https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
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Very interesting. I know nothing about the coding aspects, but have long harboured suspicions about Professor Ferguson and his work. The discrepancies between his projections and what is actually observed (and he has modelled many epidemics) is beyond surreal! He was the shadowy figure, incidentally, advising the Govt. on foot and mouth in 2001, research which was described as ‘seriously flawed’, and which decimated the farming industry, via a quite disproportionate and unnecessary cull of animals.
I agree with the author that theoretical biologists should not be giving advice to the Govt. on these incredibly important issues at all! Let alone treated as ‘experts’ whose advice must be followed unquestioningly. I don’t know what the Govt. was thinking of. All this needs to come out in a review later, and, in my view, Ferguson needs to shoulder a large part of the blame if his advice is found to have done criminal damage to our country and our economy. This whole business has been handled very badly, not just by the UK but everyone, with the honourable exception of Sweden.
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“On a personal level I’d actually go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people and the results speak for themselves.”
Perhaps even more significantly, they pay a price when they get it wrong, a check on overreaching idiocy that appears completely lacking in these “advisory” academic roles in government.
See also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn_XEDPIeU8&t=593s
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on having Skin In the Game.
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Thank you. Are the mainstream media capable of covering this? That is what frightens me.
Who is going to be the first to point out that the reason sick peoples weren’t getting hospital beds is because the models were telling us to expect thousands more sick people than there were? How many people died because of this?
And what about all this new normal talk? All these assumptions life will change for ever built on fantastic predictions which are being falsified by Swedish and Dutch data?
This diktat that we can’t set free young people who are not threatened by the virus because the model says hundreds of thousands would die? All nonsense.
This is the greatest academic scandal in our history.
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Slightly off topic but I would suggest that some of the climate science work suffers from similar problems and at a comparable scale. Dr Mann’s flawed hockey stick comes to mind; my understanding is that the analysis code has never been released.
I am science trained but a HW guy, not SW. I place most of my trust in measurements, especially ones that can be reproduced by others.
“I would suggest that some of the climate science work suffers from similar problems”
The infamous “Harry_Read_Me” file contained in the original Climate Gate release springs to mind. As I recall, it was a similar tale of a technician desperately trying to make sense of terrible software & coding being used by the “Climate Scientists” – one of whom had to ask for help using Excel…
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Mathematical models of epidemics are just simplified representations of reality. One can fit them to data, once one has data, and the fit may be impressive. But as a predictive tool, in the absence of much data, they may be useless. Having experience of mathematical modelling of epidemics, and knowing their limitations, it is bewildering how countries around the world have imposed all these silly lockdown measures, seemingly because of one computer program by someone who isn’t even a mathematician or programmer.
It seems to me that politicians, afraid of appearing ignorant when their academic “professor” buddy told them everyone was gonna die, and being pressured by an increasingly hysterical media reporting every individual case of coronavirus, decided lockdown was a good idea. Of course, as time will tell, it was never a good idea. And it won’t be in future either, if another new disease comes along.