Accuracy and Perception

When I was a young boy my father bought me a plastic model car and some glue and paint to put it together. I assembled the model and painted it, but ended up with a bunch of parts left over. The car was the right shape and the right colour, but I had left out the engine! At my young age I had little understanding of what an engine was and I saw no point in including it in my model. I had also glued the hood closed, because that was the “proper shape” of a car. Had I built the model “wrong”? No, I had simply chosen to leave out certain details that were of little relevance to me. The model was less complete than the manufacturers had intended, but was still a viable model of a car. Even if I had included all the parts, the model still was far from complete as compared to a real car. It lacked steering linkages, drive train, and an electrical system to name just a few components. The engine consisted of three or four solid masses, hardly representative of a real engine.

Several years later as a teenager, I was hanging out at my friend Larry’s house and noticed that his older brother Keith had a fine collection of models. Keith had a gift for all things mechanical and enjoyed tinkering with real motorcycles and cars as well as building beautiful models of airplanes, military tanks, and cars. Because Keith understood the real life workings of the things he modeled, his models were very accurate. What really caught my attention though, were not Keith’s plastic models, as beautifully assembled and painted as they were. No, the object that fascinated me was a model of a different sort; in his father’s machine shop, Keith had fabricated a miniature version of an actual working steam engine. This tiny steam engine was about six inches long and looked like a rudimentary tractor. The main engine part was a bored out cube of steel with little brass pipes to direct the steam. To this day, I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but Keith had actually made it run under its own power!

As models, which more accurately represented reality; my hollow plastic painted car body, or Keith’s working steam engine? My model superficially looked like a car, but Keith’s tractor captured the essence of motoring by moving autonomously – the very definition of an automobile. Neither model really came close to an accurate representation of a car, but both models fairly accurately modeled one particular aspect of “car-ness”. Both models were heavily dependent on the viewer’s experience with cars and our perspectives regarding the salient features of a car. I knew what cars looked like. Keith did too, but he also knew that that’s not what makes a car a car.

The integrative thinker is able to see different models as representing different aspects of the same reality. Models tend to focus on a few particular aspects or features of the reality. These features are those which the model designer deemed “salient features”. That is, the model designer chose to include certain features or aspects because he deemed them important, relevant, and interesting. Non-salient features are left out of the model so as not to make the model overly complex.

Next - the Complexity Problem
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