George E. P. Box Quotes
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
This is a reference to mathematical models.
George E. P. Box as quoted in New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There is a great tendency in politics and government operations to get extremely precise numbers because political opponents will always attack all numbers that do not support their positions. The result is that typically, so much time and money goes into trying to get precision, that by the time the numbers are good enough the opportunity to make the right policy decision will have passed. Much information that bears on an issue is never used because it is not precise enough while the precise information is not particularly relevant. See {619763} for a similar related quote.
More and more scientific researchers and technologists were using research tools that they did not fully understand and sometimes did not understand at all.
George Edward Pelham Box FRS was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".
