

Is science merely fiction? - dewaka
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2013/02/08/is-science-merely-fiction/

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noonespecial
Science is what happens when your fictitious model gives you predictive power
over reality. It's the careful method of choosing one model over another based
on this criteria.

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crntaylor
As far as I can tell, this can be summed up in the two aphorisms

    
    
        "The map is not the territory"
    

and

    
    
        "All models are wrong; some are useful."

~~~
espeed
Also, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of
knowledge." -- Stephen Hawking

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dschiptsov
A map is not a territory - this is already an old maxim.

 _A model is not a reality_ is the one of today. Look at all that "economy",
"psychology", "nutrition" nonsense. These models are so weak and artificial,
they are not even good-enough for considering "as if".)

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espeed
"All models are wrong; some models are useful." -- George Box. Or as I like to
put it, "The key to life is perspective"
(<http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto>).

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PavlovsCat
_But that is far too pessimistic, even for a cynic like me._

That stuff roughly occured to me in my youth.. that you probably cannot fully
know and describe a system while being part of it. I don't find that
depressing at all. Sure there is a reality, maybe it is internally consistent;
there's just no way from fiction leading to there. We can build imperfect
models of the shadows on the wall of the cave; we can't even make imperfect
models of all of reality. It's like trying to make sense of a piece of code,
give a definite answer, without knowing the code that comes before and after
it... it won't ever happen, you can guess as long as you want, you can never
fully confirm or deny your model. Don't get used to, don't identify with that
house of cards, and there is nothing depressing about blowing it away.

