
Critiqued coronavirus simulation gets thumbs up from code-checking efforts - tanh
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01685-y
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seesawtron
I am not sure if it's a thumbs up when they said the code was 'horrible' and
'buggy mess'. Key points to note:

The authors reason that they had to adapt an older version of the simulations
code and hence did not have time to write everything from scratch. I think we
have all been there.

Reproducibility doesn't imply that the underlying model assumptions were free
from flaws. As Taleb pointed out in another talk, "It was wrong to use point-
estimates for distributions with heavy tails"

The lead author Neil Ferguson was unfortunately caught up in another
controversy where he left his house during lockdown measures to meet his
"married lover". He had to resign from some of his positions but this
shouldn't affect the research work he published.

~~~
mjw1007
The people calling the code 'horrible' and a 'buggy mess' don't appear to be
the same people as the researchers who have gone to the effort to reproduce
the results.

So I don't think that has any bearing on the "thumbs up" report.

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jgalt212
This article is all you have to know about the man who is more responsible
than any other for the "shut down the world" strategy (which he thought did
not apply to him).

Coronavirus: Prof Neil Ferguson quits government role after 'undermining'
lockdown.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52553229](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
politics-52553229)

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dr_dshiv
It's a strange but good example of the effects of AI on society.

It tells me that we are far away from being able to produce models that
incorporate and aim to optimize a broader notion of human wellbeing.

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rurban
The criticism was mainly on the wrong model and wrong data, not the code
quality. A good model must be robust and verifiable, this is neither robust
nor verifiable. Just compare it to a good model, like the Göttingen model with
Bayes inference, which successfully predicted results two weeks into the
future. Multiple times.
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/14/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/14/science.abb9789.full)

Ferguson's model was always exponentially wrong, you can even say
catastrophically wrong given the economic costs.

Nature still defending this catatrophy, interesting. So they also switched to
non- science, supporting politics. The political angle is that they want to
suppress extreme right-wing shifts as after the last such political/economical
crisis 1930, caused by fatefully wrong political decisions. As they happened
after and because of the Ferguson study.

