Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-12-02 09:48 AM: > All models are wrong; models are designed to be wrong. They couldnt possibly > do any good if they weren;t wrong. > > It's just that some models are wronger than others.
Oh, the situation is a lot worse than that. It's not that some models are more wrong than others. It's that models are rhetorical devices. When you meet a person who really _believes_ her own rhetoric to the extent that they are convicted, committed, and unwaveringly confident in their own rhetoric ... well, then you KNOW you've got a certifiable WACKO on your hands. Following their consulting would be like following Jim Jones to Guyana ... like following Marshall Applewhite to Rancho Santa Fe. At least with your run-of-the-mill televangelist, you get the sense that they're just hucksters trying to get others to believe rhetoric they, themselves, don't believe. I'll take a snake-oil salesman over a True Believer any day! -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
