Nit: It goes a bit deeper than that.

Note this talk by another Pop Sci personality Robert Sapolsky, where he talks about the limitations of western reductionism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo

Yet his latest book on free will exclusively depended on an reductionist viewpoint.

While I don't know his motivations for those changes, the fact that the paper he mentioned was so extremely unpopular that I was only one of a handful that read it surely provided some incentive:

> "REDUCTIONISM AND VARIABILITY IN DATA: A META-ANALYSIS ROBERT SAPOLSKY and STEVEN BALT"

Or you can go back to math and look at the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy, which was purely about if we should, universally, accept PEM a priori, which Church, Post, Gödel, and others proved wasn't a safe in many problems.

Luckily ZFC helped with some of that, but Hilbert won that war of of words. Where even suggesting a constructivist approach produces so much cognitive dissonance that it is often branded as heresy.

Fortunately with the Curry–Howard–Lambek correspondence you can shift to types or categories with someone who understands them to avoid that land mine, but even on here people get frustrated when people say something is 'undecidable' and then go silent. It is not that labeling it as 'undecidable' wins an argument, but that it is so painful to move on because from Plato onward PEM was part of the trinity of thought that is sacrosanct.

To be clear, I am not a strict constructivist, but view this as horses for courses, with the reductionist view being insanely useful for many needs.

If you look at the link that jeffbee the mention of "garden of forking paths" is a way of stepping on egg shells around the above.

https://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/heali...

Overfitting and underfitting are often explained as symptoms of the bias-variance trade-off, and even with PHDs it is hard to invoke indecomposablity, decidability, or non-triviality; all of which should be easy to explain as when PEM doesn't hold for some reason.

While mistaking the map for the territory is an easy way for the Freakonomics authors to make a living, it can be viewed as an unfortunate outcome due to the assumption of PEM and abuse of the principle of sufficient reason.

While there are most certainly other approaches, and obviously not everything can be proven or even found with the constructivist approach, whenever something is found that is surprising, there should be an attempt to not accept PEM before making a claim that something is not just epistemically possible but
epistemically necessary.

To me this is just checking your assumptions, obviously the staunchly anti-constructivist viewpoint has members that are far smarter and knowledgeable then I will ever be.

IMHO for profit or donation based Pop science will always look for the man bites dog stories... I do agree that sharing the beauty while avoiding misleading is challenging and important.

But the false premise that you either do or do not accept constructive mathematics also blocks the ease in which you could show that these type of farcical claims the authors make are false.

That simply doesn't exist today where the many worlds ideas are popular in the press, but pointing out that many efforts appear to be an attempt to maintain the illusion of Laplacian determinism, which we know has counterexamples, is so counter to the Platonic zeitgeist that most people bite their tongues when they should be providing counterexamples to help find a better theory.

I know that the true believers in any camp help drive things forward, and they need to be encouraged too.

But the point is that there is a real deeper problem that is helping drive this particular communication problem and something needs to change so that we can move forward with the majority of individuals having larger toolboxes vs dogmatic schools of thought.

</rant>