Science is a discipline predicated on constant doubt and reassessment and contemplating the evidence through alternate prisms...Taking a number, stripping it of context and uncertainty and using it to justify policy is something else altogether.
The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”. He was writing in the mid-20th century about socialist governments attempting to engineer economic planning by assuming complex society could be distilled into a few key metrics, but since then scientism has only grown.
It came of age with Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence under Kennedy, whose data obsession meant the White House paid far more attention to the body count in Vietnam than more subjective questions like: have we any chance of winning this war? But, as the American historian Jerry Muller wrote in The Tyranny of Metrics, McNamara was only bringing to the Oval Office what had long been the mantra at business schools and management consultancies: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”...
Wikipedia has an article, "The McNamara Fallacy." It features this quote from Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972):
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
That article has a great "See also" list: Allegory of the cave. Goodhart's law, Newton's flaming laser sword, Occam's razor, Streetlight effect, Truth, Verificationism, Verisimilitude. I can't read — or even link — all of that right now, but I am interested in Newton's Flaming Laser Sword:
In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless they can be shown by precise logic and/or mathematics to have observable consequences. In its strongest form it demands a list of observable consequences and a formal demonstration that they are indeed consequences of the proposition claimed.And who even thought about looking up "Truth" in Wikipedia? But that's a subject for a separate post, because it charmingly converges with something else I've been planning to blog about.
पोस्ट्स
८५ टिप्पण्या:
He's wrong. The R number may be fuzzy, but it is the single most important metric. Not cases, not hospitalisations, not deaths. The R number. Because it tells you whether the virus is growing or shrinking in the community.
You know the fuzzy number we should be ignoring? Herd immunity. That's the made up number (changes week by week depending, seemingly, on Fauci's mood). Herd immunity means nothing. What matters is, is the virus growing or shrinking in the community? And the number we look to for that information is the R number.
As many of us have been saying for years, there is NO such thing as 'settled science'.
This is interesting in light of Fauci’s claim yesterday that the Biden admin will follow the science, as if the Trump admin wasn’t doing the same. The issue is the science on the virus is full of unknowns. These leaders should admit this and just say they are just guessing because of these unknowns. Quit pretending they have definitive answers. And quit the lockdowns as they have not made a difference anywhere in the course of the infection.
I forgot to ridicule this laugher:
Fixating on the R number isn’t real science/The pandemic response should be based on judgment, not a figure that’s only an educated guess.
Educated guesses aren't science, judgment is science.
Does this guy have an editor? Did anybody read this idiocy before going to press?
When you establish these metrics as a way to understand and drive performance what ends up happening is the objective fades to the background and the metric comes to the foreground. In my business, enterprise sales, tracking sales rep metrics like dials, meetings, face-to-face meetings, and conversations is all the rage these days. These measures were established based on the idea that they correlate with revenue production, i.e.; closed deals. Over time the metrics become the objective, if you are hitting your metrics you are seen as successful. Predictably, as the focus switches to the metrics revenue production decreases. The fans of metrics then double down on the approach, either by increasing the target metric number or adding new ones, or both.
Eventually, executive leadership and ownership, who only care about revenue production, swap out the sales leadership. Fortunately where I work revenue and opportunity identification are still the primary focus.
The problem is that there is no precise way to calculate the transmission rate. There are several ways to calculate it but they do not agree.
I looked at two numbers for my state this morning.
One showed my state's number as 1.07 (virus spreading/shut down everything). The second showed the number as 0.89 (virus not spreading/everything's cool).
This is not "science".
Just found a 3rd one: 1.01
"He's wrong. The R number may be fuzzy, but it is the single most important metric."
The idea of the number is important, but if you can't arrive at the number, what is important? You probably didn't read the article. I have a subscription to the London Times, but there is material that addresses what you are saying so it bothers me to see "He's wrong."
