> the authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".

I sense a paradox there. They are insisting on calling it a lie but really it isn't

The models that they call "lie" are, in fact, mostly correct, they are good approximations, with limited scope, and sometimes don't handle edge cases, the same with Newton's gravity and many topics.

The same way that Pi is not 3.14159, nor it is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286, and it's not a lie, just an approximation.

The reality is that we don't know the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

Even general relativity is a lie if you want to go that route.

This Wikipedia article is just scientific trolling promoted by satiric authors like Pratchett, that some people here are taking too seriously.

And these authors are hurting science because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.

I don't think that this statement is correct (the quote on Wikipedia, not your conclusion).

Educators do indeed employ lies-to-children with the intention of deception in many cases. It's not the primary intention, but it is still intentional deception.

In some cases, there is no intention to deceive (e.g. when a teacher immediately explains that 'what I'm teaching you is an intentional oversimplification, and is not completely correct'), but in many cases, educators leave this to the teacher who needs to teach the newer, more correct model later. This is especially true at a young age.

Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term.

Ultimately every single thing you think you understand ends at an approximation or a simplification. That's just the nature of the world. It's not a lie - it's just a simpler abstraction of the underlying truth.

The entire field of engineering is based on creating simple models of things and using them to build complex things. Every engineering class is pre-empted with "these equations are simplified approximations of how things work in the real world, but they're good enough for designing things". Those aren't lies - just useful tools.