> What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. One of my favorite comments from not too long ago was from a

> What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. One of my favorite comments from not too long ago was from an Ask HN on biology: The sooner you get used to believing that "I can't prove anything, but we have a pile of mostly not contradictory evidence that suggests that most of the time this idea is a pretty good heuristic and our error bars are reasonable", the better you'll do and the saner you'll remain ... And if you like, I can provide a basically endless stream of papers of the form "we thought X did Y and we knew what X was; it turns out that X actually does Q, it also turns out we don't know why X does anything at all, but when we do X we sometimes get Y so we've been confused for the past 50 years" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410086 The whole thread is a gold mine of how defined "systems" fail to model biology at a useful level. At some point, a system gets so complex that it's indistinguishable from chaos. Then your toolbox just has instinct, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. But you can't ascribe it to explicit rules, you have to start firing from the hip without exactly knowing why.