Beware of treating clouds like clocks
Rory SutherlandOgilvyOne London and Ogilvy Group UK
The growing use of cheap computational power encourages us to pretend that wide, complex problems are narrow, simple ones.
This is a typical school maths question:
Two buses leave the same bus station at noon. One travels west at a constant 30mph, the other travels north at a constant 40mph. What time will it be when the buses are 100 miles apart?
This is a typical real-life problem:
I need to catch a plane leaving Gatwick at 8am. How should I get there (by train, taxi...