Do you think that applying black box models can result in “progress”? Say, molecular modeling/docking or climate modeling or whole-cell modeling or certain finite-element models? [climate models kind of work with finite element analysis but most people who run them don’t understand all the precise elements used in the finite element analysis or COMSOL]? It always seems that there are many many more people who run the models than there are people who develop the models, and the many people who run the models (some of whom are students) are often not as knowledgeable about the internals as those who develop them—yet they still can produce unexpected leads/insights [or stories—which CAN be deceiving, but which in an optimal world helps others understand the system better even if they aren’t super-familiar with the GFD equations of motions that run inside climate models or COMSOL] that might be better than chance.
I would not usually call finite element models black box. It’s true that they can be used like mysterious black boxes by particular users, but the gears inside the model do map directly to gears in the physical world, and the people who wrote the code do understand that mapping.
Do you think that applying black box models can result in “progress”? Say, molecular modeling/docking or climate modeling or whole-cell modeling or certain finite-element models? [climate models kind of work with finite element analysis but most people who run them don’t understand all the precise elements used in the finite element analysis or COMSOL]? It always seems that there are many many more people who run the models than there are people who develop the models, and the many people who run the models (some of whom are students) are often not as knowledgeable about the internals as those who develop them—yet they still can produce unexpected leads/insights [or stories—which CAN be deceiving, but which in an optimal world helps others understand the system better even if they aren’t super-familiar with the GFD equations of motions that run inside climate models or COMSOL] that might be better than chance.
I would not usually call finite element models black box. It’s true that they can be used like mysterious black boxes by particular users, but the gears inside the model do map directly to gears in the physical world, and the people who wrote the code do understand that mapping.