Carolina QuotesRemember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
George E. P. Box Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 74
- work
- Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)
- year
- 1987
- locator
- p. 74
Cite this record
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question i…” George E. P. Box. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-0E77AC3AFA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/0e77ac3afa
More from George E. P. Box
I want to tell you how I got to be a statistician. I was, of course, born in England and in 1939... when war broke out in September of that year, although I was close to getting a degree in Chemistry, I abandoned that and joined the Army. They put me in the Engineers (and when I see a bridge I still catch myself calculating where I would put the charges to blow it up). Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas. Some of England's best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant. The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician. He said "we can't get one, what do you know about it?" I said "Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn't understand it". He said "You've read the book so you better do it", so I said, "Yes sir"
The researcher hoping to break new ground in the theory of experimental design should involve himself in the design of actual experiments. The investigator who hopes to revolutionize decision theory should observe and take part in the making of important decisions.
For the theory-practice iteration to work, the scientist must be, as it were, mentally ambidextrous; fascinated equally on the one hand by possible meanings, theories, and tentative models to be induced from data and the practical reality of the real world, and on the other with the factual implications deducible from tentative theories, models and hypotheses.