No, senator, science can't do away with models

Abstraction: Defense of mathematical models as essential to scientific method

Key points:

• Senator John Cornyn claimed (April 2020, COVID context) that models are not part of the scientific method — scientists responded with bafflement
• Conceptual models are fundamental to all scientific thinking, not just mathematical simulations; every reasoned prediction relies on an internal model
• Mathematical simulations are one point on a broad spectrum of model types, all of which are indispensable to science
• "You can make a model say anything" is a bad-faith or ignorant argument — models can be wrong or uncertain, but that does not make them unscientific
• Some models can be genuinely poor, but this is an argument for better models, not no models
• Criticism of scientific conclusions by attacking modeling as a method is fundamentally misleading about how knowledge is produced

Connections: Scientific Modeling · Computational Modeling

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/no-senator-science-cant-do-away-with-models/