Excerpt:
"For while R is sometimes presented as a monolithic data point emerging mysteriously from a Whitehall database, it is actually the product of something more human: a conversation. Each week a group of academics from 11 institutions meets online. This is the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M). Each academic provides an estimate. These can differ dramatically depending on each party’s view on the reliability of the data. Modellers at Imperial think that R is above one and there is little sign of infections slowing. Public Health England, on the other hand, has a model which has said R could have been below one for a week or two now. That’s quite a big difference. During the teleconference each group makes their case. Sometimes one will realise that their number is too high or low and will withdraw it. Eventually the meeting finishes and the surviving estimates are combined into a kind of average: behold, R. The point is that what looks like a single data point with all the certainty that implies is really the product of judgment calls and debate, a little like the interest rate calls made by the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. As it happens, Spi-M members are just as baffled as the rest of us about why the government set such store by this number. No other leading nation hinged policies directly on an epidemiological statistic. Why did Britain? My suspicion is that it stemmed from a crisis of confidence in No 10 last spring as deaths mounted. Having been berated for failing to follow the science, they responded that in future decisions would be informed by that most scientific of all things: a number."
When I want information on the virus that includes both numbers and "judgment", I go to an Israeli site. They have some of the best doctors in the world. They don't smother dissent. They have no political axe to grind. They also lead in the world in efficiency for delivering the vaccine and are already seeing and reporting on the results.
tim maguire said...
He's wrong. The R number may be fuzzy, but it is the single most important metric. Not cases, not hospitalisations, not deaths. The R number. Because it tells you whether the virus is growing or shrinking in the community.
Not really.
Excess deaths would be the most important number in most people's opinion at this point.
That is why they are suppressing studies that show excess deaths aren't up.
Because it hurts the justification for stripping the tyrants of their power.
It doesn't help that on inauguration day, WHO changed the way a case is determined, it now must have more than a single positive test, and clinical symptoms. And a tighter restriction on the number of cycles uses to determine a positive test.
https://redstate.com/michael_thau/2021/01/20/total-coincidence-alert-who-issues-new-c19-guidelines-requiring-2nd-test-for-symptom-less-on-day-biden-takes-office-n313400
If they were to revisit the previous year's data with that definition, case numbers would plummet, so they won't. If they were to apply it to what have been counted as WuFlu deaths, the death count would plummet too, and you can't have that.
But applying it going forward will make the situation seem less urgent. And we can have that.
Science is OK with fuzzy numbers, but policy makers and reporters aren't.
Great post.
You caught me with Hayek. He should be taught in every university, at least in economics...?. If he was taught, we would not still have adults going around and publicly proclaiming their affinity for socialism without being soundly mocked and ridiculed. But I fear his work is no longer taught at most universities. Possibly still at UoChicago. Possibly.
"In my business, enterprise sales, tracking sales rep metrics like dials, meetings, face-to-face meetings, and conversations is all the rage these days."
And they give the slugs a road map of how to game things. The stats for gifted shirkers will look exactly like those of solid performers.
Specialists always have some number that is "THE MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER."
This sort of thing justifies all sorts of stupidity.
Another problem is that the number fluctuates, sometimes significantly, from day to day. How can this be scientifically possible? Its like saying the size of a glacier varies significantly from day to day.
I look at my state's R number every day because I know our dopey governor does. One thing I noticed is that the number tends to drop on those days when deaths are highest, and increases when deaths are lowest. How could this be?
Again, this is not science.
"That is why they are suppressing studies that show excess deaths aren't up."
I mentioned before, major league baseball players are a good group to look at. Among slightly over 10,000 living current and former major leaguers, 98 died in 2018, 97 in 2019, 111 in 2020. So the death rate was about 9.6 per thousand pre-covid, 10.7 after. That extra death is from all causes - covid, undiagnosed/treated illness, depression, whatever. No women or children in the group, of course.
Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”,
The word "scientism" was used in the 1800's, with essentially the same meaning.
Calculating R depends on having good data. In this year in which the flu has mysteriously, for the first time in history, disappeared as a significant cause of death we have an abundance of data that both the case and death counts for SARS-COV-2 are seriously wrong.
Also this is a much more complicated problem than just minimizing the number of deaths since the lockdowns and the fear that surround them are destroying a staggering number of businesses. Now if government employees and academics were losing their jobs in the same proportion as the rest of the population I doubt we would have this problem with constant lockdowns as they would be used, if at all, only very sparingly. But given that we don't live in that world we have in this nightmare where our economy is being destroyed.
One of the many virtues of Trump was that he had some clue that the economy really, really matters.
