Depends on the complexity of the interactions between variables. There are plenty of examples where we have excellent local models, but make (comparatively) wor

Depends on the complexity of the interactions between variables. There are plenty of examples where we have excellent local models, but make (comparatively) worse prediction at scale. A pretty classic example is biology - we have excellent knowledge about how genotypes work and their interactions in cells, but models of phenotypes are typically expensive, error-prone, or non-existent.