Useful Ways of Looking

Useful Ways of Looking is a series on concepts I often reference. You could think of them as mental models, or primitives, or keys, or, well, Ways of Looking. You probably landed here because I referenced one and sent you this link for further explanation!

The Useful Ways of Looking are not necessarily true, but they are — as the name suggests — often useful. Finding where to skillfully apply them is part of the job.

In brief

The usefulness of any idea is not necessarily correlated with how correct it is; it is only within a specified context that attributes like usefulness and correctness of the idea can be evaluated.

More context

The degree to which any way of looking or mental model is “correct” is not necessarily correlated with how “useful” is it. When people disagree about a principle, they are often arguing from different sides of this divide.

In any situation — especially when you’re getting advice or evaluating a way of looking — you should consider whether you’re looking for a useful model or a correct one, and you should narrow your evaluation to the specific context rather than questioning what applies “broadly.”

For instance: the idea of weight loss happening via a calories in / calories out math is correct, but not useful. Yes, the first law of thermodynamics applies, and the amount of energy (and thus mass) your body retains is equal to how much comes in minus how much comes out.

However, this ignores the useful reality that what constitutes your “calories in” affects your “calories out” (let alone your psychology and continued adherence). If all you ate was 2500 calories of straight sugar vs. 2500 calories of olive oil vs. 2500 calories of a “balanced” diet, your results would obviously vary massively.

Yes, in each of those three cases, we could calculate your calories in (2500 kcal) and your calories out, and the net of those two would indeed lead directly to how much weight you gained or lost. But the composition of the “in” would affect how much goes “out,” and thus the results.

So “calories in / calories out” is a model that is correct but not terribly useful. When people start bickering about this, it’s often because one of them is arguing the model is correct, and the other is arguing it is not useful, but at least one of them is using imprecise language to say so.

I would argue this applies to just about everything.

It’s impossible to evaluate a model without putting it in context. So when considering a way of looking, first make sure you’re thinking of it in a context, and then ask yourself whether you’re looking for correctness or usefulness. Only then can reasonable statements be made.

In the context of an experiment that measured calories in and weight loss, where the experimenter was seeking to find how the subjects’ calories out varied, the calories-in-calories-out model is both useful and correct! But in the context of our everyday lives, it is more correct than it is useful.

Note: even this very model of “useful vs. correct” falls victim to itself! In a given context, it’s certainly possible that correctness and usefulness are one and the same, or that the division is technically correct but not useful. But with respect to humanity’s use of ways of looking writ large, I think the “correct vs. useful” division is highly useful itself — hence this inclusion of the idea in the series.

Further readings

Brian Lui wrote a great post on this, including the CICO example.

Wikipedia on “All models are wrong” from statistician George Box.

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