Yeah, it’s not a very good one- the other one I was thinking of was “financial stability” and “money in your pocket”, which better captures that the interactions go both ways- if you’re financially stable, a symptom of that is that you can get money to put into your pocket, but you can have money in your pocket without being financially stable. But the issue here is it does make sense to think about financial stability when you have no money, whereas it doesn’t make sense to think of a house made out of nothing- and I want an explanation which makes no predictions to not make sense. (Or maybe not- the null explanation of “I know nothing and acknowledge that I know nothing” might be worthwhile to explicitly include.)
Maybe it is better to just look at it as levels of ‘methodological abstraction’- a prediction is a fortune cookie, an explanation is a box that generates fortune cookies, science is a process that generates boxes that generate fortune cookies.
Yeah, it’s not a very good one- the other one I was thinking of was “financial stability” and “money in your pocket”, which better captures that the interactions go both ways- if you’re financially stable, a symptom of that is that you can get money to put into your pocket, but you can have money in your pocket without being financially stable. But the issue here is it does make sense to think about financial stability when you have no money, whereas it doesn’t make sense to think of a house made out of nothing- and I want an explanation which makes no predictions to not make sense. (Or maybe not- the null explanation of “I know nothing and acknowledge that I know nothing” might be worthwhile to explicitly include.)
Maybe it is better to just look at it as levels of ‘methodological abstraction’- a prediction is a fortune cookie, an explanation is a box that generates fortune cookies, science is a process that generates boxes that generate fortune cookies.