One example is pandemics. The thing is pandemics are extremely fat tailed in terms of fatalities. You need a lot of data to fit any outbreak model and no one has time for that. But the reaction to diseases out breaks is very simple. Is it super deadly and contagious? If yes, shut everything down! This is essentially what Asian countries like Vietnam and Taiwan did during Covid and they handled it way better than the West. I remember arguing about outbreak models, which is a completely useless activity.

Weather models are ridiculously advanced running on super computers crunching a massive global network of real time data. But they still aren't anywhere close to perfect.

That being said, just because it rains on your birthday when it was said to be sunny, doesn't mean you delete your weather app, call meteorology pseudoscience, and start a substack of "the forecast was wrong again" blog posts.

People intuitively grasp this foolishness because they constantly interact with weather models. But for things they have almost no contact with, it's easy to write it off on a single "bad forecast"

(I'll also admit the caveat that not every model is as good (or bad) as weather models, another dimension at play to throw a wrench in peoples gears)