The world is vast and deeply detailed.

If you build an ever more detailed physical model of the world’s topography, eventually you end up with a map the size of the world itself^[1].

Maps and models allow us to think and see and reason about broad concepts and how they interact with each other. This is the difference between seeing a bag of marbles as

blue 🔵
blue 🔵
red 🔴
green 🟢
blue 🔵

and another bag as

red 🔴
green 🟢
green 🟢
blue 🔵
red 🔴
green 🟢

and the more abstract concept that bag one has a most common color of “blue 🔵” and bag two of “green 🟢”.

Statistics are a common example of compressing reality into an abstraction that can more easier be reported and compared against. Mode (described above) is a relatively lossy statistic. We could prefer something like color counts instead.

Hand one
🔴 red: 1
🟢 green: 1
🔵 blue: 3

That’s more information than just the mode. We know about other colors and their rate of occurrence.

But we still don’t know their position in the bag. Whether any overlapped each other. Which colors were touching which. What the size and weight of the marbles were.

The level of detail that can potentially be captured to describe this bag of marbles continues down to an identical replica of the true physical state. This brings us back to the beginning of this essay.

All models are wrong

But some are useful^[2].

When creating models or reporting statistics, you need to decide which elements of the situation must be captured and which can be neglected without compromising the clarity of the abstraction or description of the situation.

In the case of the marbles, if we’re just trying to describe the “marble-color” population, it could be ok to neglect the position of the marbles in the bag or their size. But when we read that data of the counts of the colors of the marbles, often implicit in our reading can be implied sameness across other characteristics of those marbles.

When I devised this example I imagined all the marbles were the same weight, size and made of the same material. But a dataset of counts of marbles and their colors doesn’t imply that. The statistic has its focus and neglects the rest.

Models in writing

Writing is a means by which you can transfer an idea from your head into someone else’s. You have to decide which data points, which statistics, which models you include in your writing in your attempt to conjure your idea within the mind of the reader.

Different examples will be effective for different readers. It’s the writers job to mark these paths for readers. Not every path will be taken, but many can lead to the same place.

Maybe my “bag of marbles” analogy example didn’t land for you. I could present another analogy or model that might. I could present several.

But too many models or examples and readers will lose sight of the point of the writing.

What you don’t write

You also have to decide what you aren’t going to write about. More so, even.

There are so many things you could write about, and you have to decide what to leave out.