Model Accuracy Quotes

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

Climate ... models bear about as much relation to reality as astrology.

We think that computer models represent reality especially if we developed the models.

It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.

I am supposed to worry about oceans rising 70 years from now, on climate models that have already proven to be utterly flawed?

Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.

The bigger a data set that you have, the more polls, the more surveys that you have that people undertake, the more accurate your models are going to be. That's just a fact of data science.

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.

A model is supposed to represent reality, and in reality, people come in all shapes, sizes, nationality, and colour.

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.

In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.

You just have to make sure the model you're working on does not undersell your product.

All models are false but some models are useful

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.