[soVeryTired]

The word “some” in the quote from Box is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

If a model is useful, I’d like to see it being used (outside academia, where there’s minimal penalty for complexity and a high emphasis on novelty).

If models like these are widely adopted at social media companies or news agencies, it’s fair to say OP’s take isn’t valid. Otherwise they may have a point.

[vannevar]

Agreed. But these kinds of models almost always start in academia, that's one of the big reasons we have academia, to explore ideas that may (or may not) be useful. My point was that you can't prejudge the usefulness of a model simply because it doesn't fully replicate all the complexity of the phenomenon being modeled.

[intended]

These ideas are used, and they influence what policy is crafted.

You can’t predict what an individual will do, but work like this kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.

There’s a paper from 2016 that shows how posts saturate/cascade through conspiracy communities and that it has distinct cascade dynamics. This wasn’t a model, it was a description of observed behavior.

Or take some relatively recent work from Harvard, which suggests that while our capacity to create misinformation has increased in both quantity and quality, its consumption rate seems to be stable.

[paganel]

> kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.

It doesn't, which is part of the point the OP is making. And now my point, it's ok that these pseudo-scientific "revelations" don't kill those "inaccurate ideological positions", because that's the whole point of human free will, there's no "accurate ideological position" when it comes to the day-to-day life, or to societal life in general.