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Freeman Dyson - Fermi's rejection of our work (94/157)
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Freeman Dyson recounts how Enrico Fermi rejected his team's meson scattering model, noting that it had too many free parameters. It is the source of the quote about fitting an elephant.
Cited in modeling and machine learning threads as the classic story on overfitting and justifying parameters.
16 Hacker News mentions · 2024–2025