Posted on 05/17/2020 8:41:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Somehow, Glenn Beck’s “The true purpose of coronavirus wargames” is still on YouTube. Shocking and illuminating.
The model was literally created over a weekend, in part, at least, by kids.
The infamous Covidiots on this forum have defended Neil Fergusons wildly inaccurate model because they claim the actual death toll fits into the lower strata of his predictions with mitigation, or that mitigation was more successful than anticipated. The old heads I win, tails you lose trick. I guess thats how theyll explain this away too.
As a modeler, says Kirkeide, you have complete control over what your results look like. The most important thing is to have absolute integrity.
What is absolute integrity:
Acting in accordance with your beliefs. Nothing to do with truth or science.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-absolute-integrity?share=1
I’m a member of the U of FL software team that is building a low-cost (i.e., under $200) ventilator for Third World countries. It took six of us working around the clock for over a month to get the software working for the ventilator. Only this week is it ready for FDA testing and approval. Anyone who thinks they can design, code, test, and debug a significant piece of software in less than a weekend is kidding themselves.
As a modeler, says Kirkeide, you have complete control over what your results look like.
Most reported models are magnitudes higher than what actually happens. That’s because the news media picks the one with the highest death rate to report. Nobody would read articles saying things are normal. They don’t print news, they print hype.
RE: Acting in accordance with your beliefs. Nothing to do with truth or science.
One can be sincere but still sincerely wrong.
GIGO. If some college kids said “this is our opinion about what’s going to happen, people might ask them for their evidence and reasoning. But if the translate their opinion into a computer model, and generate some dazzling graphs, people instead say “should we write out the check for $2 trillion or $3 trillion?”
As a modeler, says Kirkeide, you have complete control over what your results look like.
Does she even have a clue to what she has said?
Sounds like what we hear from the Gorebull Warmers like Greta,’It is settled science”!
These expert or no better than the FBI. If they dont have the outcome they want, they just change the evidence to fit their needs.
That's like the power of Powerpoint is to turn bulls*** into gold.
That is a very important point. Too many college students and other inexperienced developers do not appreciate the complexity of software which does anything significant. They learn to throw together demo level programs largely from existing code and think that they are done since it worked once, or at least it looked like it did.
In the case of the epidemic models many of the modelers fell for the trap of writing a bunch of equations for which you really don't know any of the correct values for the constant terms. You get an output, and if you pick the right values for the parameters it would in fact model what is actually happening in the real world. But you have no idea what the parameters really are, so your model is just a guess.
You can see that in the confidence intervals of the models that have been published. They are so wide that nearly any result falls in their error band.
They are no better than a weather prediction model that says tomorrow's temperature has a greater than 90% chance of being between -30 and + 110 degrees. It is right nearly always, but doesn't tell you much.
Anyone who thinks they can design, code, test, and debug a significant piece of software in less than a weekend is kidding themselves.
If from scratch, I agree with you. It depends, though, on what you have on which to build the model code. For example, if they had an accurate model of SARS, then it's a matter of fitting the coefficients to the actual numbers you have. Emphasis on the word "accurate."
One step that's not mentioned is how the kids TESTED the accuracy of their model to data to date. Also I'd call into question the accuracy of said data (inaccurate based on reporters says COVID-19 when it may not be, or may not have been the principal cause of death) both as the model was being written, and during subsequent tracking of prediction over reported data.
Questions the reporter did not ask. Must have flunked Statistics 201.
Neil Ferguson takes the cake. 100x off with the Wuhan coronavirus death rates, 1000x off with mad cow disease and bird flu.
Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told Guardian Unlimited that up to 200 million people could be killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/30/birdflu.jamessturcke
Never use any model that can’t be backtested to at least reference data and the model’s use has to be controlled using only measurements that are available with the reference data.
This is basic stuff. You have to be a complete idiot not to know this.
“Never use any model that cant be backtested to at least reference data and the models use has to be controlled using only measurements that are available with the reference data.
This is basic stuff. You have to be a complete idiot not to know this.”
Bingo.
I worked with groundwater flow models and contaminant transport models back in another career, and it could take literally years to get a model working correctly...
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