Rory said...
"That is why they are suppressing studies that show excess deaths aren't up."
I mentioned before, major league baseball players are a good group to look at. Among slightly over 10,000 living current and former major leaguers, 98 died in 2018, 97 in 2019, 111 in 2020. So the death rate was about 9.6 per thousand pre-covid, 10.7 after. That extra death is from all causes - covid, undiagnosed/treated illness, depression, whatever. No women or children in the group, of course.
Wasn't the season shortened?
So you gave a bunch of 18-32 year old men more free time, millions of dollars, and took away their opportunity to perform in front of fans?
Suicide is way up in 2020.
2021 will be Cancer deaths.
So, in return for a promise of large chunks of US tax dollars, WHO tells the US that Biden defeated Covid in less than 48 hours. Stupidhead Trump.
But, more and more stringent mitigation and prevention requirements are still necessary.
I have personal knowledge of at least two efforts to educate kids destroyed by false positives. One had substantial expense in getting off the ground.
The graduates of HOA academies who discovered that politics is way funner when jerking people around will not be denied their glory.
And the MAKE ME DO STUPID STUFF....OOOOHHHH YEAHHHHH crowd will be in heaven.
The R number gives the dynamics and tells you how to change effects. It's not a matter of measuring it but of reducing it. How many people does an infected person newly infect on the average. If it's bigger than 1.0, the infection grows; if it's less than 1.0 the infection dies away.
If you have a history of number of infected you can infer the R number but that's not its point.
More exact theories take into account incubation time etc but don't introduce any new dynamics, namely more than 1.0 or less than 1.0.
Attempting to quantify the unquantifiable has led to countless failures in quality control. "Gee, this product has met every measurable parameter but it still looks like shit!"
I fully expect by the end of next week to see reports that "total number of COVID deaths and infected are not an effective measure of how the government is doing" stories.
Another problem is that the number fluctuates, sometimes significantly, from day to day. How can this be scientifically possible? Its like saying the size of a glacier varies significantly from day to day.
It's a matter of your ability to measure as well as identify all appropriate variables. That's not new, and is perfectly consistent with science.
Not really. Excess deaths would be the most important number in most people's opinion at this point
I never had the privilege of learning whatever learning they are criticizing about was taught in business school. We learned to identify and utilize the most robust data and to be wary of weak data. Total deaths is robust. Excess deaths is useful when compared to historical. 'Cases' and 'covid deaths' are weak, especially when there are incentives to corrupt the numbers. A ratio of tests to positive tests could be helpful...
Which ones did public policy 'experts' rely on?
The swamp hates Trump in part because he showed how solvable government's unsolvable problems really are...
Magic, White and Black
"The Science of Finite and Infinite Life, Containing Practical Hints for Students of Occultism"
[Sounds like a handy book to have around the house]
By Franz Hartmann, 1895
"There should a distinction be made between 'religion' and 'religionism'; between 'science' and 'scientism'; and between 'mystic' and 'mysticism'."
"We are in danger from the want of this running off into the wildest skepticism and the most superficial yet most arrogant scientism." - 1870
"Science is a discipline predicated on constant doubt and reassessment and contemplating the evidence through alternate prisms..."
Which is why Climate Science is no longer Science.
What if your 'judgement' is an educated guess? Because what I've seen so far in relation to the Chinese covid experience is a lot of publicly paid employees changing their minds every couple of months. Let's Let's base it on science and experience.
Science is what we know, so far. There is always doubt and the expectation of new data.
Anyone who's income depends on understanding science, NEVER blindly follows science.
Science is not settled. Science in NOT consensus.
Production agriculture centers in the arena of science, and it is an hourly battle of science in direct contradiction.
Stevew is 100% correct. If metrics are created in an effort to define success, then institute the measurables. The measurables become the goal.
I've asked multiple times here, what the public policy goal in covide response is, and never got a serious answer.
IMO, the goal should be the protection of the vulnerable. Since ~80% of deaths are in long term care facilities and that has remained the case for 11 months.
