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54 B. Edmonds

of an illustration of the key ideas and does not qualify for either explaining specific
data, predicting anything unknown or exploring a theory.

4.6.2 Risks

The main risk here is that you might deceive people using the illustration into
reading more into the simulation than is intended, as these are often quite persuasive
in terms of their impact. Such simulations can be used as a kind of analogy—a way
of thinking about other phenomena. However, just because you can think about some
phenomena in a particular way does not make it true. The human mind is good at
creating, ‘on the fly’, connections between an analogy and what it is considering—
so good that it does it almost without us being aware of this process. The danger
here is of confusing being able to think of some phenomena using an idea and that
idea having any force in terms of a possible explanation or method of prediction.
The apparent generality of an analogy tends to dissipate when one tries to precisely
specify the relationship of a model to observations, since an analogy has a different
set of relationships for each situation it is applied to—it is a supremely flexible
way of thinking. This flexibility means that it does not work well to support an
explanation or predict well, since both of these necessitate an explicit and fixed
relationship with observed data.
There is also a risk of confusion if it is not clear which aspects are important
to the illustration and which are not. A simulation for illustration will show the
intended behaviour, but (unlike when its theory is being explored) it has been tested
only for a restricted range of possibilities; indeed the claimed results might be quite
brittle to insignificant changes in assumption.

4.6.3 Mitigating Measures

Be very clear in the documentation that the purpose of the simulation is for
illustration only, maybe giving pointers to fuller simulations that might be useful
for other purposes. Also be clear in precisely what idea is being communicated and
so which aspects of the simulation are relevant for this purpose.

4.7 Some Confusions of Purpose

It should be abundantly clear by now that establishing a simulation for one purpose
does not justify it for another and that any assumptions to the contrary risk confusion
and unreliable science. However, the field has many examples of such confusions
and conflations, so this message is obviously needed. It is true that a simulation