Model Thinking Notes

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
  1. Explain
  2. Guide data collection
  3. Illuminate core dynamics
  4. Suggest dynamical analogies
  5. Discover new questions
  6. Promote a scientific habit of mind
  7. Bound (bracket_ outcomes to plausible ranges
  8. Illuminate core uncertainties
  9. Offer crisis options in near-real time
  10. Demonstrate tradeoffs / suggest efficiencies
  11. Challenge the robustness of prevailing theory through perturbations
  12. Expose prevailing wisdom as incompatible with available data
  13. Train practitioners
  14. Discipline the policy dialogue
  15. Educate the general public
  16. Reveal the apparently simple (complex) to be complex (simple)