Lumifer comments on Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MrMind 03 August 2015 07:05AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 06 August 2015 08:26:30PM *  2 points [-]

Well, let's step back a little bit.

How good a model is cannot be determined without specifying purpose of this model. In particular, there is no universally-correct granularity -- some models track a lot of little details and effects, while others do not and aggregate all of them into a few measures or indicators. Both types can be useful depending on the purpose. In particular, a more granular model is not necessarily a better model.

This general principle applies here as well. Sometimes you do want to model a group of humans as a group of distinct humans, and sometimes you want to model a group of humans as a single entity.