As SAGE minutes released with the Government’s approval make the case for new restrictions and even the cancellation of Christmas, Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson probed SAGE modeller Graham Medley on Twitter on why SAGE’s models were so often pessimistic and wrong.
The exchange, reproduced in full below, is illuminating because Graham says they do not include more benign scenarios because “it doesn’t add any further information” and “decision-makers are generally on [sic] only interested in situations where decisions have to be made”.
“Decision-makers don’t have to decide if nothing happens,” he argues. This is wrong, of course: not imposing restrictions because the threat doesn’t warrant it is itself a decision, a very important one.
Fraser asks: “So you exclusively model bad outcomes that require restrictions and omit just-as-likely outcomes that would not require restrictions?”
Graham replies that “we generally model what we are asked to model”.
Fraser asks: “Okay, so you were asked to model bad Omicron outcomes and make no comment as to the probability?”
Graham’s reply: “We model the scenarios that are useful to decisions.”
Ladies and gentleman: The Science.
Stop Press: Fraser has written about his Twitter exchange on the Spectator blog.
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Gove is the master snake oil salesman. A political back stabber and at the very beating heart of every wound inflicted on our great nation by the Con-servatives over the last 14 years.
I gave up on the Spectator years ago when it embraced greenism and covidism.
I’m sure it will be a blow to their hopes but I won’t be back …
I have just about stuck with them for Liddle, Murray, Shriver etc. However I think the baggage Gove brings is too much. I’m out.
Never bothered with the Spectator. Never read it. Gave up on Fake News lamestreaming back in 2005 or before. Used to read the Ecommunist and WSJ – globalist rags, couldn’t stand vomiting so much, so had to stop. I doubt the Govidians running the Spectator are any better. All of them are a waste of space.
Goves’s a slimey git, RIP the spectator!
Powell was right.
Gove is a despicable covidian.
The Conservative party has never recovered from Heath.
But Heath was not the cause of the Conservative Party’s problems – he was a symptom. The cause is that our civilisation is decadent, our dominant class (the state bourgeoisie) is degenerate, and our ruling group (Rushi Soonoff, 2TK, etc, etc, etc) is gripped by a death with – hence the insane addiction to the Great Replacement. Only if we get rid of our current rulers in some kind of national revolution can we prevent the social collapse that they will impose on us.
Well, perhaps what you say is correct but for me the traitor Heath will always remain the traitor. A cold fish who thought that by joining with a continent that was entirely unlike us we should somehow be able to repair what was wrong in our own country.
A thousand deaths are not enough for the traitor Heath.
England joined “with the continent which was entirely unlikely to it” for the most recent time in in 1903 and the ultimate outcome was a wholesale destruction of the traditional order of that continent, millions of dead people and handing over all of Europe eastward of the so-called Oder-Neiße line as birthday present to the great beneficiary of mankind known as Josef Stalin which lead to about 45 years of Bolshevist/ Communist rule there.
You’re more than welcome to stick with minding your own business in future while Europe eventually reconstructs itself instead of playing some idiotic “We are are victim of ourselves!” card. Such as (a set of more recent examples) first pressing for quick eastward expansion of the EEC and then complaining about it having happened or (I still remember that one) first forcing Germany into the European currency Irrsinnsprojekt as condition for allowing its so-called reunification and then complaining about the Euro being a German, that is “Nazi” project for German domination of Europe.
I gave up subscribing to The Spectator about 5 years ago.
Now the treacherous snake Gove is Editor, I won’t even consider re-subscribing.
I used to give the £5 per month to The Spectator. I stopped when I heard Fraser Nelson talking all Covidian. I don’t remember what it was he said, but I do remember thinking “I no longer want to support this magazine, so I dont want to give them any more money”. It gave me pleasure to cancel that standing order.
On a not entirely unrelated point, I need some timber today to replace a couple of floorboards. I shall take quiet satisfaction from driving past Wickes to the slightly more expensive DIY shop further down the road.
Good. I have exactly the same principles, which my wife just absolutely cannot understand, (which in itself is an indictment of where we have got to).
Amazon is a prime example – just NO, NO and furthermore, NO.
Never subscribed, but if someone like James Delingpole became editor I might consider it!
