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 :—[[Nancy Cartwright]], {{br|How the Laws of Physics Lie}} (1983)}}
-[[how the laws of data science lie|In]] 1983 philosopher [[Nancy Cartwright]] wrote the seemingly scandalous {{Br|How the Laws of Physics Lie}} — it is not quite the post-modernist tripe it sounds, but rather a serious and literate work of analytical philosophy. Cartwright’s point was that scientific laws are formulated in conditions so rigid, isolated and controlled that, even though they might be perfectly valid within those conditions, they are practically useless “in the real world,” where those conditions have no hope of existing. So the principles of Newton’s mechanics, assuming as they do no inconveniently intervening forces like friction, gravity, inelasticity, might plot the trajectory of an object on a graph, but have no chance with the proverbial [[Crisp-packet blowing across St Mark’s square|crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]]. You could spend a lot of time with a slide rule and an anemometer; when you look up the packet will be gone.
+[[how the laws of data science lie|In]] 1983 philosopher [[Nancy Cartwright]] wrote the seemingly scandalous book {{Br|How the Laws of Physics Lie}}. It is not quite the [[post-modernist]] screed it sounds, but rather a serious and literate, but difficult, work of analytical philosophy. Cartwright’s argument is that scientific laws are formulated in conditions so rigid, isolated and controlled that, even though they might be perfectly valid within those conditions, they are practically useless “in the real world,” where those conditions have no hope of existing.
+{{quote|We explain by ''[[ceteris paribus]]'' laws, by composition of causes, and by approximations that improve on what the fundamental laws dictate. In all of these cases the fundamental laws ''patently do not get the facts right''.}}
+So Newton’s mechanics assuming, as they do, no inconveniently intervening forces like friction, gravity, inelasticity, might plot the trajectory of an object on a graph, but have no chance with the proverbial [[Crisp-packet blowing across St Mark’s square|crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]]. You could spend a lot of time with a slide rule and an anemometer; when you look up the packet will be gone.
 The same observation animates [[Gerd Gigerenzer]]’s faith in [[Heuristic|heuristics]] over science: despite [[Richard Dawkins]]’ trite conviction to the contrary, a fielder performs no differential equations on the way to catching a flying cricket ball.