The Expert Billiard Player Analogy for 'As If' Reasoning
In his book Essays in Positive Economics, Milton Friedman introduced an analogy involving an expert billiard player to illustrate the 'as if' principle. He argued that a successful predictive model could be based on the hypothesis that the player makes shots as if they understood complex physics and could perform instantaneous calculations. While the player likely does not perform these calculations, their expertise, developed through practice, leads to outcomes consistent with such a model. Therefore, the model's value comes from its predictive accuracy based on observable results, not the realism of its assumptions about the player's thought process.
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