As the statistician George Box famously put it: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” An oversimplified model that you have enough data to estimate is better than a perfect one that you don’t. It’s astonishing how simultaneously very wrong and very useful some models can be. The economist Milton Friedman even argued in a highly influential essay that the best theories are the most oversimplified, provided their predictions are accurate, because they explain the most with the least.
