10/07/2008

The Best Sentences I've Read in a Long Time

[T]he statement "All models are wrong, but some are useful" is itself a model (of an epistemological system, with many competing models) and thus is paradoxical, being true only if it isn't. Moreover, although it asserts directly that some models are useful and indirectly that others are not, the statement tells as [sic] nothing as to which is which, so it is not, itself, useful.
Kawoom!

Read the whole thing here.

3 comments:

Political Scientist said...

Cheers for the link LemmusLemmus: glad you liked it - I've fixed the "us"/"as" typo. I really liked your "rule of thumb" post when I read it, so it was great to be able to link to something that made clear what the problem with the "correlation is not causation" trope.

Good to see you back blogging: was it an unpaid telephone bill?.

LemmusLemmus said...

Oh, I hadn't even noticed you had linked to me, ta.

It was actually three or for unpaid telephone bills in a row; I'm a teensy bit sloppy sometimes.

LemmusLemmus said...

"for" should have been "four", of course. Speaking of typos...