Science & Tech Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono’s line is a pressure-washer aimed at science’s self-mythology. He rejects the priestly pose of “pure” description and swaps it for something almost brutally practical: science as a workshop, not a cathedral. The sentence structure does the work. “Not to analyze or describe but to make useful models” yanks the focus from reverent observation to engineering. Even the redundancy in “useful… get use out of it” is a feature, not a bug: he’s insisting that usefulness isn’t a philosophical garnish, it’s the whole meal.

The subtext is a quiet attack on scholasticism - on the kind of knowledge that wins status without changing anything. Coming from a psychologist best known for lateral thinking, this is also a manifesto against intellectual inertia. De Bono spent a career arguing that brains love neat stories and familiar tracks; “model-making” is his antidote because models can be swapped, stress-tested, and updated. Descriptions can harden into identities; models stay provisional.

Context matters: late-20th-century science was increasingly entwined with computation, systems thinking, and applied research, while academia still prized explanatory elegance and disciplinary gatekeeping. De Bono’s framing anticipates today’s fights over prediction vs. understanding (think machine learning that works without “explaining itself”). He’s not anti-truth; he’s anti-complacency. If a model helps you navigate reality - cure, build, forecast, decide - it earns its keep. If it only flatters the analyst, it’s just ornament, dressed up as insight.