Dear All,
We have been having a discussion on a SF Site called Wedtech about the
relationship between explanation, simulation, and prediction. If you want to
get a sense of the starting point of that discussion, have a look at Josh
Epstein's forum entry in the current JASSS, which seems to be just about as
wrong headed as a piece of writing can be. In it, he makes a radical
separation between prediction and explanation, implying that the quality,
accuracy, scope, and precision of predictions that arise from an explanation is
no measure of that explanation's value.
In the course of trying to discover where such a silly idea might have come
from, I was led to literatures in economics and geophysics where, indeed, the
word "prediction" has taken on a negative tone. These seem to be both fields
in which the need for knowledge about the future has overwhelmed people's need
to understand the phenomenon, so that predictive activities have way outrun
theory.
However, acknowledging the problem in these literatures is not the same thing
as making a principled claim that prediction has nothing to do with
explanation.
In the course of thinking about these matters, I have stumbled on an
extraordinary website packed with simulations done by people at the USGS in
Menlo Park California. the page is
http://quake.usgs.gov/research/deformation/modeling/animations/. I commend to
you particularly, the simulations done on teh Anatolian Fault in Turkey (BELOW
the stuff on california) and ask you to ponder whether the mix of simulatoin,
explanation, and predicition is appropriate here. I suggest you start at the
top of the Anatolian series and move from simulation to simulation using the
link provided at the bottom right of each simulation. Stress buildup and
stress release are represented by red and blue colors respectively and the
theory is one of stress propogation. I would love to know where the colors
come from i.e., how stress is measured. If there is no independent measure of
stress, then, as in psychology, the notion of stress is just covert adhockery.
Please let me (us) know what you think.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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