Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Climateer Line of the Day: Doing it With Models Edition

I know it's a bit early in the day for the prestigious CLoD but this is going to be hard to top.
First though, a brief homage to the inspiration for the headline, Jodi Beggs' Economists Do It With Models blog:

I Think I’ve Figured Out Why Austrians Don’t Do It With Models

If you don’t get the headline, here is a great article by Bryan Caplan that, in its critique of the Austrian School, does a good job of outlining what the fundamental Austrian principles actually are.
And from Naked Capitalism:
An instant banking classic, from Treasury Select Committee hearing on HBOS (Richard Smith): https://twitter.com/creditplumber/status/275673495713751040: 
“It would appear the ability to see risk is inversely proportional to the time spent trying to model it.”
See also:
Modelling vs. Science

"The map is not the territory"
-Alfred Korzybski
"A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics" 
presented before the American Mathematical Society December 28, 1931
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"All models are wrong, but some are useful"
-George E.P. Box
Section heading, page 2 of Box's paper, "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building"
(May 1979)