Posted on 05/17/2020 5:57:11 PM PDT by Hojczyk
But that’s not the worst of it. In the Telegraph, two software executives write that Ferguson’s model was, on its face, incompetent and would not have been accepted by anyone well-versed in computer technology. (“Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time.”) The article is beyond a paywall, so I will excerpt liberally:
In the U.K., as here in America, the responsible government officials believed they had no choice but to follow the advice of officially-anointed “experts.” These alleged experts were bureaucrats and academics, not practicing physicians. The result has been a disaster, blighting the lives of hundreds of millions–perhaps billions–across the globe. The number of deaths resulting from the current, unnecessary economic collapse will never be accurately tabulated, but it will surely–unlike the toll from the virus itself–mount into the millions. The United Nations predicts that the death toll among children in underdeveloped countries alone will be hundreds of thousands.
Whatever you think of the Wuhan virus, it is certainly no more severe, and probably less severe, than the epidemics of 1957-58, which killed around 1.1 million in a much less populated world, and 1968-69, which killed 1 million worldwide and around 100,000 in the U.S. (the equivalent of 160,000 today). Those epidemics were bad. They killed people, mostly the elderly and the infirm. But the damage was not compounded by irrational government actions that devastated far more lives than were impacted by the diseases. It adds insult to injury that those government actions have been based, in large part, on incompetent work by “experts.”
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
No getting around the reality that the virus will kill as many as it will. Gotta go out there and live or die. Just like every other day of life.
These alleged experts were bureaucrats and academics, not practicing physicians.
How is such a model used? It is simple. The "expert" runs the model multiple times. They may tweak inputs a bit if the results don't "look right".
When the results "look right" (confirm the "expert's opinion"), they are accepted and treated as gospel.
It is the way it works.
Models used for political purposes are not independent indicators of the best policy decisions.
They are props used to support the particular "expert's" desired result.
Trusting is irrelevant. Do NOT put them in charge of the fate of the economy, live or did (e.g. Fauci !!).
Tell me that when you have cancer.
Honestly, that sounds like a Monte Carlo Simulation where you instruct the computer to vary each input according to a probability distribution you specify. Millions of runs, each with different results, then converge on a most probable answer.
Github returns 10,959 repository results for "Monte Carlo." There are 1,712 hits in C++ (others who have read the code say it is in C++ and not in FORTRAN). There are four hits for "Monte Carlo Pandemic."
“Tell me that when you have cancer.”
That’s a bit of histrionics since this is virus just like the common cold or the flu and is not like cancel.
P4L
Richard Feynmann famously said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”.
On this here little board, where you would THINK we have great commonality of thought and philosophy, we had YUGE disagreement. We had flubros, TEOTEAWKI types, hysterics, skeptics, you name it. People from all sorts of backgrounds - physicians, clinicians, biostatistician, and even normal people - debated and yelled and name-called and so on. Gigabytes of links, articles, pictures, technical papers (I never read so much from the Lancet and the NEJM) were posted.
There was total freedom in the marketplace of ideas. And where did we, perhaps the most philosophically and politically homogeneous lot on the interwebs land by the time the DJIA went into free fall on March 9? Stalemate. Indeed, by the end of that week from hell, I think Wayne Allen Root summed it up best
I have many great friends and guests on my national TV and radio shows who are medical experts. Half believe this is the pandemic to end all pandemics. They quote Centers for Disease Control and Prevention models that report as many as 1.7 million Americans could die. So people are rightfully scared out of their minds. American business is shutting down. But the other half of my medical friends and expert guests say this is an overreaction. They predict fewer Americans will die than during the flu season of 2017-18 that killed about 80,000 people. They don't believe we need to close down American business and lock ourselves in our homes.
The problem is we won't know who's right until it's over.
And yet...dare I say it, that demolition derby of debate toughened us up and sharpened our minds. So much so, that I feel like I'm about 4-5 days ahead of where friends and family are thinking/acting/behaving, and where I can actively yell at the TV and computer "NO! There is NO WAY you know what is R0 at this point because it is only calculable after the fact...and a Case Fatality Rate requires a stable denominator which we don't have yet, you jackeagon!!"
The upside to this demolition derby and acquired intellect is we are now better able to call BS. Cohesion has (generally) returned in the form of a pro-open business attitude - and it is worth noting the fatality totals are closer to the "overreaction" crew Mr Root noted than the "pandemic" lot. Further, we have seen our philosophy being proven whereby statists have cranked up their dictatorial inclinations to the point where the mask is off and, clearly, this isn't about safety (HT Grampa Dave).
Thus, when "experts" warn us about reinfection blah blah blah, we probably have a graduate level understanding of the "experts" topic., and we're not gonna take their horse hockey anymore.
Never let technocrats dictate public policies.
They are too narrowly focused on their one specialty and have no accountability to the general public.
The “esteemed” Dr. Fauci’s words paraphrased; “We are only drawing out the infection rate so that hospitals don’t get overwhelmed. Eventually the same number of people will get infected and the same number will die.”
It isn't.
The model was designed to include "seeds" for the random number generators, so that results could be reproduced. It was supposed have "deterministic" output for a given input data set. The problem is that does not work because of the model implementation details.
Worse yet the model has chaotic zones of instability as each time period results are computed from the previous time period. You can get results like "everybody dies" or "everybody recovers" or "nobody gets infected" from "small" changes to obscure model parameters. Or just from re-running the model with no changes at all.
It is a fascinating intellectual effort. It does not seem to have any predictive capability. Such things should not be used for justifying a national economy shutdown.
If experts were infallible, they would always be in agreement.
I don’t. The most difficult people I have to work with are those with the letters PhD after their name. They think that just because they learned ‘more and more about less and less’, they can never be wrong.
JoMa
It started in Fortran. Most of the code was in Fortran. Lately it seems to have been translated into C++ using a code converter. Perhaps to see if the code got any easier to follow.
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