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Luke_A_Somers comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's not quite what it feels like from the inside either. It's more like, "You're looking at this enormous noodle soup! Well, let's see what we can say with certainty, and let's poke around for useful approximations. If that doesn't work, I got nuffin'."
Physicists tend to have very good modeling chops. A fellow in the early 1900s (Ising) was trying to come up with a model for ferromagnetism and came up with Markov random fields, basically. That is amazing to me.
Meanwhile, in psychometrics: "I know, let's model intelligence by one number!"
edit: There is some controversy about how much of this was Ising vs Ising's advisor. This does not affect my point about physicists, though.
Right, I kind of swept that under the rug as part of approximations - as in, 'try making a seemingly overly-simple model of the individual components and see if the relevant behavior emerges'. Could have been clearer on that.