Simulation is a wonderful thing. It’s one of the foundations of mathematics.
Scale models are a good example. If you want to see what the new building will look like make a model. It isn’t going to tell you everything, the architectural models of housing projects usually look wonderful, but it’s a great example of using the external world to think for you, of externalizing your brain. Yes, you can read a description and imagine what something will look like, but making a model, reduces how much of your brain that uses, leaving more brain for other things, like deciding whether any child is really going to want to play under the gaze of a thousand anonymous windows.
The power of modeling is real. From the scale drawings my father used to make before decorating the kitchen, to the simulation that demonstrated that the proposed system for baggage handling at Denver Airport was guaranteed to fail horribly. (Unfortunately the simulation, costing a few thousand dollars, was done after the actual system was built at the cost of hundreds of millions, and then millions more in delays.) Dangerous, lengthy and expensive processes can be evaluated for a fraction of the cost of the actual experiment. Some people’s love this new power, others can’t forget what’s being lost.
What’s lost in any abstraction is the specific, the individual, everything that matters. Some people can’t get over that.
Simulations and models only work because they ignore details, knowing whether they are important details can be difficult. A scale model works fine for the forces on a house or a skyscraper, but is hopeless for a ship. Econometric models are notorious for their spurious certainty.
So the practical fitness of a model to it’s purpose is one question, but there are others. For some people it is impossible to imagine the classic absurdist math problem characters “a man”, or “a woman” without some humanity to hang on to. People differ on this.
I remember some fine junior high level course material on date arithmetic. A drawing of a set of gravestones: name, born, died. The question was: how old was each person when they died. One child faced with “James Brown: March 1823 to June 1839″ confounded his teacher by insisting on knowing why Jim died. I don’t share that need, but I rather like it. I’m glad it’s around. If we want to make more people more mathematically adept, this is the kind of fact we need to acknowledge and deal with.