Models Memes

Economists already treat humans like perfectly rational, frictionless spheres in a vacuum! The Alice in Wonderland confusion here is perfect—economists build elaborate mathematical models where people behave with perfect logic and complete information, while real humans are over here panic-buying toilet paper and spending their rent money on NFTs of digital monkeys. Imagine the economic equivalent of Schrödinger's cat: a consumer simultaneously rational and irrational until observed by the Federal Reserve. Or perhaps we need Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Economics—the more precisely you measure someone's spending habits, the less you understand why they bought that ridiculous hat.

Physics textbooks exist in their own special dimension where penguins are perfect cylinders and cows are spherical. Nobody asked for these simplifications, yet there they are, teaching generations of students that air resistance is negligible and pulleys are frictionless. Next time your experiment fails, remember it's not you—it's just that reality refuses to be a well-behaved mathematical model. Those of us who've spent years in the lab know the truth: the universe is held together by duct tape and statistical error bars.