Originally Posted by rtomes

The funny thing is that the "physical" model and theory builders do not see the funny side of this. Decades ago Box and Jenkins demonstrated that in economics, all the theories and models and using 100 time series to forecast just one of interest could not compete with a "dumb" model that knew nothing about economics and that used only the series itself. I don't think that has stopped economic modeling, but it has largely obsoleted it.

Much of the stuff done as physics and nearly all of cosmology fits into the same category. You don't need the "physical model" to get the best results. Modeling is just for us to be able to get new ideas, it doesn't help with the results.