Connectionists: Reflections on Models

[Brian Mingus]

The most important thing to know about models is that they affect your
perception of reality. If you or your group becomes infected by a
sufficiently unrealistic model, the consequences are devastating.
Maintaining an unrealistic model as your worldview leads immediately to a
kind of dissociation and creates and over time continues to magnify your
resulting blind spots. These blind spots, if not rectified, promise, very
sincerely, to end the species.

Consider the following models:

- All models are wrong. This model hitches a ride on the truism that
“nothing is necessary.” It is a trivial truth. Outside the synthetic
aperture of mathematics the real world is a messy place, and you ought to,
as a child, be made comfortable with that. Whereas “all models are wrong”
puts you in the position of staring down a never-ending existential crisis
- a permanent instability that fails to establish itself as a safe platform
for the future of the species.

- All models are wrong, but some are useful. This model is elitist,
allowing the person rocking it as their worldview to have a feeling of
superiority over other people, such as found in Nassim Taleb. The reality
is that all models are useful. In the worst cases, we can use a model as
part of a Rube Goldberg machine that solves a problem, such as throwing bad
models into the landfill of time.

- The No Free Lunch Theorem. This model says that for every model, there is
a counter-model. It concludes that it is therefore impossible to have
knowledge. In reality, the No Free Lunch Theorems simplify to the negation
operation - for anything that is said, simply add that it might also be the
case that it is not true. The NFL theorems are nothing more than a
mathematical attack on your ego, strengthened by your inability to
penetrate the extremely advanced mathematics used to “prove” them to you.

Indeed, the entire idea of a model could be considered to be an attack on
your individual person. As a flawed conception of a human being in the
world, it leads to an endless cycle of navel-gazing-induced existential
crises.

Models, in their never-ending ambiguity, promise to erode all that is
important to people. Our ability to love, have children who are optimistic
stewards of the future of humanity, enjoy our lives and to live with
confidence fall flat in the face of one simple operation - negation.
Instead of negation, try optimistic, positive psychology and having respect
and warm feelings and intentions for your fellow humans - all of them -
100%.
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