Proposition Joe said:
NASAg03 said:
If what he says comes true, public confidence in models and scientists and public health leaders is going to be destroyed.
A large portion of the population stopped believing models, scientists and public health leaders long ago when it didn't align with what their preference was.
without getting sucked into the political back and forth, it bears mentioning that 'model' based projections of complex systems and phenomenon, and using complex model predictions to drive public policy is a recent development over the past couple of decades. mass increases in computational power have enabled this approach.
when you say 'long ago', this is an important piece of context. the science is new, subject to constant change and learning, and the phenomena modeled are highly nonlinear in response to variables.
people who develop complex models, be they in finance (remember 2008), economics, climate, or epidemiology, are naturally passionate advocates for their work. that's the nature of brilliant people - but the science is not well established and a bit of healthy skepticism given the track record of predictive success is not necessarily about 'aligning with preferences'.
I think it is increasingly likely that the projections in this case of modeling COVID will have been extremely pessimistic, and the mass alignment of public policy with those projections will trigger tremendous skepticism of all scientific modeling for a long time - to the detriment of many areas that are important and potentially less prone to errors given maturity of specific fields of data analysis.
We're from North California, and South Alabam
and little towns all around this land...