George Box famously said:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” (Box, 1979)
Drawing upon this idea, about a year ago, I developed a tutorial to explore the idea of how quantitative methods can allow one to be less wrong about important social issues: https://globalfamilies.quarto.pub/be-less-wrong/.
Since that time, I’ve made some updates: minor updates to the diagrams; and some notes clarifying the relationship of the ideas in the tutorial to ideas about RCT’s, statistical mediation, statistical confounders, and statistical colliders.
References
Box, G. (1979). Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building. In R. L. Launer & G. N. Wilkinson (Eds.), Robustness in statistics. Academic Press, Inc. [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers], New York-London.