Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Escape From Model-Land

Earlier this week, Mark Buchanan's column in Nature Physics featured "The Limits of a Model" , concerning  the pitfalls of epidemiological forecasting, of course a topic very much in the news in the last few months.  Near the end Buchanan cites an intriguing paper by Thompson & Smith (2019), "Escape From Model-Land", a bracing discussion of why one should be very humble about using mathematical/empirical models.  It calls to mind another entertaining piece from over a decade ago, the "Financial Modeler's Manifesto" by Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott.

DTLR strongly recommends the Thompson & Smith piece, a candidate for required reading by every applied mathematician, applied statistician, and mathematical/computational modeler in every discipline.

Reference


Erica L. Thompson and Leonard A. Smith, 2019:  Escape From Model-Land.  Economics:  The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 13:  2019-40.

1 comment:

  1. I recently read the book by one of the authors, Erica Thompson, also titled "Escape from Model Land" (Basic Books, 2022). I would highly recommend it. I have seen many examples of scientists making claims about the world when they are actually making claims about a model; the gap between model and reality is often (unquantifiably) uncertain. This is just one of the messages from the book.

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