“All models are wrong but some are useful,” said Professor George P. Box, who has been called one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century. The original reference was to statistical models, but this aphorism is now used for scientific models in general. However, I think there is no area of life where a perfect model exists. Why is that? Simply put, life is too complex. Trying to describe life in a model is like trying to hold on to a slippery lizard, leaving only its tail in your hands.
This fact is the hardest to accept for someone with a developed intellect. Feeling his habitual superiority over the rest, he arrogantly ponders: “Am I not able to solve this problem? All I have to do is come up with an ingenious “knight’s move.” Psychologist Jordan Peterson observed, “Rationality tends to fall in love with its own creations.” After all, it’s so tempting to feel like the all-powerful demiurge before whom reality prostrates itself. Unfortunately, obsession with any “great” idea has always ended in great blood. An example is the USSR, China, Cambodia, and other countries of “victorious communism,” where social experiments with “good” Marxist ideas took the lives of 60 to 100 million people.
Business is no exception. The founders easily get carried away with the next supposedly breakthrough idea/theory/model, slashing and reshaping their companies alive, despite the groans and protests of the people working in the “petri dish”. The problem is that the model becomes an absolute, in which a flaw is impossible. But if we remember Box’s aphorism, instead of worshipping the product of a proud mind, there is a humble interest in exploring the limits of the model’s applicability: from here to here, there is benefit. From here to there is harm.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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