phorkyas27

As @sidlls rightly commented you are overselling "mathematical modeling" a bit, up to the point it becomes another black box, near to magical ability. I think it is essentially the capacity to abstract and find the relevant key features of what you want to model. And perhaps equally important is to cross check your initial model by seeing if it behaves reasonably in limit and corner cases, e.g. by putting certain parameters to zero or infinity.

>I can tell you this with 100% confidence, AlphaGo, Duplex, Siri etc. are all gimmicks

I think here you might have went slightly over the cliff. Couldn't you not with the same conviction claim those hedge funds only use toy models from statistical physics or wherever to sell you some Sokal hoax like vapor fund (of course they now the tricks that you or the public will pay when the bubble collapses again)?

I'm a bit split on the interesting tangent that @thoroughaway opened of distrusting mathematical models altogether. When I left physics somehow this field of "social physics" tried to establish itself, and I remember how the old lads in statistical physics viewed this field with great suspicion as not being proper physics. (One of the physicists of that field was consulted prior to the Love parade disaster in Duisburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster - it's not about blaming him, but about the suspicion maybe also raised by thoroughaway that not everything, especially humans in a panic, should be modeled like Brownian motion or something)