There it was in the press, garnering international headlines, the idea that HIV could be brought under control in a decade in a particular country with the proper combination of testing and interventionist medical treatments. This information came from a simulation. The inputs were not clear, but the outputs clearly garnered all sorts of attention.

There’s a healthy dose of skepticism that usually comes with easy solutions and round numbers and easy predictions. The world itself is quite complex. Many factors affect outcomes. And it’s a rare thing that can take a tough situation and change its directions dramatically. There are laws of unintended consequences, which can turn a situation in unexpected ways. And there are absolutely confounding effects that may move a situation in another direction. Most people know better than to try to model human behaviors because there’s a fair amount of unpredictability.

Information is valuable if it is accurate, timely, and predictive (it has value projecting into the future). Those first two adjectives are tough enough, but the third one is downright elusive—that concept of predictiveness. If a simulation is modeling against the world, what is actionable then has such a high standard that it may not be truly attainable.