Alexander Mattick says real-world problems are non-stationary and can change as people interact with them, describing reality as protean in terms attributed to Marvitz Chiramuta.

“I got this from Marvitz Chiramuta. So she said that reality is protean. And what she meant by that is there's this ancient myth in Greek mythology about this guy Proteus and you could pin him down.”

“and hit afterwards your question but when you let go he would shape shift so so um there's this thing that with problems in the real world when we interact with them they shape shift and they're non-stationary but what we try to do though as mathematicians and scientists is is we learn knowledge and representations at an increasingly high level of abstraction and the purpose of that is that the knowledge is less shape shifty so it kind of feels like we almost need to have”