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by jofer
2543 days ago
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To be fair, there are some well documented EM precursors. The most classic is from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/GL01... Recently, some fairly convincing ionospheric-related (i.e. GPS delay) precursors have also been observed before Tohoku and (less convincingly) several other major earthquakes. (e.g. Heki, 2011, Iwata & Umeno 2016, and several other references I forget. Mostly from the same couple research groups.) We don't have a full mechanism to explain them (or, rather, there are a lot of competing mechanisms that don't fully explain things). More importantly, precursors don't seem to occur consistently as you noted. However, they're also not worth automatically dismissing. The idea that they're all a simple case of confirmation bias has been extensively discussed, and while it's not currently possible to refute, it's starting to seem less likely. There's certainly been a lot more attention given to possible precursors and mechanisms in the last 5 years than there were before. It's a serious avenue of research right now. Keep an eye out then next time you're at AGU. I guarantee you you'll see at least a few posters around possible precursors and/or precursor mechanisms. Forecasting is definitely pseudoscience, but EM-related precursors are a fairly hot (and controversial) research topic at the moment. |
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It's not pseudoscience because it can be disproven--which is generally what happens.
The issue that everybody forgets is that predictions have FOUR outcomes, not two.
You have the one everybody remembers: "I predicted X and X happened".
You have the one some people remember: "I didn't predict X and X didn't happen."
You have the one that people rarely remember: "I predicted X and X didn't happen."
You have the one nobody remembers: "I didn't predict X, but X happened."
The problem is that for rare events, the "predict X and not X" and "didn't predict X but X" have to be REALLY low probability for a measure to be useful.