Hi, Nick.

I haven't read the papers yet, so maybe I am misunderstanding you when you
say:

but I am prepared to bet you that it will be easy to
> show that just to the extent that they are explanatory, they are also
> predictive.
>

You go on to mention earthquakes, which was the first thing I thought of
when I read the above.

I guess the part I don't get is, aren't a lot of phenomena like this?  I
mean, you could construct a model that perfectly explains earthquakes, but
won't be able to predict them.  I'm assuming here that the model in question
"explains" and "predicts" the real world ... but often in the real world we
do not have all the measurements we need to predict.

So in this sense, even a perfect explanatory model would not be able to
predict some things, simply because it lacks the right inputs.

What point am I missing here?

Thanks,

Ted
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