This article presents key ideas I heard at the talk given by Julie Schweer, KIT on Nov 09, 2020.
Motivation
What is the role of computer simulation in scientific understanding?
Are they opaque?
Do we really make scientific progress?
Introduction
understand a phenomenon
experimentally intractable (infeasible?) and difficult to obtain
"epistemically opaque?"
What is understanding?
- ability to provide explanation;
- ability to generalize; and
- ability to predict the behavior of counterfactuals.
Challenges in Computer Simulation
- lead to an illusion of understanding;
- confuse model dynamics vs. actual phenomenon;
- does the simulation the model the phenomenon under investigation;
- sources of uncertainty (initial conditions, hyper-parameters);
- model assumption
"ask clear questions; it is easy to come up with sexy answers"
"all models are wrong; some are useful"
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