Predictability without good explanation is a trailhead for research

Things that are predicable, but for which we don’t have a good explanation, provide trailheads for research. Humans are one such example: much of our behavior is predictable, both as individuals and in groups. But in most cases, we don’t yet have very satisfying explanations for why.

Credit to Laura Deming for the conversation that generated this, and to Hongyi Li, for pointing out that my original formulation violated Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

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