This may or not be relevant to the ongoing attractor debate, but...
I have this vague recollection of having read something (more than once) in
Science about some folks doing practical work in stabilising a chaotic
system (may have been a heart muscle). Knowing the form of the chaotic
dynamics they were able to create a signal which, when sent into the
system, had a stabilising effect. They might not have had a good model of
the causal forces in the system (may not even have had a bad model), but
the description of the system (knowing what type of attractor it had) gave
them useful information about how to intervene in the system. Seems to me
this sort of thing makes chaos theory a genuinely useful set of descriptive
techniques.
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