“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician
Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 424,
For instance in George E. P. Box, William Hunter and Stuart Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, 2005, page 440. See "All models are wrong".
“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician
Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 424,
“Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.”
Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer
Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 2
George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician
Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 74
Michael Lewis book The Big Short
Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Five, Accidental Capitalists, p. 113
Edward Fredkin (1934) American physicist and computer scientist, a pioneer of digital physics
[An informational process based on reversible universal cellular automata, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 45, 1–3, September 1990, 254–270, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016727899090186S, 10.1016/0167-2789(90)90186-S]
Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer
Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 314
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist
Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 108 as cited in: Charles West Churchman, Richard O. Mason (1976) World modeling: a dialogue. p. 23.
Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist
Source: Society as a complex adaptive system (1968), p. 490.
Orrin H. Pilkey (1934) American ecologist
Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey https://web.archive.org/web/20080105132439/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/pilkeyinterview.html. <br class="br">Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)
Lars Peter Hansen (1952) American economist
Source: David Brancaccio (2013) " Nobel Prize in Economics winner Lars Peter Hansen on imperfect models http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/nobel-prize-economics-winner-lars-peter-hansen-imperfect-models" at marketplace.org.