💎 Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models

The second kind of response is at the other extreme. Rather than ignore results, people may have too much faith in them. Opaque and difficult is seen as a good thing. I’ve often heard people suggest that a piece of maths is brilliant because nobody can understand it. In their view, complicated means clever. According to statistician George Box, it’s not just observers who can be seduced by mathematical analysis. “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models,’ he supposedly once said.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski