I agree with most of what you’re saying, but this part seems like giving up way too easily: “And even if you say, ok sure it depends, but like what’s the average answer—even then, the only the way to arrive at some unbiased global sense of whether the future is predictable is to come up with some way of enumerating and weighing all possible facts about the future universe… which is an impossible problem. So we’re left with the unsatisfying truth that the future is neither predictable or unpredictable—it depends on which features of the future you are considering.”
The only way to say something useful about this is literally enumerating all possible facts? Sounds needlessly pessimistic.
On the contrary, I think it could be tremendously interesting and useful to start building some kind of categorization of prediction domains that allows saying something about their respective predictability. Obviously this is a hard problem, obviously the universe is very complex and the categorization will miss a lot of the intricacy, but the same is true about many other domains of knowledge (probably, nearly all of them). Despite the complexity of the universe (i) we should keep looking for (extremely) simplified models that capture a lot of what we actually care about (ii) having even an extremely simplified model is often much better than no model at all (iii) the model will keep evolving over time (which is to say, it feels more like a potential new science than a single problem that can be stated and solved in a relatively short time frame).
I agree with most of what you’re saying, but this part seems like giving up way too easily: “And even if you say, ok sure it depends, but like what’s the average answer—even then, the only the way to arrive at some unbiased global sense of whether the future is predictable is to come up with some way of enumerating and weighing all possible facts about the future universe… which is an impossible problem. So we’re left with the unsatisfying truth that the future is neither predictable or unpredictable—it depends on which features of the future you are considering.”
The only way to say something useful about this is literally enumerating all possible facts? Sounds needlessly pessimistic.
On the contrary, I think it could be tremendously interesting and useful to start building some kind of categorization of prediction domains that allows saying something about their respective predictability. Obviously this is a hard problem, obviously the universe is very complex and the categorization will miss a lot of the intricacy, but the same is true about many other domains of knowledge (probably, nearly all of them). Despite the complexity of the universe (i) we should keep looking for (extremely) simplified models that capture a lot of what we actually care about (ii) having even an extremely simplified model is often much better than no model at all (iii) the model will keep evolving over time (which is to say, it feels more like a potential new science than a single problem that can be stated and solved in a relatively short time frame).