alt Hacker NewsA bit of caution with this line of thinking, because I was blindsided by it after more than decade of hand waving away "academics"
When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.
The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."
Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.
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It's because the models have different purposes in decision making, in ways which decision makers don't often appreciate.
Models are still great at helping us understand the world and are in many ways the best thing we have. The problem is that today we are overly relying on them to make real policy interventions on an ecology (e.g. what is a "healthy" amount of animals to cull or fish) based on an ecosystem, which is just a poor model.
If we could get rid of this idea of "stability" and "equilibrium" in economics and ecology, I would be a happy man.
> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this
Exactly why I'm here :-)
> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.
This varies substantially by field, or by subfield. There is a vast decades-long intellectual wasteland of bad economics predicated on bad models that are only appealing on normative grounds. The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam. Etc etc. Science advances one funeral at a time hard part because people are unwilling to let go of their models, even when they have outlived their usefulness or have been simply proven too wrong to be useful even in their original purpose.