The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Trusting
City Journal,
by
Chris Von Csefalvay
Original Article
Posted By: Senex,
5/16/2020 1:38:13 PM
British leaders planned . . . a laissez-faire approach to the spread of the coronavirus. . . . . But . . . , a report from the Imperial College . . . led by . . . Neil Ferguson, shocked the Cabinet . . . into a complete reversal . . . . Report 9 . . . used computational models to predict that . . . Britain would suffer 500,000 [coronavirus] deaths . . . . [But the] code on which they based their predictions would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
RuckusTom 5/16/2020 2:04:21 PM (No. 412892)
"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." Ronald H. Coase.
6 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
DVC 5/16/2020 2:39:03 PM (No. 412909)
The author is a virologist. He is skeptical of the modeling, since Ferguson will NOT release his software.
THAT (IMO) is a sign of a coverup of incompetence, error or possibly even intentional malpractice.
Government funded software is generally publicly available, since the public paid for it's creation. An example is the first major engineering structural analysis code, NASTRAN, every line available for the price of copying it to tapes back when tapes were the way you transferred large quantities of data. I worked with NASTRAN for decades, and later, more capable codes.
What is Ferguson hiding?
FTA:
"The first step toward integrating predictive models into evidence-based policy is thorough assessment of the models’ assumptions and implementation. Reasonable skepticism about predictive models is not unscientific—and blind trust in an untested, shoddily written model is not scientific. As Socrates might have put it, an unexamined model is not worth trusting."
9 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
NotaBene 5/16/2020 3:34:22 PM (No. 412946)
Neil Ferguson resigned because he broke his own quarantine to mate with a married woman. The Bill Gates model from the University of Washington is no better. I will not let them contaminate me with the Bill Gates nucleic acid vaccine, for which there is no antecedent ever.
Sweden did just fine with the herd immunity model. At least better than US.
7 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Bur Oak 5/16/2020 4:10:51 PM (No. 412982)
There are a series of quality control standards used by industry. They are the ISO 9001 standards. They require that businesses verify and validate computer programs and models before they are relied upon. None of the Chinese virus models have been verified or validated yet our elites have locked down the economy based upon them. They have proved to be wrong by multiples of hundreds and thousands. If you aren't angry you ought to be. Our government is not here to help us. They help only themselves to our wealth.
4 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Italiano 5/16/2020 4:16:59 PM (No. 412988)
Let's just say that my late-March / early-April predictions were more accurate than Dr. Fauci's, and leave it at that.
4 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
DVC 5/16/2020 4:21:12 PM (No. 412991)
#3, you are factually wrong. Sweden's death rate is 364 per million, US is 270 per million. Sweden has a 35% higher mortality rate.
And, if you read from people inside Sweden, things are not quite what the US media and naysayers claim. Apparently most of the elderly DID 'shut in', and even the younger folks that went out were more circumspect, more washing, etc. Certainly not like 'locked at home', which appears to be the case in some place.
I have NEVER been locked anywhere, I go out and shop, visit friends and work in my shop, mow, trim trees, etc. like normal. The only thing missing for me has been sit down restaurant meals.
4 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
sanspeur 5/16/2020 10:27:16 PM (No. 413186)
guess whose daughter Ali is employed by twitter as a software engr? Dr F’s daughter is embedded with billy gates too ...( see the” national file” site ) . there is a great pix of the estimable dr f with henry nostrilitus waxman , fancy nancy , and Elton john ..We have been lumbered friends ..
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
DVC 5/17/2020 12:22:50 AM (No. 413241)
Apparently some researchers have gotten ahold of his software, and says it is a nightmare. They can't get the same results twice from identical input. THAT is really an indicator of garbage code.
The quote from those who examined it was 'it resembles a bowl of angle hair pasta, not good code.' (from memory). The analogy here for non-programming types is that good code has branches and loops back, in a smooth, sensible, intelligible way.
Garbage code has difficult to understand, seemingly random branches, to odd places, and loops which seem to do nothing, always bypassed, and loops within loops, with the "logic", if any, impenetrable.
And in a good code writer puts in a LOT of comments like "****here is the branch to the subroutine to calculate Bsub zero, which is the parameter for .....****"
Any sane code writer knows that HE will be needing to use these comments after as little as six weeks away from the code, when you want to debug it or modify it. Lacking comments, and smooth logic to the code, it becomes damned near impossible for even the original writer to figure the mess out after a while.
Wait a couple of years, with sloppily written code and few/no comments......it becomes nearly hopeless to follow without HUGE effort. In many cases there are LOTS of unknown variables, or the same variable used to mean something else in a different subroutine. It can be hideous to figure out code written by bad writers.
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