alt Hacker News> The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure.
Yes. Celestial navigation was based on a universe which spun around the earth, which is wrong, but it worked for navigation.
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raincom • yesterday at 4:17 PM
That's instrumentalism in philosophy of sciences. As long as a theory is useful and results in good predictions, without worrying about whether a theory is true or not.
Celestial navigation is still based on a geocentric coordinate system. Modern astronomical ephemerides use the Tychonic model--the sun is modeled as revolving around the Earth, the other planets as revolving around the sun.
Mathematically, in a two-body system, there's no actual difference between saying body A orbits body B or saying body B orbits body A, so in some sense, it's not even wrong.