‘Experts’ haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory during the pandemic. Their pronouncements concerning things like lockdowns, masks and herd immunity seem to be more correlated with swings in Twitter sentiment than with any fundamental changes in scientific evidence.
We’re used to seeing graphs like this one, which show the actual course of the epidemic deviating rather substantially from what was predicted. And where there is some correspondence between data and forecasts, this is usually because the forecasts included so many different ‘scenarios’ that one of them had to be right.
Famously, Neil Ferguson said it was “almost inevitable” that cases would reach 100,000 per day after some restrictions were removed on 19th July. What cases actually did over the next 10 days was fall by nearly 50%.
(If Ferguson tells you it’s “almost inevitable” that he’ll meet you on time, it’s probably best to bring a book, or delay your own arrival by half an hour.)
Okay, so the ‘experts’ aren’t very good at predicting where cases or deaths will be a few weeks hence. But they’re surely better than the rest of us. And since some information is better than no information, we shouldn’t dismiss them entirely – right?
A study published earlier this year did find that experts (defined as “epidemiologists, statisticians, mathematical modelers, virologists, and clinicians”) were more accurate at forecasting the UK’s death toll in 2020 than were random members of the public.
In April of 2020, Gabriel Recchia and colleagues asked 140 experts, as well as 2,000 members of the public, to guess how many people in the UK would die of COVID by 31st December. Each participant was asked to give a ‘75% confidence interval’ for their guess.
The correct answer (which can be debated, of course) fell within the 75% confidence interval for 10% of non-experts and 36% of experts. So the experts did better, but less than half of them were even close.
A more recent study reached slightly different conclusions. Earlier this year, the epiforecast group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine hosted a forecasting competition in which they invited members of the public to predict weekly case and death numbers in the U.K.
The competition ran from 24th May to 16th August. Both experts and non-experts were eligible to compete, experts being those who declared themselves as such when they signed up (so we’re presumably talking about epidemiologists and people with a background in forecasting).
What did the researchers find? In this case, the self-declared experts performed slightly worse than the non-experts, although neither group did especially well.
Why did the two studies reach different conclusions? I suspect the answer lies in the composition of each study’s non-expert group. In the first study, the non-experts were random members of the public, whereas in the second, they were laymen who chose to take part in a forecasting tournament.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock has gathered a large amount of evidence that, when it comes to quantitative forecasting, experts aren’t any better than well-informed laymen (even if they do have an edge over the man on the street).
I suspect the non-experts who took part in the Covid forecasting tournament were the kind of well-informed laymen that Tetlock identified in his research. After all, you’d have to be pretty geeky to find out about such a tournament in the first place.
Overall, the evidence suggests that no one’s particularly good at forecasting the epidemic. Where the ‘experts’ do have an advantage is in making their predictions appear scientific.
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‘Experts’ such as Neil Ferguson should be tried for crimes against humanity for the Covid scamdemic.
He is an expert in innumerate balderdash, going back 25 years.
If you arranged to meet Ferguson for lunch he would likely give you a prediction of his arrival time which would be any time between 0830 on April 30th and 1745 on November 26th, with a central forecast of 1530 on June 7th with a margin of error of +/= 76% and then even though you missed him he would claim his forecasting was successful.
Spouting rubbish is not a ‘crime against humanity’. Taking notice might be.
Two down knee-jerks for a statement of the bleedin’ obvious.
Interesting IQ test result.
(If Ferguson tells you it’s “almost inevitable” that he’ll meet you on time, it’s probably best to bring a book, or delay your own arrival by half an hour.)
If you are meeting Ferguson at all your life went badly wrong and you’d be better off cleaning public toilets than making your meeting.
I’ve done modeling for business. It’s hard. Because you know that you don’t know everything, and you don’t know what you don’t know. But you also know which factors have the biggest impact and how a mistake in those areas will make your whole model useless. Ferguson has been wrong on those key factors for 20 years, across multiple diseases. How he has a job is unfathomable (aside from grants by those whose agenda benefits from scary forecasts). How he can get more listeners than a loon at Hyde Park, even more unbelievable?
There were a few reasonably good mockers (Warwick I think the best). Because they learned from the earliest case data from Italy and Diamond Princess. Oh, and they probably had to be near right to keep their jobs. Had Ferguson been placed over a pit of crocodiles and told his model must be within 20% or the floor disappears, do you think he says 100k deaths? Me neither.
“I’ve done modeling for business. It’s hard”
Exactly. And it requires a sharp awareness of how massive the errors from ‘garbage in’ can be.