3 possibilities
1. Deaths attributed to covid in LTCF are not actual caused by covid but rather test positive for covid.
2. It is impossible to reduce or delay the spread of covid in an isolated population.
3. politicians like Cumo, etal, intentionally put those people at risk to reduce medicaid expenditures
Practically speaking, I think we could radically improve the accuracy of our measurement of R if we ignored the PCR data and only used antigen tests to count infections.
That means you are only counting people that are infectious. Since R is supposed to be all about measuring the rate at which the virus is spreading, then restricting the count to people who are infectious, rather than including in our count, and distorting R because of it, people who may have been infectious two months ago.
The other huge advantage of not using PCR tests to calculate R is that we get away from the huge problem that the PCR test has with false positives.
Now people will argue against this by claiming that the antigen tests aren't that accurate. But I don't think that's true. If your definition of accuracy is giving the same result as the PCR, well then of course the antigen test doesn't. And of course that is exactly the logic being used by most people claiming the antigen test is worthless.
But if we are looking for people who are actually infectious, then as a recent paper states the antigen test is 95% accurate. While at the same time the PCR test is almost useless at distinguishing between those that are infectious and those that are not.
Covid-19 is showing everyone what applied science looks like in real time. It's uncertain messy and often wrong. It's best to just go with the flow and not get excited about anything. In other words, grow a pair be a man and do what you can to avoid becoming another victim and failing that avoid spreading it to others.
Get you and yours vaccined ASAP.
It does seem that we suffer from an advanced stage of 'scientism'. In which the word science is used to raise a policy or opinion to a place above outside comment. Once declared 'science', whether it is or not, it becomes unassailable. Anyone who dares question it becomes labeled a 'denier' or worse- someone who doesn't 'believe' in science. (I love how they place the idea of 'science' into a matter of belief- like a religion). Rather than someone rightfully questioning the science or how it was arrived at, which is exactly what science is supposed to always be doing.
Continually test, question, test, question. Instead we have Priests of Science who are almost kneeled in front of by willing politicians, academics, journalists. Science is struggling to remain science and not become just another policy accessory to be manipulated like play dough to be used to 'prove' whatever you want it to prove and to shut down debate that might question what you are doing.
Specialists always have some number that is "THE MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER."
Did you mean to say Nate Silver? Or did that get edited out of your post:)
Conway was the one that wanted to kill off old people because brexit remember
Achilles predictions this past year have all been wrong because he is a retarded moron neo Nazis who prays for war, pestilence and famine. He's just a piece of shit who pollutes these threads with hate and stupidity because his personal life sucks.
Other than that, he's a great guy.
Even prog "scientism" is phony.
Our overlords are not fixated on any particular metrics, in the sense that those metrics drive policy.
Policy comes first, then metrics are massaged to fit the political message.
In our coercive, highly politicized, over-moneyed, cancel-culture society, we are long past the point where science can be trusted about much of anything.
What scientists call "truth" is whatever the majority of scientists say it is. But the formation of that consensus is a very complex sociological (not scientific) process. Introduce into that process (a) large government grants and cushy tenured professorial jobs at stake (b) the perception or reality that the brand "science" can be used as a means to political power, (c) a vicious populace that cares nothing for scientific findings but almost for sport would like nothing more than to destroy someone's reputation and career, (d) the seemingly-interconnected but false world in the ether-drift called the internet, and (e) the overreliance on speculative and conjectured computer models as a replacement for hard data observations and correlation, and you've got a soup where what is called in the press "scientific truth" can't be trusted almost at all. You have to go to the studies, and see if you can replicate them, for any hope of standing on solid ground.
From the article: “Taking a number, stripping it of context and uncertainty and using it to justify policy is something else altogether. The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”.”
This times 1000.
This PCR testing with the 35-40x cycles is GARBAGE DATA because it tells us nothing about who has the live virus. It’s extremely “noisy” to the point of being, you guessed it, garbage.
Yet, the state health departments turned these positive tests into “cases” — more garbage data — and then because this pile of garbage data can be graphed — holy smokes, look at that slope on the graph, this looks bad!
Data has to be nearly 100% CLEAN or it is basically useless for forming policy or driving decisions. Not many people seem to understand that.
This is a good example of manipulating data to fool people who do not — or cannot — think analytically.
