
You cannot do science as a statitics of images; that's pseudoscience. And chomsky is here only half-right; it's actually much worse than he's sayign.
So for example, take an extreme case, suppose that somebody says he wants to eliminate the physics department and do it the right way. The “right” way is to take endless numbers of videotapes of what’s happening outside the video, and feed them into the biggest and fastest computer, gigabytes of data, and do complex statistical analysis — you know, Bayesian this and that [Editor’s note: A modern approach to analysis of data which makes heavy use of probability theory.] — and you’ll get some kind of prediction about what’s gonna happen outside the window next. In fact, you get a much better prediction than the physics department will ever give. Well, if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it’s way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won’t get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at — what you’ll get at is an approximation to what’s happening.
http://chomsky.info/20121101/