Team Explanation

There are two major ways of assessing the quality of our understanding of a phenomenon: Prediction, and Explanation.Prediction feels extremely powerful because it seems to be proving its deep understanding by having reality speak on its behalf. You want proof that I understand how the planets move? Well let me tell you exactly where Jupiter will be in the sky on an arbitrary day.That's powerful indeed.🔭 Ptolemy's epicycles predicted planet positions well enough to be used for over a thousand years, while the model behind them was wrong.But David Deutsch has an idea that I think is even more powerful, which is Explanation. And he has a brilliant example to demonstrate why it's superior to Prediction.The turkey professor He asks us to imagine a turkey on a turkey farm in the United States who holds a scientific lecture for a number of his fellow turkeys on the farm.📚 Bertrand Russell's chicken, from The Problems of Philosophy (1912), is the original; the turkey version is often called…