Earlier quoted context omitted.
{Hypothesis, test, loop} is the scientific method, and I can guarantee it is being used when fine tuning an LLM.
The reason that this is Engineering as opposed to Science, is that the hypothesis is just, "hey, maybe this will work". Nobody has really explained why it works.
I believe it's entirely possible that the scientific method breaks down past a certain level of system complexity defined somehow by thermodynamics.
This would in part be due to the infeasibility of running the proper experiments to understand the effects of single variables when tens of thousands of variables might be changing at the micro level.