Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bang2“, is an old one that I don’t remember, but it’s a good one. The term “retrodiction” is mine, though someone might have throught of it before I did.
The strip came with a note, and notice the new book on sale:
A resurrection from 2008 today, slightly edited. In other news, there’s a new J&M book out! It’s a best-of compilation, selected by me. 150 pages of J&M, without any crap ones!
In the strip below, of course you know who “Al” is, right?
Nnnnno, I don’t…. I mean, …
That aside…
“retrodiction” is 🎯 for this.
I wonder if there are synonyms .. or near-synonyms…
I’ve seen the term ‘retrodiction before’. It was in the context of theories allowing us to predict as well as retrodict.
Who is BIG AL?
“Big Al” is Allah, of course!
Carl Hempel’s “covering law” model of scientific explanations claimed that explanations and predictions are symmetrical. Thus, if an explanation had been available in time, it could have served as a prediction.
A good one!
Retrodiction has its own (not very good) Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrodiction
A similar concept is the retrojection. You posit some event in the past because you want the powers of the present to achieve that event in the near future.
A nice example is the Israelite United Monarchy under the kings David and Solomon. It never existed but was retrojected by the Levite priesthood of Jerusalem in the second half of the 7th century BC. The idea was that the Judahite king of the time, Josiah, was to take advantage of the withdrawal of the Assyrian empire from its western territories and conquer (occupy) the areas of the destroyed Northern Kingdom of Israel. Alas, the Egyptian pharaoh Necho had the same idea and in a fatal error of judgement Josiah travelled to the camp of Necho and was executed by the Egyptian.
Retrojection! Awww…
Seems to me there is too much of this retrojection in politics, ideology, and not enough presentinspection or perhaps futujection.
Good one barmaid, bang on!
Good one!
BTW, the related antonym hindcasting is used for ‘validation of weather forecast methods’, and by extension other types of numerical models.