Abstract: My title refers to Richard Levins’ famous paper on models in population biology (1966). Here Levins presented his three-way distinction between kinds of modelbuilding, and also introduced a set of more fundamental ideas about trade-offs that constrain and guide scientific work. For Levins, these trade-offs derive from the relationships between three different theoretical goals: realism, precision, and generality. The talk of ‘‘strategies’’ within Levins’ paper concerns alternative strategies within the enterprise of model-building. ...
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Topics: 
Epistemology
Management science
Engineering ethics