suppose that the phenomenon that you were trying to model was the output of a cryptographic-quality pseudo-random generator for which you did not know the seed. Would you expect to be able to model its output accurately?
Uhh, no, I wouldn’t. But that hardly describes most naturally occurring phenomena.
Ok. In a sense, all of the difference between your intution and your friend’s intuition can be viewed as how to construe “most”. There are lots of systems in both categories. There is also a bias in which ones we research: Unless a problem is extraordinarily important, if attempts to build models for a phenomenon keep failing, and we have any reason to suspect e.g. chaotic behavior, we fall back to e.g. settling for statistical information.
Also, there is a question of how much precision one is looking for: The orbits of the planets look like clockwork even on moderately long timescales—but there do turn out to be chaotic dynamics (I think the part with the fastest divergence turns out to be one of the orbital elements of Mars, iirc), and this injects chaotic dynamics into everything else, if you want to predict far enough into the future.
Uhh, no, I wouldn’t. But that hardly describes most naturally occurring phenomena.
Ok. In a sense, all of the difference between your intution and your friend’s intuition can be viewed as how to construe “most”. There are lots of systems in both categories. There is also a bias in which ones we research: Unless a problem is extraordinarily important, if attempts to build models for a phenomenon keep failing, and we have any reason to suspect e.g. chaotic behavior, we fall back to e.g. settling for statistical information.
Also, there is a question of how much precision one is looking for: The orbits of the planets look like clockwork even on moderately long timescales—but there do turn out to be chaotic dynamics (I think the part with the fastest divergence turns out to be one of the orbital elements of Mars, iirc), and this injects chaotic dynamics into everything else, if you want to predict far enough into the future.