Talk:Grand challenges/Causes of Suboptimal Life Experiences

Stepwise refinement
“Essentially, all models are wrong,” George Box noted, “but some are useful.” The cause-effect diagram developing here uses a linear model of A causes B causes C causes D etc. This model is clearly simplistic and wrong, but it does have the benefit of being (almost) tractable.

The concept of stepwise refinement encourages us to advance through increasingly refined approximations toward the final result. The term was introduced by Niklaus Wirth in an April 1971 article in the Communications of the ACM. It is widely used in product development to describe the orderly progression through stages of concept, requirements, specification, design, realization, verification, validation, use, customer feedback, and on-going refinement.

I foresee this simplistic cause-effect diagram evolving as it is studied further. More causes will be identified. Networks of causes will be created illustrating dependencies and precedence among causes. Loops will be identified. All this will take time and will be exciting work to engage in as it unfolds. --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 00:35, 12 November 2016 (UTC)