I agree. But it depends fundamentally on what one means by all those words: "model", "wrong", "useful" - 3 unknowns, assuming "some" and "all" are understood as quantifiers and "are" is understood as membership/identity. The problem with the EO Wilson aphorism was that it was too short. This one is even shorter. As I tried to hint at in my comment about *solving* for the meaning of a variable in a sentence, the fewer the sentences, the less meaning the sentences have. Why not simply reduce all aphorisms to Mu and be done with it?
On 10/8/24 14:06, Jon Zingale wrote:
Since we are picking on aphorisms, I wish to add criticism to "all models are wrong, some are useful". To a great extent, the qualities of the thing being modelled matters. For instance, natural numbers do have crisp, compact properties and can be modelled by sets. To claim that models are never correct is to deny that bisimulation ever exists between machines. It is fine, I suppose, as a world view, but proving bisimulation between things also seems fine. Weirder still is the case where things can model one another and yet not be useful. While closed lambda calculi, turing machines and agent based models can all model universal computers, limitations of various types can render any particular model useless. Only partially with tongue-in-cheek, I am not sure anyone has ever found Turing's machine to be useful for anything other than getting a passing grade on a senior year project. In the case of ants, do we really have to wait so long? Alright, time to run away before my ears are George Boxed...
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