Get you and yours vaccined ASAP
One of the worst policy failures is the 'ASAP' in (vaccinated) ASAP. Keep in mind the vaccine was created over a weekend and has been in existence for nearly a year. We should have been making it available to anyone willing to receive it but instead we tried to hide the entire global population from a highly transmissible enemy while we all waited on the snails pace of bureaucracy. Thank God Trump
managed to speed things up or we'd still be waiting...
"What scientists call "truth" is whatever the majority of scientists say it is." And politicians will tell you what constitutes the majority of scientists. How many times have we heard "97% of scientists agree..." But 97% of scientists never agree on any but the most rudimentary of facts. Probably at least 97% of scientists agree that the sun comes up in the east, but beyond that you are getting propaganda, not 'truth.'
Wouldn't using the Greek letter rho instead "R" give it one hell of a lot more authority?
The WHO announced on Jan 20 that — hold on to your hats — the 35x PCR testing is not good enough and needs a second positive test to confirm a clinical case.
Hmmm. What else happened on Jan 20?
35x PCR testing — producing garbage data about cases — was good when Trump was in office, but now it’s not?
These people are all ridiculous liars and only fools pay attention to them.
We can thank our general scientific illiteracy for much of our current misery. Possibly the fault can be traced to letting kids use calculators instead of working math problems by hand: they have no “feel” for the magnitude or direction of the operation they are punching in to the little box. By extension they don’t develop a physical “knack” for systems being represented by numbers, and what kinds of values are plausible versus obvious bullshit. When that’s the default cultural milieu, a smooth-talking “expert” can gain enormous power. Combine that ascendancy with media who are complicit in the power game, or are simply too innumerate and gullible to counter the arrogation and tyrannical policy-making, and here we are. As noted above, “climate science” is another sad case and IMHO both a test case (where these styles of bullshit have been perfected) and an ongoing source of power (both aggrandizing its proponents and training the public to accept this style of intellectual lockdown and obedience).
Not optimistic. “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” - Feynman.
mockturtle said...
As many of us have been saying for years, there is NO such thing as 'settled science'.
In Social Psychology, an awful lot of the "settled science" could not be replicated. In other words, there are a lot of accepted theories out there that are just preferred opinion with no empirical basis.
However, Dr. Fauci assures us that such a thing could NEVER happen with epidemiology.
The OED meanings of scientism, both of which go back to the early 1870s, are "A mode of thought which considers things from a scientific viewpoint" and "The belief that only knowledge obtained from scientific research is valid, and that notions or beliefs deriving from other sources, such as religion, should be discounted; extreme or excessive faith in science or scientists. Also: the view that the methodology used in the natural and physical sciences can be applied to other disciplines, such as philosophy and the social sciences."
This is the oldest quote for the second meaning:
1871 Amer. Presbyterian Rev. Apr. 333 If, in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts.., any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality and religion, are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured.
And this is a good one:
1956 E. H. Hutten Lang. Mod. Physics vi. 273 This belief in the omnipotence of science is..making a mockery of science: for this scientism represents the same, superstitious, attitude which, in previous times, ascribed such power to a supernatural agency.
If there was ever a good time to recognize that data is used to manipulate us, and that we must always be skeptical of all data-driven policies, this is it.
Infections are declining here. I'm going to stick with my old prediction that the US pandemic will peter out in March irregardless. That said, I'm scheduled for vaccination Feb 2, gotta prepare for next fall.
Good points, Owen. And the use of computer modeling replacing actual experimentation in many cases. Face it, it's easier. And you can make a graph come out about any way you choose by adjusting the variables. But, hey, it's 'science'.
“The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”
This is the “Sara Cody” approach, health director of Santa Clara County, California.
And she’s killed a lot of businesses, and made many students truly miserable.
Owen x10
Most people don't understand the number represent real things.
Just the other night we were watching TV and they said over the next week. X was going to happen Y times. I simply divided the number by 7 (70) and told my wife X was going to happen 4 times a minute. The biggest problem is those with the task to pass on information, are ignorant themselves. As the expert Ben Rhodes explained to us, Reporters are stupid and literally don't know anything.
Yes. The R number is yet another component of this pandemic that was foisted on the innumerate by lying "scientists"
It's a meaningless number.
