All stories are wrong but some are useful

neilkakkar.com

30 points·mthwsjc_··12 comments

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms"

When I first came across this quote from the poem "The Speed of Darkness" by Muriel Rukeyser I thought it was all too typical glib and hand-wavy poetic license. I was a STEM person, I knew the world was made of atoms, not stories.

But the years ticked by and eventually I realized that the atoms were just stories too.

+1 for the poets.

Reading the first lines of the poem, I get why you initially thought it was hand-wavy

> Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis

> Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt

Every time I do a search to check on the name and authorship of the poem, I'm always amazed how such a deep and profound line (to me) can occur in the middle of what otherwise seems an at-best mediocre piece of poetry (for me).

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

“What then is the truth of history, generally? A fable agreed upon.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

I’ve more frequently heard this said about simulations

The headline is a play on George Box: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

Useful = correct.

Or so some might say.

well they're not very useful then, are they.

Newtonian physics ain't "correct" but it's damned useful.

Analogies are, almost by definition, "incorrect". They're still very useful.

In the traditional map vs territory parlance, the perfectly correct map is an identical copy of the terrain - needless to say, that's not very useful for most use cases, and we prefer a model that's known to be incorrect in many aspects e.g. it's shrunk at 1:24000 scale and has various types of detail intentionally omitted, making it less correct but more useful for the intended purpose.

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