"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
I always thought the 'but models are wrong' is quite a weak excuse. Newtonian physics is a wrong model of how the universe works. Using it though; we put a man on the moon. Einsteinian physics are incomplete, but it allows us to use satellites moving at roughly 10KM/s to pinpoint our location to within a few metres.
A model's usefulness is not about how accurately it describes what is happening, but about whether it describes what happens at a certain meso-scale accurately.
[0]: http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt07/lt_2011_...
Funny. I know how GPS works and that knowing the SAT locations is critical, but I never thought about how fast they are moving. They need to transmit their own position and time with great accuracy. In particular, don't they have to transmit their time and position at the time of transmission? That is a more interesting problem than I realized.
People on other science forums are generally fast to dismiss computer models as 'unrealistic' and 'non-representative', disregarding their utility.
For those interested in models I always recommend looking at Schelling's segregation model for starters, the premises and conclusions drawn from the experiment are quite interesting.
But if it's been verified against nothing, I don't have much interest in it.
Some examples of that include almost every model that claims to describe some element of human social interaction, which never seem to be checked against anything real that I can see, and I recall once reading an article and paper on modeling exoplanets and their likelihood of having life on them (or the likelihood of it being hospitable, not sure which) that flew so far beyond our science and data that the peer reviewers should be ashamed they ever approved it.
(Of course, if you want to publish your unvalidated model as an interesting piece of math, go nuts.)