Trying to build and apply models is by far the most important strategy humans can employ when trying to understand and change the world. Having a structure of thought helps us anticipate behaviors and phenomena we have never personally observed. This allows us to know without experiencing; a necessary mechanism when we only have one lifetime to live. A new model can help illuminate unexplored gaps in our understanding and provide new solutions to old problems. One model's fudge factor can be another's insight. By exploring and developing new models, we give ourselves the tools of progress. Those who construct them well are able to communicate ideas that endure; holding up their thinking on the scaffolding of the model.
I hope I have peaked your interest in the criticality and usefulness of models, so let me now disabuse you of any hope that they can deliver us to some high-minded well-thought through utopia.
Models can be wrong, or more precisely, not always right. Turning off your brain, applying a model, and forgetting everything that went into it, may work fine until it doesn't. Models have to trade off between usable and absolute correctness. Models that incorporate all factors become increasingly hard to apply, so baking in assumptions and biases to a model can do a lot to simplify its usage at the cost of increasing its risk. We humans rarely miss an opportunity to take a mental shortcut, and applying a model is a great way to do that. If we do so implicitly, our thinking can appear to have all the biases and assumptions necessary for the model's functioning. Communicating with those who don't share your models can be confusing at best and cause them to question your motives at worst.
These drawbacks are what I hope to address with this page. By sharing the models I use, I can be rigorous in explaining their assumptions and biases, and even more importantly, help communicate how I think to those that think differently. This page is a tool for communication and thinking. Other posts of this blog I will attempt to keep as static snapshots, but this page will evolve as I do.