Re: the Imperial College
In other areas of life this method is known as "making stuff up" or in NYC "spitballing". Try their method for a year on your family finances and see what happens"
Does everyone else suffer the obnoxious woke signs all around town? the ones that list out all the current woke-left observances and high school woke-lectures.
I believe:
"Science is real"
OK.
Insert what Temujin said @ 8:11.
have we any chance of winning this war?
We did win the fucking war!!!!
When we left in 1973, South Vietnam had a viable economy, a viable government, secure borders and a reasonably well equipped and trained military. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese military were both wiped out.
THEN, two years later after North Vietnam had been re-equipped and trained by the Soviet Union, North Vietnam invaded and captured their neighbors in Indochina. North Vietnam won this war because the Democrats in Congress went back on their promise to defend South Vietnam if it was attacked again.
Once upon a time "Science" assured us the truth that the earth was the center of universe.
In other areas of life this method is known as "making stuff up" or in NYC "spitballing"
In grade school we referred this type of science as Optical Regression Analysis i.e. 'That looks pretty good...'
We LOST in Vietnam because we tried to fight a 'limited war'. The 'limited war' theory, which MacArthur warned about in Korea, costs more in lives and reaps no reward. IMO, we should have stayed out of it altogether. If we can't declare war and intend to win it, we shouldn't be in it.
The R number is the wrong thing to get angry at.
Shutdowns would have worked except they didn't get the R number to less than one. If they fail at that, the epidemic doesn't go away.
Severe shutdowns work except when you open up travellers bring it right back in.
A shutdown does make sense when there's a vaccine close by coming, but how far away that is and at what economic cost may dictate against it.
BidenFamilyTaxpayerFundedCrackPipe @ 9:09: “...the earth was the center of the universe.”
“Eppur, si muove.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/01/21/here-we-go-10-executive-orders-to-federally-weaponize-covid-against-us/
‘The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”.’
In this era “scientism” has coincided with the rise of leftist culture. By now it’s all we have in the public eye. Take a look, for example at the “science” attacking the use of hydroxychloroquine.
Wikipedia again?
Is someone keeping track of the covid deaths on Joe's watch?
I predict the comeback of the actual flu in big numbers.
"Hmmm. What else happened on Jan 20?"
If I cut my finger and the WHO told me to put a Band Aid® on it, I'd be mighty suspicious.
In the age of Trump, all of these organizations (not just governmental) have been exposed for what they truly are; propaganda arms of the new Great Leap Forward.
We did win the fucking war!!!!
When we left in 1973, South Vietnam had a viable economy, a viable government, secure borders and a reasonably well equipped and trained military. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese military were both wiped out.
THEN, two years later after North Vietnam had been re-equipped and trained by the Soviet Union, North Vietnam invaded and captured their neighbors in Indochina. North Vietnam won this war because the Democrats in Congress went back on their promise to defend South Vietnam if it was attacked again.
We fought them until they sued for peace and then we left. Today the Vietnamese work like slaves in factories to make goods for American companies to sell in the US, and use their wages to buy McDonald's while watching American movies.
We won.
log(R) is the slope of the infected population line on log graph paper. Log(1)=0.
R is real. The assumptions/assertions may be wrong. The frame of reference may be poorly specified.
We LOST in Vietnam because we tried to fight a 'limited war'.
If we lost in Vietnam, what would a victory have looked like? Just because you disagree with how the war was fought doesn't mean we lost the war. I think we should have hung the USSR out to dry in WW II, but that doesn't mean I think we lost World War II.
3. politicians like Cumo, etal, intentionally put those people at risk to reduce medicaid expenditures
But as for me in Planned Parent/hood I believe. Sung to the tune of "Grandma got run over by a reindeer".
And who even thought about looking up "Truth" in Wikipedia?
Someone who doesn't know what truth is, what the truth is, and someone who is likely not to know either afterward.
BidenFamilyTaxPayerFundedCrackPipe said...
Once upon a time "Science" assured us the truth that the earth was the center of universe. ----------------============
at the time "Science" spoke through religion.
all science [= free thinking man] wanted was to be able to adjust frame of reference to simplify calculations >>> which is what science has always been about = contextual knowledge >>> experiment = changing context/parameters/variables
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Decades ago, I saw one of those "forty thousand scientists" things. This time it was opposing Reagan's SDI. I picked one name and followed it. Guy was an oceanographer at Woods Hole. So a guy who pesters fish for a living gets to tell me about missile defense....
