Category Archives: Mathematics
Herd Immunity
Is the percentage needed for it lower than was thought? If so, this is good news.
[Update a while later]
“‘Herd immunity’ is misleading; what we need is augmented immunity.”
Ferguson’s Imperial Model
A code review.
Good lord.
This reminds me an awful lot of the code that was leaked from CRU. S**t climate coding has done a lot of economic damage, but nowhere near as rapidly as this has, with tens of thousands of deaths to boot.
[Update a few minutes later]
A devastating conclusion:
All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
On a personal level, I’d 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.
Same with climate modeling. Get it out of the universities. Particularly Penn State.
[Update a while later]
What Ferguson’s booty call tells us about our “elites.”
[Friday-afternoon update]
The model that panicked the world was junk.
Lock-Down Cost/Benefit Analyses
Robin Hanson does what few others have. Bottom line: we are at serious risk of having done or doing too much lock down.
New York Patients
Nearly all of them had underlying conditions.
Of all of these, I only have hypertension (which I think is vastly overdiagnosed, andoverrated as a risk). And since only 6% had only one, I’d think it’s unlikely that hypertension by itself is that big a risk, so despite my superannuated condition, I’m not that personally concerned.
Tiptoeing Through A Dark House
COBOL
Want to make money? Brush up on it, or learn it.
Remdesivir
…seems to be at least somewhat effective.
If we can find what works for treatment, and only isolate the most vulnerable, that’s the best path forward to re-open the economy in the absence of a vaccine.
[Update a while later]
Time to dump epidemic models? All models are wrong, some are useful, but it’s not clear that these have been, though they’ve certainly been used to implement policies that a lot of people wanted to implement before the pandemic.
[Bumped]
A New Fundamental Theory Of Physics
Has Wolfram found one?
Haven’t read this yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
The Models
…were flawed and misleading.
As with climate, models are not science.