Another factor that anyone who’s tried it can testify, is that the possible error as delineated by the max/min boundaries of the forecast widens massively with time.
the last sentence is a gem – there has been a great deal of ‘scientists’ and ‘experts’ making unscientific nonsense appear scientific – and the half wit main stream media types lap it up.
Experts in what?
Is their expertise in relevant field?
Experts are good at manipulating the data to fit an agenda, while making it appear to have a grain of truth.
Indeed. I read somewhere, recently, that the modelling had improved over the time of covid. For some reason, I couldn’t shake off the notion that the modelling had been retrofitted to the data.
I’m betting the ‘experts’ would argue that they had fewer unknowns to bother them as the infections progressed.
Unfortunately, the damage had, by then, been done.
“Experts” are nothing more than paid propagandists these days.
You have more chance of encountering valuable information if you consult someone who is independent with no expertise in that area but possessed of curiosity, an inquiring mind and a basic grounding in science or mathematics.
“Overall, the evidence suggests that no one’s particularly good at forecasting the epidemic. Where the ‘experts’ do have an advantage is in making their predictions appear scientific. “
The crucial conclusion, applicable especially to the covid panic response disaster, but also far more widely, is not that “experts are useless”, but that the world is too complex to launch into dramatic panic responses to predictions of doom (or to offers of huge gains, either), on the mere advice of such people.
A healthily sceptical attitude to “expert” predictions based on over extrapolated modelling fantasies could and should have avoided the covid response disaster.
That lesson should be applied urgently to the ongoing panic response to similarly weakly based climate alarmist forecasts, where much has already been wasted and much harm done, but the worst is most likely still to come.
More widely, and leaving behind the particular dangers of modelling, this is why the radical left in general should not be trusted. The essence of leftism is the reliance on expert “reasoning” to justify radical changes to society and to humanity, to build a better future and a better humanity. Historically, a little of that is arguably good and useful, but too much of it ends in mass suffering, disaster and war.
As our technological powers increase, the dangers of radicalism increase exponentially. Past radical leftists, such as eugenicists, socialists and communists of various kinds, lacked either the technological capability or the big state powers of intrusion and organisation, to interfere with our very genetic structure and to monitor and manipulate us all, through cheap and plentiful digital technology, and to control our opinions through sophisticate modern psychological manipulation built on decades of mass advertising experience. Those of the now or of the near future will have those capabilities.
The precautionary principle, properly applied, would require a sharp turn away from the currently rampant radicalism and back to a much more cautious conservatism.
https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/more-on-original-antigenic-sin-and
interesting from the news round up today
original antigenic sin
your first exposure remains your main line of defence
so is you are vaxxed, your main line of defence will always be antibodies to the original Wuhan variant spike protein, however many times you get infected with new strains
if you got delta naturally your main defence is a broad spectrum to all sars-cov2 proteins, not just the spike
If a new variant arises that evades the spike, naturally immune people may be better off than vaccinated – unless they were vaccinated after they had covid
The jab changes the response of the immune system to a covid infection, it’s explained in this audio interview with Dr Dan Stock. It’s pretty technical but is basically saying that the real champions of infection killing in the body are the CD8+ T cells which can go everywhere yet in the jabbed the immune response is changed towards antibody production in the bloodstream which can’t get to every source of infection, which is why infections are lingering longer in the jabbed, regardless of infection type. The CD8+ T cells have the highest need for Vitamin D of all cells in the body making good Vitamin D3 + K2 supplementation really important. 10,000iu per day is not toxic according to some immunologist who was in a discussion about this interview.
Anecdotally, my Mum, double jabbed has been fighting off a sore throat for a few weeks now. She started to feel better after she started to take a Vit D3 + K2 supplement.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/cT1o1hYwld1O/
As Orwell pointed out in 1984
The goal is not to get people to say 2+2=5
The goal it is to get people to actually believe 2+2=5
This goal was achieved way before March 2020 and I cannot point to a time when it wasn’t so
I’m not sure I agree that the ‘experts’ managed to appear scientific, given that Ferguson’s model was thoroughly trashed when inspected by peers some time after it had been launched.
Quite why our politicians choose to hide behind discredited wonks like these continues to be a mystery to me.
At least Whitty has stopped claiming to ‘follow the science’ and instead means to inject children against the JCVI advice.
they appeared scientific enough to scare the shit out of many – so much so they rushed off to the jabattoir for an experimental gene therapy clot shot
No ‘mystery’
There was money to be made
In that context it makes perfect
I now define an “expert” as someone who can demonstrate that they have correctly predicted the future, or have personally effected a change that others could not. All others should fall under the title “charlatan”.