Neil Oliver and John Redwood might also be good, but its a very narrow field, so many disappointed when it mattered, if not over Brexit then over the Covid scam, and/or the Climate lie.
I wonder whether Gove will give his good pal James Delingpole a broader remit.
’Down the Rabbit Hole with Delingpole’ would make for an interesting column.
Splendid suggestion trouble is it won’t happen sadly.
I am a subscriber to the Spectator.
I think it’s a good magazine. Sure, I don’t agree with everything that I read but that’s OK. We blame the left for living in their echo chamber so we should be careful not to live in ours.
I must admit the appointment of Gove surprises me: this is a guy who was in favour of vaccine passports and mandates. Plus, as many others have noticed, there is something slimy about the guy. But we’ll see.
Ultimately, if I don’t like the magazine, well, it only takes a few clicks to unsubscribe. I wish I could do the same with our Labour government!
Editors are indeed important. But even more so are the owners. Why the author does not mention the owners of the Spectator over the last fifty years, the last one being (since September) Sir Paul Marshall, who also owns GBNews and UnHerd. Strange.
The Media appear unable to understand that STEM subjects, up to A’ levels, and even a Natural Science, mid-1970’s, degree, is apolitical. There might be tweeks, like Newton’s and Einstein’s views on Space and Time, but both sets of experts agreed on the boundaries. Until further evidence arrives, they are the tools of the trade, for further investigations., and wealth creation.
A balanced discussion about the Climate Emergency is impossible while there’s a BBC ban on ‘Climate Deniers’. And it happens in many other disciplines too. Yet, discussions about what is woman are acceptable, as long as there is no conclusion!
When you know about what happens during solar storms and understand Maxwell’s Equations enough to think it worth investigating, and wonder why it isn’t discussed in the Media, it’s easy to see why we are in the state we are in.
And while Arts and Humanities graduates dominate every sector, it will continue. The reason there are so few STEM graduates with good presentation skills is that they rarely have the opportunity to maintain their sanity, integrity and income, if they ventured into the Media / Political Bubble.
I also subscribe and rather agree with MajorMajor. There seems to be an increasing tendency to write off newspapers and magazines unless you agree with pretty much every opinion expressed in them. I think that’s unfortunate. I’ve never met a person I agreed with about everything, nor do I expect I ever will; and I am even less likely to find a publication I entirely agree with.
I think that the Spectator’s heart has been in the right place under Fraser Nelson on many, though not of course, all issues. It is a well written and stimulating publication. I will wait to see what Gove does with it.
I’ve been a Spectator subscriber for a couple of years. Whilst I didn’t always agree with every opinion on there, and some of Fraser Nelson’s recent comments made me wonder what he’d been drinking, it was always a worthwhile read.
However, Gove is a red line for me. Subscription has been cancelled and I won’t go back whilst he’s there.
When they appointed Gove as Editor I stopped my subscription to the Spectator.
One has to have standards…
I gave up reading the Spectator when Nelson and his crew refused to call out the scamdemic for what it was – a complete fraud. Where were they when we needed them? Absolutely f… nowhere.
I have had several letters published by The Spectator over the years but (IMHO) my best one – which mentioned that the damage from Covid “vaccines” dwarfed the Thalidomide toll – was ignored. Similarly, credit to Fraser Nelson for keeping faith with Toby Young when the Twitter mob descended on him, but I don’t recall him writing anything in The Spectator which criticised the vaccines.
My Spectator addiction began in Creighton’s time. Then, as now, it has excellent contributors. But context is all. Then, as for many years after, to oppose our membership of the EEC was to be put beyond the pale. The Spectator had to bang its drum because almost every other paper endlessly banged the other drum.
Fifty years on, my only break from Spectator reading was in Chancellor’s time as editor. It had just given up under what Nelson described as a lazy editor.
It eventually came back, not as an echo chamber but as an intellectual stimulant. If you met most of the contributors in the pub, you would probably stay for a silly afternoon.
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The current edition of The Spectator contains a review of Boris Johnson’s memoir by… Michael Gove – hardly an unbiased observer. I was thinking of resubscribing, but my loathing of Gove rules it out,