simplicio comments on Fake Causality - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 August 2007 06:12PM

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Comment author: simplicio 13 March 2010 02:53:54AM 5 points [-]

@C of A:

Prediction doesn't have to mean literally predicting future events; it can mean predicting what more we will discover about the past.

E by NS holds that there is one tree of life (at least for complex organisms), just like a family tree. That is a prediction. It means that we won't find a human in the same fossil stratum and dating to the same time period as a fishlike creature that's supposed to be our great-to-the-nth-power grammy. So that's a prediction about our future discoveries, one that has been borne out. That's one example from a non-expert.