> Perhaps we should treat with caution the predictions of electrical engineers about pandemic disease outbreaks
Or former software company CEOs for that matter
All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
191–200 of 216 posts
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#192>Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation? Perhaps we should treat with caution the predictions of electrical engineers about pandemic disease outbreaks. I kind of disagree with this point. The models we see are mostly statistical models. Anybody with a statistics background (mathematician, physicist, chemist, biologist, engineer, computer scientist, epi…
wouldn't you need to be an SME to interpret the results properly and put them in their proper context? Not to mention what inputs, variable would actually make sense in the real world?
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhmm, no? Reality is way too complex for anyone to make a statement about what is "true" - even for domain experts and especially for journalists, whose, at best, entire specialization is "public health". We may be able to state what is "true" for very obvious matters where there are clear dividing lines for a matter to qualify (e.g. forest fire, election results). But when it comes to the sciences, it is incredibly…
Given a choice between an engineer who did some calculations on an unfamiliar topic, and a journalist who triangulated expert opinions but didn't do any calculations, I'll listen to the engineer.
1) The comment regarding engineers related to the tendency to assume, because one has specialized knowledge in one field, one also is qualified to comment on other topics, such as the ability to discern the "truth" in a highly volatile and complex social situation (e.g. COVID-19)
2) What you are describing is exactly what I mean: There are dozens of experts ("engineers") who have done their calculations but have come to different conclusions. To presume, as a journalist or expert, one's own calculations will provide the "truth" in such a situation is not only extremely arrogant but also, when it comes to a pandemic, extremely dangerous.
It reminds me of that electrical engineer at Imperial College who thought epidemiology is a cake-walk and wrote a paper predicting 5000 deaths in the UK, which stood in stark contrast to that modeling effort by a large group of actual, renowned experts in the field (epidemiologists, virologists, public health scholars) also at the Imperial College, whose estimates have at least estimated 20,000 deaths. The electrical engineer had to quickly backtrack on his claims after hundreds of scientists wrote in. Now imagine, every journalist would do that and directly publish it. That would be far worse than an article that brings up that 5,000 deaths study but also mentions other estimates.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#194What I've noticed about models, or at least when people are talking about them or trying to prove a point about them, is that people forget models are a simplified version of a specific part of reality, much the same as models of airplanes or something. No matter how many variables you include, you can never capture the utterly massive and unpredictable amount of variables that exist in reality. But they're not suppo…
Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. It just means they have an inflammation of the bronchi. It says no…
Medicine is super-bad about not being able to tell a symptom from a disease. A lot of "diseases" are just symptoms with Latin names and a set of empirical remedies.
Psychology in particular seems to have come to the conclusion that if you can name an assortment of 4 out of 10 symptoms, that counts as having identified single disease.
I think part of the problem is that we're so good at applying various techniques that no one bothers to think anymore.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. It just means they have an inflammation of the bronchi. It says no…
Medicine is super-bad about not being able to tell a symptom from a disease. A lot of "diseases" are just symptoms with Latin names and a set of empirical remedies. Psychology in particular seems to have come to the conclusion that if you can name an assortment of 4 out of 10 symptoms, that counts as having identified single disease. I think part of the problem is that we're so good at applying various techniques tha…
'Medicine' being a stand-in for 'diagnosis'? Because medical research is all about underlying causes these days. Maybe 50 years ago it was just a corpus of traditional cures. But those days are gone.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. It just means they have an inflammation of the bronchi. It says no…
>If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. Agreed, on the medical front this also leads to a focus on sophisticated diagnostic tools and numbers versus a 'true' cure. >Call something a democracy, and nobody will check if it is. >Call something a privilege, and people will start to want it, working hard for it. Let me add one more to…
"Gun rights" are totally bogus.
Let's enumerate rights: "Life." Okay. "Liberty." Gotcha. "Pursuit of happiness." Yep. "Private property." Might need some asterisks on that one, but sure. "Carry a weapon around in case I might need to murder another human being very quickly." ???
It's been this incredible PR campaign based around the fact that people are illiterate and don't know what "bear arms" means (jargon for "serve in a militia"[1].)
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you describe here is a deeply problematic fallacy and in fact what journalists already do. They are very, very far from your hypothetical "33% to Tom, 33% to Dick, 33% to Harry" scenario and it's one of the factors that undermines trust in journalism. What actually happens is this: 1. Journalists have a story they want to write. They probably already decided what the message is going to be, but let's be generous…
> Mostly academics like nutritionists, psychologists and so on. So it's completely unrelated to the topics I refer to. What I refer to is: https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob... Claiming that the misinterpretation of science happened only in the distant past is intentional attempt to obscure the real problem. There is objective truth and it is far from what some people with a lot of money ped…
It's funny, we're not even really disagreeing with each other. The difference is I don't see government (academia) as sources of funding any different to a corporation: both sources create an incentive to huge bias, spreading of disinformation and other problems. But too many people and especially journalists like to pretend that getting your money from government grants magically makes those problems disappear. They're willing to criticise work by corporate scientists who may have an incentive to find a certain outcome, but not academics who have just as strong or even stronger incentives to find certain outcomes.
I suspect it comes from academic propaganda about 'free thought', being able to pursue any line of questioning they desire, etc. It's obviously not true. Academics find it impossible to reach a simple conclusion that's reached all the time in the corporate world: "we don't know the answer and cannot know anytime soon".
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The two richest people on the planet right now are both known for being almost entirely void of morals when it comes to their business dealings.
They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.
Nobody earns a billion dollars; the only way to get that kind of money is to pay a whole lot of people significantly less than the economic value of their labor. The internet economy has just made it easier to abstract away ethical problems such that you don't recognize them as hugely problematic when you're making them.
With the current system, we're reliant on the whims of a couple of billionaires. Some are relatively benevolent, but far more are on the level of the Kochs, Larry Ellison or the Sacklers. Business schools have taught the "fiduciary duty" doctrine for a long time, which is basically "maximize profit above all else, or we'll find someone else who will".
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will have nothing to add if the “2.2 million deaths in the US” scenario, which was blasted across every newspaper front page a few weeks ago, turns out to have been impossible all along? If that scenario was “completely wrong” too, it seems like it would serve as a perfect example of the consequences of this kind of (still hypothetical) misinformation.
We can't rerun the experiment with a control version of the US in which nothing was shut down and we continued to have crowded sports events and night life. So it won't be possible to determine that the 2.2 million deaths scenario is impossible, especially if it's interpreted as 2.2 million extra deaths from either COVID-19 or other causes that could have been treatable by a medical system that wasn't completely over…
I’m extremely pissed off at these folks who built an unfalsifiable model, panicked the whole world, and will now pretend that it is “science” as they ignore and downplay the death and destruction that follows in the wake of their foolishness. This will not stand.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think there’s value in doing this, unless the second opinion disagrees with the original model. It’s not hard to find a second “expert” to agree with just about anything, if you look hard enough. The number of people who agree with something tells you, as a rational person, practically nothing - it reminds me of the absurd compilation argument “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein”: https://archive.org/detail…
An article with just opposing positions would just confuse the reader. It's also like how the media has climate skeptics debate climate scientists one-on-one as if there is an actual debate to be had, magnifying the level of climate skepticism in the field.
I think you missed the point of the story.