>Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the actions company leadership takes impacts everyone in the same way. The people who are most effective will be disproportionately likely to leave if you turn a knob that leads to increased attrition.
This gem applies to so many fields. It's bonkers that this has to be spelled out to people who are ostensibly experts. This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model.
> This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model.
I’ve never understood these critiques. If you want to study society, what’s the alternative? No matter what, you have to make a model of some kind. Yeah, some models are simplistic, but maybe they can capture the high order bits of the phenomenon they are modeling, and at least you are committing to an idea you can codify, find fault with, and improve. The alternative (never making models) seems to be a type of intellectual nihilism.
Every model is simplistic, otherwise it's not a model, but reality. Societal models (I've never heard of a remotely reasonable one, aside from psychohistory) have the unique problem where they influence the people they are supposed to model. If your business is societal models, planned obsolescence is part of the deal.
A lot of so-called experts don't quite grasp the former and don't care about the latter. They cannot be relied upon for actual decision making, since the low level details are what's hard!
> "This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model."
Yet that is precisely what classical economic theory has done, for decades! It boggles my mind how long it's taking for that kind of reductionist, simplistic, reality-ignoring "thinking" to mature.
"Reality" is necessarily a model. Your brain doesn't see photons, doesn't touch objects, doesn't respond to audio waves.
If you are sane, then your model must not be subject to your will; therefore it is outside "you" even if within your skull, and performs as a trusted intermediary.
Sure, on that point we're agreed. Our perceptions (distinct from sensory input) are dependent on a conceptual framework / paradigm / model. But I didn't say models were useless, I was pointing out the profound flaw at the heart of typical economic models. Classical economic theory reduces the messy reality of human interaction to a handful of simple pseudo-mathematical axioms, then proceeds to build complicated formulas and algorithms atop this unreliable foundation. It's only quite recently that real-world complexity is (finally!) entering the picture, thanks to things like the Santa Fe Institute. It's reminiscent of the Copernican revolution.
I think it's something inherent in the self-selection for the politician/bureaucrat process that makes them inherently unable to believe that people aren't cogs.
