I frequently visualize things in ways that aren’t quite correct. Not to perform precise calculations, but for the sake of my intuition. That might sound just as bad, but I find that intuition works better when it has internal visual cues to support it; your “flow of causality” example is what I’m thinking about here. When I’m thinking about some complicated system, imagining something flowing between the relevant parts to create the cause and effect helps me get what’s going on.
So I would say that visualizations that aren’t completely correct are not in and of themselves bad, as long as they don’t start affecting your predictions directly.
I frequently visualize things in ways that aren’t quite correct. Not to perform precise calculations, but for the sake of my intuition. That might sound just as bad, but I find that intuition works better when it has internal visual cues to support it; your “flow of causality” example is what I’m thinking about here. When I’m thinking about some complicated system, imagining something flowing between the relevant parts to create the cause and effect helps me get what’s going on.
So I would say that visualizations that aren’t completely correct are not in and of themselves bad, as long as they don’t start affecting your predictions directly.