Talk:All models are wrong

Historical antecedents
Although the aphorism seems to have originated with George Box, the underlying idea goes back decades, perhaps millennia. Hence the article could be improved by adding a section on historical antecedents. SolidPhase (talk) 12:45, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree fully. The reason I came to the Talk page was to comment that the phrase reminds me of one of my favorite portions of the Tao Te Ching: the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao - the name that can be named is not the eternal name.PurpleChez (talk) 17:14, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

This section has been claimed to be a violation of WP:NOR. How so? SolidPhase (talk) 05:41, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I will not change it back, but it seemed to me that it was we WP editors that were making the connections rather than the sources doing it.  I could be wrong, I have been criticized recently for being too much of a taker-outer. PopSci (talk) 17:40, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Charlie Munger's work on "mental models" seems relevant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ansgarjohn (talk • contribs) 18:58, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Possible exceptions?
Liddle &#91;MonNotRAstronSoc, 2007&#93; quotes Box's aphorism and then claims that the aphorism is not true for models in cosmology. Additionally, within a certain domain, could Newton's laws be argued to be accurate to within any feasible/possible measurement error? What about models that are essentially just based on arithmetic or counting? SolidPhase (talk) 05:25, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

No longer a stub Suggestion
I think it's pretty clear that this article is no longer a stub, even if one section needs expansion -- PeterLFlomPhD (talk) 23:36, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

First sentence, wording
Recently, User:DavidWBrooks edited the lead to quote an expanded version of the aphorism. I thought that quoting the expanded version materially improved the article. I did, though, change the wording of the first sentence, to be as follows. ""All models are wrong" is a common aphorism in statistics; it is often expanded as "All models are wrong, but some are useful"."

Afterward, DavidWBrooks revised the sentence to be the following. ""All models are wrong" is a common aphorism in statistics, often expanded as "All models are wrong, but some are useful"."

I find the revised sentence difficult to comprehend. Indeed, I have to read the revised sentence at least twice to understand what it is saying (and I am a mathematical scientist who has done work in statistical analysis).

To get an independent assessment, I put both versions into Microsoft Word and then calculated the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. The first version scores 6.8; the revised version scores 11.1 That is a very large difference—and it strongly supports my belief that the first version is much easier to comprehend.

Comprehensibility is especially important in the WP:lead, because the lead will be read by non-technical people. SolidPhase (talk) 21:01, 5 February 2019 (UTC)


 * I would say that the F-K test is both wrong and not useful as a model of ease of comprehension, but I don't think it's a major problem either way. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:40, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Citations of Burnham & Anderson (2002)
Regarding the citations of Burnham & Anderson (2002), a source for those citations is given in the Notes: Google Scholar. My earlier edit summary included a link to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cn6l-l8AAAAJ. That link is actually for the book's first author, Burnham; it lists the book as having over 44000 citations. A direct link to Google Scholar's list of those citations is here.

Another editor, User:Mwtoews, has claimed that there are only 311 citations of the book. That is false, as the prior link demonstrates. The claim seems to be based on a doi for a particular electronic copy of the book: that particular e-copy has 311 citations. The doi is thus misleading.

There is currently a bug in Google Scholar. If you search (in Google Scholar) for the book title, "Model Selection and Multimodel Inference", the title is not found. That is so even though the book is at Google Books. The bug has only appeared during the past couple weeks. Presumably, it will be fixed soon.

Because of the bug, the book can realistically only be found by searching for the authors. Moreover, even then Google Scholar currently gives an incorrect title for the book: it actually gives the title of a chapter from the 1998 edition of the book ("Practical use of the information-theoretic approach").

This article's Note says "This book has over 44000 citations on Google Scholar". That was fine, I thought, when Google Scholar was working well. With the bug, the situation is confusing—I definitely agree. I am not sure about the best way to handle this situation. Perhaps the Note should include a direct link to Google Scholar's list of citations. For now, I have made that change.

SolidPhase (talk) 00:06, 22 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Please don't revert improvements to citations (e.g., added DOI, expanded author information, specify book citation template, etc.). Google Scholar is a bit of a mess (i.e. see "Quality" in Google Scholar), but for this publication, it counts either 244 or 20 (found through the author's citations in Google Scholar), and one chapter with 185. I don't see anything close to 44,000, and I'm not sure what the link (at "here") above was about, as it cites stuff before 2002. Links from the publisher (at ) or Springer's Bookmetrix don't specify whether the citations are e-copy, or whatever, but I don't see why this source would be "misleading" without a good reason. So, if you find a reliable source that says that this book has been cited 44,000, please add and reference. + m t  01:43, 22 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Your reply largely ignores the points that I raised, and your edit introduces inconsistencies into the formatting of Notes as well as removes valuable content. Additionally, your new claim that using "cite book" rather than "citation" is an improvement is unsupported, and seems wrong to me. Regarding the 44000 citations that I linked to, you can easily chose a few of them and confirm that they do cite the book; as for the citations before 2002, that is because an earlier edition of the book was published in 1998—as I previously stated and you ignored.


