Model Thinking Notes: Difference between revisions
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Combining information with models and contrasting it with facts can lead to decisions (Iceland bank example). | Combining information with models and contrasting it with facts can lead to decisions (Iceland bank example). | ||
Models don't so much have flaws as they have limited scope. Newtonian physics is an 'incorrect' model with broad application. | Models don't so much have flaws as they have limited scope. Newtonian physics is an 'incorrect' model with broad application. Multiple models help to compensate by extending scope or focusing scope. | ||
Revision as of 19:10, 12 March 2012
Lectures
1
- Why use models?
- Lots of fields use models
- Models produce clearer thinking, make you a better thinker
- Use and understand data
- Decide, Strategize and design
2
How models make you a better citizen of the world
- "All models are wrong, but some are useful" George EP Box
- Models are the language of business, academia, non-profit, almost all purposes
- Models give us the conditions under which rules are best applied
- Formal models do better than any semi-formal technique
- Models are fertile, a model designed for one system can often be cross applied to other domains
- Models make us humble
3
How models make us clear thinkers
- Step 1: Name the parts
- Step 2: Identify the relationships (between those parts and how things play out)
- Outcomes: Equilibrium, cycle, random, complex
- Identify logical boundaries (identify conditions under which to apply rules)
- Use models to communicate
Readings
Why Model?
By: Joshua M. Epstein
- Everyone models, but most models are implicit rather than explicit
- Reasons besides predictions to build modles
- Explain
- Guide data collection
- Illuminate core dynamics
- Suggest dynamical analogies
- Discover new questions
- Promote a scientific habit of mind
- Bound (bracket_ outcomes to plausible ranges
- Illuminate core uncertainties
- Offer crisis options in near-real time
- Demonstrate tradeoffs / suggest efficiencies
- Challenge the robustness of prevailing theory through perturbations
- Expose prevailing wisdom as incompatible with available data
- Train practitioners
- Discipline the policy dialogue
- Educate the general public
- Reveal the apparently simple (complex) to be complex (simple)
- Many models are fertile, they cross apply to many unrelated domains
The Model Thinker: Prologue, Introduction and Chapter 1
Prologue
We have access to a lot of information. Models are the best means to parse it and choose which rules to apply to it.
Introduction
Combining information with models and contrasting it with facts can lead to decisions (Iceland bank example).
Models don't so much have flaws as they have limited scope. Newtonian physics is an 'incorrect' model with broad application. Multiple models help to compensate by extending scope or focusing scope.