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soreff comments on Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree - Less Wrong
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Two comments:
a) In the cs domain, 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?
b) My gut reaction to your original post was that I'd expect them to partition roughly between cases where there is lots of experimental data compared to the parameter space of the system in question vs. where the parameter space is much larger than the reasonably accessible volume of experimental data. Of course, one doesn't really know the parameter space till one has a successful model :-( ...
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.