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All Models Are Wrong
we need to figure out which models are reliable and useful. We must also discard or update the unreliable ones, because unreliable or flawed models come with a cost.
Rhiannon Beaubien • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts
“It’s critical to have a diversity of models,” I was told by Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorologist who is one of the world’s foremost theorists about hurricanes. “You do not want to put all your eggs in one basket.” One of the reasons this is so critical, Emanuel told me, is that in addition to the different assumptions these models employ, they also
... See moreNate Silver • The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
G2 points us to Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong”:3 When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
Any understanding of the mundane world that we develop necessarily involves dimension reduction and simplification: so the story goes. We may end up with a tractable model that predicts reasonably well, but we’ll never get our error term to zero, and we mustn’t confuse our toy conceptions for a high-fidelity reproduction of “reality.”