From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Feb 24 2009 - 11:47:31 MST
John K Clark wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 "Johnicholas Hines"
> <johnicholas.hines@gmail.com> said:
>
>
>> My claim is I think we should consider the expert
>> opinion that "there's no weather underneath" as relevant
>>
>
> I agree, except that you don’t need to be an expert to know that both
> simulations stink. The first one makes clouds that are too blurry, and
> clouds are already pretty damn blurry; and your second simulation
> doesn’t even understand the concept of temperature. Yes, you are right,
> there is no weather underneath, in fact there is no "there" there. You
> have categorically proven with absolutely no doubt that lousy
> simulations are, well, lousy. There is simply no doubt about it.
> Congratulations.
>
> John K Clark
This isn't clear. If it models how clouds change accurately enough I
would assert that temperature is implicitly encoded into the model. And
if it's accurate *enough*, then it might be a good local model of
weather. And if it's accurate ENOUGH, then it might be a reasonable
datafeed for your World Weather Watch.
Think of neural nets. They don't have separate variables for separate
measures, and they don't have intelligible internal workings. But if you
train one well enough, it produces reasonable results without having the
separate variables that we have decided are good descriptors. Like
temperature.
Personally, I want to be able to understand my models, but I don't think
of intelligibility as an essential property of a model.
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