Bruce Edmonds
RofASSS
There is a modelling norm that one should be able to completely understand one’s own model. Whilst acknowledging there is a trade-off between a model’s representational adequacy and its simplicity of formulation, this tradition assumes there will be a “sweet spot” where the model is just tractable but also good enough to be usefully informative about the target of modelling – in the words attributed to Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”1. But what do we do about all the phenomena where to get an adequate model2 one has to settle for a complex one (where by “complex” I mean a model that we do not completely understand)? Despite the tradition in Physics to the contrary, it would be an incredibly strong assumption that there are no such phenomena, i.e. that an adequate simple model is always possible (Edmonds 2013).
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Complexity Digest 