Empirical researchers are certainly an important part of society.
My purpose in discussing the relative importance of the two goals is to answer a July 16 post from Bryan Griffin, who criticized the EPR approach for ignoring the concept of explanation in favor of the concepts of prediction and control. George's post criti- cizes this argument. If you can use the predictions to your benefit, you will probably be very interested in using them even though you don't understand how they work. Therefore, it is reasonable to emphasize prediction and control of the values of variables in the introductory statistics course. Note that the impossibility of this example does not invalidate my argument.