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by seanhunter 758 days ago
> You don't think that a model is something abstract?

Models definitely don't have to be abstract. For example, researchers will talk about studying a disease or the effectiveness of a treatment in a "mouse model"[1].

That model is an actual concrete mouse that is being used as a model of a human. It's not abstract in the sense of language, mathematics, or a sketch, and they do the research by looking for the physical effects on the mouse model and drawing an analogy to what would correspondingly happen in a human.

[1] eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7121329/