 * The book is one of the most influential books published in statistics in decades. Your claim that the book has only a few hundred citations demonstrates your lack of familiarity with the field (a field in which I used to work professionally). You could also try searching with plain Google for . That gets over 95000 results.


 * Your edit, in my judgment, clearly made the article worse. Additionally, according to WP:BRD, once an edit has been reverted and a discussion opened on the Talk page, there should be no further edits to the article until a consensus is reached; ergo, you violated BRD.


 * We do not seem to be working constructively. Perhaps we should go into WP:dispute resolution. If so, I ask you to choose one of the recommended methods.
 * SolidPhase (talk) 07:25, 22 February 2019 (UTC)


 * The process that I've followed is WP:VERIFY. As detailed previously, I found two sources (Google Scholar and Springer's Bookmetrix) that put the figure for the 2002 book publication around 300+ citations. I could not verify where the Google Scholar link with 44000 results had been obtained, as it did not contain any information on the search result, which is why I didn't investigate the search results any further. I now see that the link is from clicking [CITED BY] 44669 (as of now) beside the 1998 edition of "Practical use of the information-theoretic approach" (yes, this is a chapter title, as you have already described). I can now verify that after randomly sampling articles from the 44669 search results that the vast majority correctly cited (usually) the 2nd or 1st edition of the book. Furthermore, these were citations from peer-reviewed literature that were not cross-referenced by Springer's Bookmetrix, showing the estimates by the publisher are two orders of magnitude off. As for your response from "improve refs" is "clearly made the article worse", this puzzling. I'll have another go at this when time permits. + m t  01:36, 26 February 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm glad that you verified a sample of the 44000 citations. The bug that Google Scholar has introduced is really annoying. About "clearly made the article worse", that was pertaining to, in particular, my comment that "your edit introduces inconsistencies into the formatting of Notes". The Notes currently have a consistent format, which I believe is good to keep. Also, Wikipedia has policies about maintaining consistency: for citations specifically (WP:CITEVAR), as well as in general (MOS:STYLEVAR). SolidPhase (talk) 18:00, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Muddled physics
From the article, "Under Einstein's theory, Earth does not exert any force on the apple.[18]" But to an observer, the curvature of space-time causes an effect, acceleration, that is indistinguishable from a force. General relativity reduces to Newtonian gravity, i.e. produces the same result, in the limit as velocity and space-time curvature go to zero. That's why it's a better model--it works where Newton does and continues to work where Newton deviates significantly from observable reality. Humans ordinarily live in a part of the universe that is near the zero limit for spacial curvature and velocity relative to the speed of light, so it takes very precise measurements to detect the errors in Newtonian physics. Most of the confirmations of general relativity come from measurements of cosmic events involving extreme conditions; even the GPS example depends on orbital velocity and a long gravitational gradient.

Note 18 is in need of review. The distinction between the effects of time and space curvature, and referring to the effect of spacial curvature as secondary is highly suspect, given that general relativity inexorably links space and time into a single entity.

76.121.140.140 (talk) 02:28, 8 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Regarding your first paragraph, this is true, but is not relevant for the point being made—which is about comparing models. (Note too that the Newtonian model implies a force acting instantaneously over distances, which is inherently implausible.)
 * Regarding your second paragraph, evaluate the difference in the stress–energy tensor, in the Einstein field equations: the temporal component dominates the total of the spatial components. It would be good to include a reference for that though. About describing time and space separately, this seems better for a general audience (as here).
 * 81.147.107.246 (talk) 15:00, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

True Enough by Catherine Elgin
Catherine Elgin wrote a book about the utility of scientific models, even if they aren't actually completely accurate and true. Maybe it ought to get a mention?


 * The book seems to be low quality. For illustration, the first paragraph and the first sentence of the next paragraph are copied below.
 * "Philosophy valorizes truth. There may be practical or prudential or political reasons to accept a known falsehood. But there can, it is held, never be epistemically good reasons to do so. Nor can there be good reasons to accept modes of justification that are known not to be truth conducive. Such is the prevailing consensus. Although it seems reasonable, this stance has a fatal flaw. It cannot account for the epistemic standing of science: for science unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true. Modern science is one of humanity’s greatest cognitive achievements. To think that this achievement is a fluke would be mad. So epistemology has the task of accounting for science’s success. A truth-centered, or veritistic, epistemology must treat models, idealizations, and thought experiments as mere heuristics, or forecast their disappearance with the advancement of scientific understanding. Neither approach is plausible. We should not cavalierly assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy; quite the opposite. I suggest that their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, I contend, felicitous falsehoods. They are more than heuristics. They are ineliminable and epistemically valuable components of the understanding science supplies. These are bold claims. ...."


 * Thus, Elgin asserts that she is making "bold claims", when all she is doing is stating something that has been generally accepted by scientists for generations. The book also nowhere mentions Box's aphorism; indeed, doing so would destroy her claims to be doing something new.
 * It is a whole book, though, but an author who is a professor at Harvard and who already has a Wikipedia biography. Hence, even though the book seems to be garbage, there might be a case for listing it in the section "Further reading". Perhaps other editors could comment...? TheSeven (talk) 16:02, 7 July 2020 (UTC)