R is an interesting metric, but there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to derive it with any accuracy. Since the goal from the start was to flatten the curve (allegedly) the metric should have been hospitalizations or available hospital capacity. Cases is too unreliable, because at the beginning it was highly dependent on the number of tests available. Trump was not wrong when he said (again, allegedly) the best way to eliminate cases is to stop testing. Deaths is another good metric because it's hard to hide the bodies, but it's a lagging indicator so less useful for deciding what to do going forward.
Like to put a different take on the importance of what can be measured.
What can be controlled MUST be important. What cannot be controlled MUST be irrelevant.
Do you want a serious issue to be governed by things you cannot control? Of course not. It's scary for one thing. And those in charge really, really don't want to admit they can't do a thing about it and they ought to forego then next year's paycheck.
IMO, this governs the Middle East issues regarding Israel. Since we can't control those crazy Arabs, but we might be able to finesse the Israelis into giving up just, just a little bit, for peace, it helps to think it's all the fault of the Jews. That way, we think we're in control, or at least we can fool others that we are.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
---Richard Feynman. (thought to have been the worlds' greatest particle physicist after Einstein)
Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts.If you believe doctors nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers nothing is safe."
"The desire to save humanity is always a false front to rule it"
---H.L. Mencken
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgments of trusted physicians or of authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion which reached slowly and reluctantly as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. (Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books, Jan 15th, 2009. "Drug Companies &
Doctors: A story of corruption.")
Joe Smith said...
Wikipedia again?
Is someone keeping track of the covid deaths on Joe's watch?
I predict the comeback of the actual flu in big numbers.
And Pneumonia.
There is a reason they have never actually reported the Covid only numbers. Just Flu, Pneumonia and Covid.
The reason they haven't done this is because I was right about everything Howard.
'Cases' and 'covid deaths' are weak, especially when there are incentives to corrupt the numbers.
A huge problem with this very true statement is that on the left, incentives only work when they want them to work. And data be damned.
Also - dues anybody remember how to use a slide rule? In particular, how the number of sig figs was a built-in part of how you calculated things, so you literally could not be more precise than the scales you had? (I am not old enough to have learned how to use one in school, but I found my dad's in his sock drawer as a young teen and looked up how to do it. Fun - but even then, for me as a user of rudimentary calculators, frustrating that you couldn't always get the answer out to eight digits like my little screen. At least, that's how I remember it.)
Interesting. W’s Tractatus took that line of thought about the truthfulness of propositions (the Newton one) about as far as it can go. Then W thought better of the whole thing and explained why in the Investigations.
wenn ich "Modeling" höre...
Ann Althouse said...
"He's wrong. The R number may be fuzzy, but it is the single most important metric."
The idea of the number is important, but if you can't arrive at the number, what is important
The problem, prof., with your response and others here is that you are dismissing the R number because it’s imprecise, and yet all the numbers are imprecise. So that fails as an objection unless you reject all numbers. As I note a couple comments down, his logic also sucks. I’m going to stick with “he’s wrong” because he’s wrong.
Achilles is sort of right that, if the question is, ‘how worried should we be?”, then excess deaths is an important figure. But excess deaths is a lagging indicator—you have to wait for a lot of people to die before you have an answer. It also exaggerates mortality as a concern—kill you is only one of many awful things a virus might do to you.
Jersey Fled said...Another problem is that the number fluctuates, sometimes significantly, from day to day. How can this be scientifically possible? Its like saying the size of a glacier varies significantly from day to day.
It’s not the slightest bit like that. Today’s R number does not build on yesterday’s number in anything like the way today’s glacier is built upon yesterday’s glacier. It’s more like saying my basketball team scored 90 points in the last game and 105 points in today’s game. The nature of the game sets certain bounds, but today’s score is not dependent on yesterday’s score.
And the variation you find in today’s number from different reporters is quite small. If one outlet reported 1 and another reported 10, or even just 3, you might be on to something, but there's far less variation than you suggest.
"Truth" and Wikipedia... No, I don't see any connection.
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