Experts step in where fools fear to thread.
In finance, the biggest blowups are regularly caused by the smartest people (s. LTCM).
I am an Engineer by profession and if I made as many ‘mistakes’ as these so-called ‘experts’ I would have been regarded as unemployable years ago…
Johnson should have been aware of Ferguson’s track record and not insisted on ‘following the science’, he refused to look at alternatives. No doubt encouraged by Blair who wanted his man centre stage to complete the covid scam of segregation passports. Ferguson, whose track record is abominable, has put a wrecking ball to the economy and millions of lives.
The result of the 2020 experiment is unsurprising if this is a random sample of the public, given what we know about (a) general innumeracy and distorted risk assessment and (b) the deliberate distortion caused by the psy-op. This has been tested in other surveys.
The methodology of these studies is a bit dodgy, but the record of self-designated ‘experts’ is no longer surprising, although it may arise from a number of causes, from rubbish models to confirmation bias and tunnel vision.
Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is the persistence of massive error and the lack of correction from a proper feedback mechanism. As often raised here – there is something wrong in a system that runs on regardless of the patent absurdity produced at regular intervals by Imperial.
I’ve previously mentioned that I ran my own experiment last autumn after the cataclysmic claims made by SAGE for a month ahead. I made myself write down a figure for weekly all-cause deaths at the end of that period, using no mathematical model, but a simple likely projection of the curve, backed by knowledge of the data to that point, and a grounding in statistics and probability. It was no more than that – an intelligent guess. I reckoned that if I wrote it down, there could be no post-hoc wriggle-room.
The result? – Massively closer to the reality than anything from SAGE.
“Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is the persistence of massive error and the lack of correction from a proper feedback mechanism.” Indeed. I won’t live long enough to know why this didn’t happen. Was it just arse covering, or something even more sinister? Just astonishing that The Emperor’s New Clothes story could play out globally, actively pushed by almost every powerful institution on the planet, to cause the biggest peacetime folly in history by some margin.
The use of the term ‘expert’ is questionable. It seems to me that you fail the test to be called such if you persistently get things wrong, or ignore the bleedin’ obvious known knowns (as in lockdown, mask wearing etc.)
I’m an expert on an expert (**)
In the UK and Sweden, the Grim Reaper took a holiday in 2019. Worked double time to catch up in 2020. Meanwhile, in Ireland, leprechauns granted the population with the Elixir of Life.
Ivor Cummins’ latest… the voice of reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3odjlEn8qXY
People with a vested interest in pushing a certain narrative (aka “experts”) are filthy liars
Who knew?
In related news, in finance the majority of active fund managers do not beat the market index. This fact has been known and widely disseminated since the 70’s. Yet most people still entrust their money to active fund managers.
A book? I’d bring a blade and I’d make sure I’m on time.
Deaths?what about the Murders in Care Homes I can attest to.Cynical pre mediated Involuntary Euthanasia to give the dumb masses a fantasy of a deadly contagion running amok?So devious it knows specific post codes like Care Homes.I know 2 staff members murdered on Ventilators to generate the climate of fear.I reported my observation s to the NMC complete silence.Then I see those cunts in Parliament laughing at and duping the same dumb masses.No one will save us at this point.
I think its a truism that no-one can forecast anything accurately, and if by chance you do, its for entirely the wrong reasons. At one time my job was ‘forecasting’ in the energy industry.
Not to toot my own horn (okay, I will) … I took on all the experts last July – all the best Medical Advisory Panels the best colleges could assemble – when I said no athlete would die if sports were allowed to continue.
I wouldn’t change a word from the piece I wrote 15 months ago. FWIW, my “science education” ended with an 11th grade chemistry class.
Here’s one excerpt:
“In short, the “safety” of athletes will not be jeopardized if sports seasons are allowed to continue this fall. The worst-case scenario is that a tiny percentage of athletes may develop “flu-like” symptoms for a week or so. However, as 15 to 45 million Americans develop an “influenza-like illness” every year, this is a risk that has always existed – without canceling sports.”
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/07/31/covid-19-poses-virtually-no-health-risk-to-athletes/
Remember, models (produced by experts) can only say what the experts want them to say. By calling themselves experts, they can avoid any consequences for their failures.
If the people are not utterly degraded, although individually they may be worse judges than those who have special knowledge, as a body they are as good or better… The many are more incorruptible than the few.” Aristotle, 350 BC.
I could randomly throw the dice from my monopoly board game a random number of times, and randomly arrange the figures I get and I’d be more accurate than Ferguson (and Whitty)…….and Gates wouldn’t have to pay me anywhere near the money he pays them!!