July 16, 2026

Philosophy

Machine Learning

LLM

Visualization

Richard Hamming famously used to ask his colleagues at Bell Labs this question: “What is the most important problem in your field, and why aren’t you working on it?” To which they probably replied, “Look, Dick, it’s eight-thirty in the morning. I haven’t even had my coffee yet. Who starts a conversation like that?”

Still, it’s a good question, isn’t it? For me, the answer is obvious: “Is there a general method for induction?” Now, you might think that the human race has a pretty good handle on induction, what with the scientific method and statistics and all that. But no: there’s a gap in the very foundation of our understanding, a gap we can only cross occasionally and haphazardly.

Hume called it the problem of induction ; a catchier name is the No Free Lunch theorem , although it’s about as far from being a “theorem” as it’s possible to get.…