[vl]

>Soccer, with the many factors that affect game outcomes — players’ injuries and intra-team conflicts, the refereeing, the weather, coaches’ errors and moments of inspiration — remains only a tightly-regulated game involving a few dozen people. The behavior and performance of big corporations, entire industries and nations is arguably even more difficult to model based on data about the past.

Author misses the way models work entirely, the larger the entity, the more statistics and averages kick in, and as a result, better model can be built.

[Donald]

Depends on the complexity of the interactions between variables. There are plenty of examples where we have excellent local models, but make (comparatively) worse prediction at scale. A pretty classic example is biology - we have excellent knowledge about how genotypes work and their interactions in cells, but models of phenotypes are typically expensive, error-prone, or non-existent.