Mental models
This Codex Vitae, or “book of life”, is a collection of my beliefs and concepts that inform my decisions and life. It is a work in constant flux; as my understanding changes, so will my beliefs. The main purpose of this document is to
pull my (often normative) beliefs into the light where I can question them more effectively and
to share philosophies, concepts, tools, and inspiration that have been helpful to me.
It's about making things explicit.
Read MoreThe argument is sometimes made that we have no choice; without a model we will end up relying on biased opinions, guesswork, or even worse. Thus we must develop the best models possible, and use them to evaluate alternative policies. In other words, working with even a highly imperfect model is better than having no model at all. That might be true if we were honest and upfront about the limitations of the model. But often we are not.
Models sometimes convey the impression that we know much more than we really do. They create a veneer of scientific legitimacy that can be used to bolster the argument for a particular policy. This is particularly the case for integrated assessment models (IAMs) which tend to be large and complicated, and are sometimes poorly documented. IAMs are typically made up of many equations, and the equations are hard to evaluate individually (especially given that they are often ad hoc and without a theoretical or empirical foundation), and even harder to understand in terms of their interactions as a complete system. In effect, the model is just a black box: we put in some assumptions about GHG emissions, discount rates, etc., and we get out some results about temperature change, damages, etc. And because the black box is “scientific,” we are supposed to take those results seriously and use them for policy analysis.
“What mattered, however, was that these models required a computer to solve and simulate. The fact that some of the underlying relationships in the models were completely ad hoc and made little sense didn’t matter – the fact that they were computer models made them “scientific” and inspired a certain degree of trust.”
Read the original article THE USE AND MISUSE OF MODELS FOR CLIMATE POLICY.
The revolution in comparative politics started with a number of brave principles:
look beyond description to more theoretically relevant problems;
look beyond the single case to the comparison of many cases;
look beyond the formal institutions of government to political processes and political functions;
and look beyond the countries of Western Europe to the new nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act.
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Photo by Janne Hellsten / CC BY-NC-ND
You see, we are building up a bidirectional causal relationship here: "we" direct our attention to particular thoughts/experiences, which make up the substance of our consciousness; at the same time, our "selves" are the sum of our consciousness.
Read More“To create an artifact, the designer needs to be a scientist to model reality, an epistemologist to metamodel the design process, and an artist to contemplate the result.”
After some reflection, I have decided to talk about the most valuable skill that I have started to acquire, as a result of being immersed in the activity of modelling the energy industry.
Read MoreTrivial this example may be (we are talking about a monthly electricity bill of 39 euros!), I am hoping that, in the not so far future, active demand response will be enabled, and we will all make more intelligent and informed decisions about whether to turn that heater on.
Read MoreI am a lover of grand narratives, ambitious stories that connect happenings across time and space, and that’s why I have named this blog ‘Connections’. Today, I will attempt to show you a powerful analogy, a mental exercise of sort, one that is able to provide a common framework to think about dynamic behaviour in biology, ecology, economics and much more. The mental construct that I will be writing about today is that of stocks and flows.
Read MoreSo my personal definition of a model is that it's always a simplification, and sometimes an abstraction of a particular entity, system or process, that helps us to understand one aspect of that very entity, system or process.
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