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| This was not an excuse to post some old school cheesecake. Absolutely not. |
That sucker wasn't off, it was wildly wrong.
Aside: Good friend Ohioan at Heart has been working on his own model and you can find it here. Excellent work, that.
On with the show.
I have a friend who runs a commercial real estate firm. His brokers are independent operators and as such, they are ineligible for unemployment compensation. Yesterday, he told me almost all of their deals have fallen through. My friend and his coworkers are furious with China, but there is probably a good deal of anger at the "scientific community" for having screwed the pooch on this one.
It's entirely possible that we would have taken the same steps had the models been accurate or even close, but they weren't and we did. Dittos for the panic media who screamed that we would see a million or more dead. Double super dittos for media companies like NBC who are actively peddling both panic and Chinese propaganda. Dig this.
U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020
Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5
Bonus tidbit from NBC:
The planet has benefited from the coronavirus pandemic — but only in the short term.— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 8, 2020
Senior climate officer Li Shuo at Greenpeace in Beijing says it’s too early to “pop the champagne corks” and that “it’s hardly a sustainable way to reduce emissions.” (2/7)
I don't know, maybe NBC has simply given up and they want to destroy their brand.
One of the biggest lessons to me from this mess is how important it is to protect your brand. In marketing books and in lectures, I've been told a zillion times* that it's everyone's job to protect their organization's brand. I used to think that was hyperbolic nonsense, but now I understand.
We Normals can't tell the difference between the IHME and MIT. When the IHME or the transgender activists or the
Dittos for the media. There really are lots and lots of honest journalists out there. However, they're not the ones ripping NBC to shreds for publishing trash. Again, that's their problem, not ours.
And that, my friends, is why you need to protect your brand. No one else is going to do it for you because you're the only one with a vested interest in the thing.
* - Hey, if the "scientific community" can peddle rubbish numbers and still demand respect, so can I. A zillion it is.
Thanks for the mention. Just a quick semi-update on that model. I never expected the cases and deaths to follow the model. I almost sat on it instead of publishing it. It just isn't reasonable to expect the infection rate to continue declining day-over-day forever (which is what the "Adjustment 1" is doing - and "Adjustment 3" is similar as well). Somewhere along the line we have to expect the rate will stabilize. Based on careful examination of the data vs model, I think it happened 3 or 4 days ago. I won't change the model until I can really see the longer term behavior (like another week to 10 days). As to what may happen to the death rate, if the effect is due to successful treatment, which continues to spread in its use, then the actual effect could increase. If it is due to something else, who knows what will happen?
ReplyDeleteAs to the model you show... Yeah, way off. Who knows why (not to be confused with WHO, or What - "he's on second"). I understand why they were so far off back at the beginning. They were using models that assumed the number of non-confirmed cases were small compared to the confirmed (I heard numbers like 20% of the cases are asymptomatic) . Plus they modeled as if there was going to be no diminishing of the infection rate. Add to that an apparent death rate of a few percent and death projections come out in the millions. All way worst case assumptions. Now, why they are (apparently) still so far off with data from yesterday available, I won't even speculate about.
As to NBC News, I have come to conclude that the acronym has changed from National Broadcasting Corporation News to Nothing But China's News.
Lastly, to your "We Normals can't tell the difference between the IHME and MIT." Basically true. And yet you understand the difference better by orders of magnitude than the "journalists".
From my phone - Before Tim gets in here and justly points out my ignorance and nastiness, let me say that I am far more forgiving of the modelers than this seems. This post was an exploration of brand protection - who should do it and why.
ReplyDelete*looks at model graphic*
ReplyDeleteOh. So that is why Iowa only going somewhat overboard is suddenly functionally the same as "do not leave your house unless absolutely necessary".
Never mind that the latest over-step only happened the night before said declaration.....
The "fun" thing is that I've been told by folks who are also in Iowa that the spokesman, MD, is correct-- when I have been contrasting what I actually see hwere with what my family in California and Washington are seeing.... not the same.
ReplyDelete/growl
Not sure if you saw my rant over at The American Catholic about how far out there New York's claimed numbers are-- they have got to be doing something like Italy. (Seen the Bee graphic about "skydiver who forgot parachute dies of corna virus"? Like that.)
Let me add one more thing. The post suggests the IHME are charlatans. I don't believe that. These essays are stream of consciousness and they sometimes get away from me. What I am trying to say is that the damage is done by certainty claimed when none is there.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've never been all that inclined to put a lot of weight on model predictions. Particularly not models that involve human behavior. And I will note that the IHME projections do have pretty generous error bounds marked, showing that they don't actually have that much faith in the exact numbers they get, either.
ReplyDeletehttps://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
I wish people reporting on these projections would spend more time talking about error bounds and intrinsic uncertainty, instead of just acting as if the mean value is the One True Value.
In general, they are fighting with the same issues that people who try to model the economy or the stock market run into: When they make predictions, people change their behavior based on the predictions.
If the initial predictions weren't horrific, people would blithely ignore the quarantining recommendations, making the prediction too conservative and pushing things towards worst-case. At which point, the modelers get yelled at for not giving proper warning.
But a sufficiently dire prediction has the chance to actually scare people into paying attention, and suddenly nobody is coming in contact with anyone else and your projection is way high. And now everyone accuses the modelers of being panic-mongers. This is pretty much a lose-lose situation for the forecasters.
Oh, and the quality of the data they are working with is evidently terrible, missing somewhere between 20% and 80% of infections, and most diagnoses being of people that were infected a week or two previously. This is at least as bad as trying to predict the stock market, and worse than predicting the weather.
Of course, lying to manipulate people into doing what they would never do if given full information is why people ignore the modelers.
ReplyDeleteThey've repeatedly shown that they can and will say whatever it takes to make people do what the modeler wants them to. Worse, they give an "even if we do everything perfectly" with a lower end error bar that is still significantly too high for what actually happened, per the e-friend who keeps an eye on the projections in their wheelhouse...and they didn't do all of what the modelers insisted was a bare minimum.
**********
Based off of the attempt-to-test-everyone samples and comparing it to how the diagnosis is being done in the US, they're probably missing closer to 80% of the symptomatic cases, everywhere they're not blanket diagnosing.
If they hadn't had weeks of better-than-China-in-January data to work on fixing the models, I'd be somewhat sympathetic; instead, it appears that the modelers have decided on what is the best choice back when we didn't know that China had months to build up the number of cases they had, and are trying to push everyone into agreeing what that.
That's lying. That's the practical side of why lying is wrong.
Your comments are, as usual, excellent and have given me food for thought.
ReplyDeleteAfter another cup of coffee, one which I will regret as I get the caffeine withdrawals around 1100 today, I'll go back on these topics. I was away from my keyboard doing productive and useful things yesterday so I couldn't engage here.