Well put. Compatibilist arguments typically hinge on some bait and switch and this is a popular one. The author does this exact thing in his weather example:

> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this microphysical detail. That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.

> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not deterministic, but stochastic, or random.

The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom number generator. It appears stochastic to someone who is only given the high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world. Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for alternative possibilities.

I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect this. He is saying "we don't want the Laplace's demon description of the system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which obviously it's not.

But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever - if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.

I agree that they are different because determinism is a (mathematical) property of the model, while the predictability (with respect to class of models) is observed.