There's always the difference between the kind of question you ask and the type of prediction and explanation for it. For example, you might ask either "what generally happens here" or "what is happening here". The first asks for a simple explanation and a rule of thumb type prediction. It might be helpful for responding to the second question, or not. The second question is more about individual complex systems in a particular circumstance requiring one to start from the limited information that raises the question and to go to the trouble of expanding your understanding while exploring possible patterns in the environment until you find one that seems to fit.
I think there are lots of differences between any kind of explanatory causation and the instrumental causes. Maybe explanations become useless if they try to include all the complexity of the instrumental processes, but also often loose their value by ignoring the underlying complexity too. Re: earth quakes, I went to a lecture at Columbia recently that was just great on the physics of 'slow slips' in a shearing crust, large horizontal zones of gradual internal tearing within the crust, having leading vibration events and propagation fronts, etc. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 3:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes 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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