You can't predict the future, but Science tries all the same

I found this blogpost hiding in my old Google + posts. It's from 2012, and the writer even uses an example of Hurricane Sandy which was approaching but hadn't made land yet. A few days later it would turn out to be second only to Katrina. In Italy, following an earthquake, scientists who, it was claimed, had not predicted it, were jailed.

Every day we behave on the assumption that what happened in the past will pertain in the future. Science has codified a sophisticated version of this process of inference (though my previous blogpost was about occasions where repeatability was not demonstrated).

As ever, Ethan Siegel (Starts with a Bang blog) dissects the arguments, illustrates them very well and explains them for a ToK audience.