He must be aware of the need to make it adequate

Friday, October 27th, 2017

The toy problem presented in Techniques of Systems Analysis is obviously limited in terms of scale and detail:

We talked about 20 planes, 2 airfields, etc. Actually, for some questions, one must talk about thousands of planes and hundreds of airfields. One may have to put in all the relevant asymmetries that were discussed in the early portion of Part IV including, for example, details of different capabilities, different targets, geography, etc. This is so obvious that it probably does not pay to dwell on it here. Unfortunately, it is often also not dwelt on where it should be. That is, not only must one be aware of the possibility that his model is inadequate to answer the questions he is asking but he must be aware of the need to make it adequate and not just to make some face saving apologies.

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