Odds And Ends, Modeling And Branding Edition

Yesterday's post elicited typically excellent comments from Ohioan, Foxie and Tim. Here are some of the thoughts they catalyzed, certainly indicative of a deranged mind.

• The IHME model was deliberately conservative. It had to be. If they came out predicting 20,000 deaths and we ended up with 500,000 because everyone dismissed the Chicom Flu as a non-event, they'd be culpable morally, if not in actuality.
  
• If there was a cultural failing, it was to have trusted anything from China at all. First off, China is one, massive governmental state. Government employees maximize self-preservation, not profits and if that means they need to tell lies, then they tell lies. That's how the Chinese ended up with Mao's body count.
  
  

  

  The current Chinese government is a direct, lineal descendant of the one that demanded that peasants smelt iron in small, backyard furnaces. All of the functionaries lied about the consequences and as a result, 80,000,000 died. Like that mattered. They were all just meatbags anyway.

• Hobby Horse Bonus Point: The individual is always a better decision maker than the government. We've lost that concept. See also: government, massive expansion of. Trusting the Chinese is a symptom of a larger failing in our culture.
  
• Ohioan made my branding point quite well. 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. They wrecked their brand and he's closed his mind to them and moved on to other things. Recovering lost trust with your customers is a Herculean task.
  
• The American model of Federalism is genius. Foxie pointed out why. *looks at model graphic* Oh. So that is why Iowa only going somewhat overboard is suddenly functionally the same as "do not leave your house unless absolutely necessary". Iowa is not New York and the people of New York shouldn't get a say in how it's run. See also: peasants smelting iron, Chinese policy of.
  
• Tim weighed in with a comment that made me think of the loss of expensive, experienced journalists. 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. As the revenue at the news media companies has dropped, they've fired the expensive old hands and replaced them with gullible, ideologue children. This is how we get clown show press conferences.
  
• I'm going to disagree with Tim on this one, but only in a very lukewarm way. 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. I think the lousy models were more due to lousy input data. All we had were Chicom lies and unverifiable information from the Italians. If you're looking to the Italians to give you an organized summary of results, you deserve what you get. ;-)
  
• On the other hand, I agree with Tim's point and it reinforces my point that Federalism wins. Tell Americans what's going on and they will usually make good choices.
  
• Also from Tim: 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. I'm so glad I was able to change his mind. :-)
  
• Foxie then goes on to make the point that interests me the most. Of course, lying to manipulate people into doing what they would never do if given full information is why people ignore the modelers. The news media has annihilated their brand. Lost customers who have alternatives they trust aren't coming back without a practically miraculous turnaround.

One final thought. I am highly suspicious of the people who want to keep this lockdown going for more than a month longer. It seems to me that they're the same people who long to recreate Mao's Paradise. They love control and power. It sure looks to me like they're anxious to use this crisis to grab it.

Kind of like the Global Warming Climate Change thing.