[FRIAM] FRIAM and causality

[Russell Standish]

All scientific models/theories tend to lie on a plane with the axes
"accuracy" and "ease of use". Explicability is also there, roughly
aligned with "ease of use".

Basically we should only keep those theories/models that lie on the
Pareto front, and discard those that are dominated. This is why we
still keep Newtonian gravity, even though it is less accurate than
GR (ie falsified), but discard the Ptolomaic system.

Cheers.

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 03:42:19PM -0800, Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:

> 
> Anyway, I definitely agree that it's a "mistake" in some sense to
> discard all but the best projections.  However, in cases where a limit
> _exists_ (and it is reasonable to believe it exists), then it's not a
> mistake at all.  Preserving an erroneous model when much more accurate
> models are at hand would be perverse (or evidence that one should be a
> historian rather than a scientist).  I'm not talking about the type of
> preservation that allows us to think back and learn from previous
> events.  I'm talking about someone _sticking_ to and/or regularly
> relying on a "bad" model even when they know it's wrong.
> 

-- 

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