September is here, and children and students all across the nation will be returning back to the classroom and lecture-theatre, many surely dreading the fact that, for some of them at least, this may be a formal GCSE, A-level or degree examination year. The fear of failure in such tests has always been a real one, at least up until now. To prove it, there is a whole cottage industry out there on the Internet these days in which teachers and examiners post images of stupid answers given by their students in exams and workbooks. Here are a few of my favourite examples:
As of yet, such answers most assuredly do not make the grade. And yet, as we saw last time around, demented Left-wing moves are now afoot to essentially allow schoolchildren and university students the luxury of designing their own semi-personalised examinations and assessment schemes. To the extent that, someday, the above incredibly incorrect answers may gain actual legitimate credit simply by virtue of demonstrating the candidates’ ability – intentional or otherwise – to create witty and amusing answers rather than boring old factually correct ones. The following two would surely gain an A* in the woke GCSE grade-schemes of tomorrow:
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so are SAGE models not The Science then?
According to a recent Facebook-ad PHE is now “preparing for a worst-case winter scenario”. This implies that they must be pretty certain that the “worst-case summer scenario” Neil “No lockdown will keep my cock down!” Ferguson referred to as “inevitable” last week won’t happen.
SAGE…Soothsayers Against Genuine Evidence.
Subjecting Analysis to Gross Exaggeration?
Can we just stop using these bogus so-called ‘cases’. They are meaningless figures and bear little relation to actual illness and death.
The models are always wrong, but these models are not even useful as they are the opposite of what happens and have negative predictive usefulness.
Attempts to predict the future are always wrong. Even (even more so) when they’re based on complicated and messy computer programs not even the people working on them understand.
That’s just the techie equivalent of trying to read it out of the layout of guts in animals.
Its not quite as bad as that, for example predicting the flight of a canon ball is pretty well spot-on.
But you are right. Software engineer here. Predicting something like this is more akin to predicting the weather or the financial markets. There is no way you can have any confidence in the predictions without being able to compare predictions with real outcomes, but in this case the real outcomes to compare against are few and far between (and clearly not ameneable to experiment).
There is no way anyone should attribute any significance to the models’ predictions.
To quote one of my physics lecturers of old “The usual assumptions are implied. The austronaut has neither mass nor extent”. Or, even nicer, a former navy superior “This was a so-called five mile shot. The rocket flew for five miles and then fell into the water and we don’t know why”.
Can’t even remotely get this to work using multiple threads and won’t fork it instead because we’re either ideologically blinded VMS fans and/ or nobody ever even got this to compile outside of Ferguson’s Windows laptop is entirely damning.
The mere fact that this program is a chaotic system whose parts interact in unpredictable ways doesn’t make it a suitlable “model” of some other chaotic system.
I dont think Fergusson even knows how little he knows about programming when you get those sort of comments in the code.
It’s not a model it’s an expensive simulated dice.
If he had tried to be a bookmaker, he’d be bankrupt by now!
Cartoons like this Bob one are brilliant not least because humourous ridicule is an excellent device for swinging things our way. See also the photo circulating today of Macron so heavily festooned in Polynesian garlands that he looks like a floating tourist boat and it utterly punctures his image. This approach secretly appeals to the majority, regardless of stance. It has to be the right side of bitchy. Snide is too much.
We had a very strong idea they were wrong from the start, and it was proved shortly afterwards beyond a reasonable doubt.
To my memory not one single modelled prediction SAGE has made has come true.
In a private business these jokers would’ve been fired by June 2020.
Fake it til you make it?
I can’t think of anything coming out of SAGE that was worthwhile.
I do know that when I experimented with a prediction – against a ludicrous one pushed by SAGE – it came out over 100 times closer to the actuality. And that never pretended to be more than intelligent guess work, using a spreadsheet and a graph!
‘It begs the question as to why the Government and media have again so enthusiastically engaged with consistently disappointing predictions …’
To answer the question – within the Media because their paymasters (Gates, Soros, BigTech, Big Corps) tell them to. With UK Government, the Reset doctrine requires the destruction of family, small businesses and freedom to travel, and most importantly, our Judeo-Christian culture.
Actually, I think it’s simpler. It’s that they had no idea what to do, and then an activist scientist poked his head around the door and said “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea….” .
…you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off…
Can we say, definitively, that ZZ Top and Brian Blessed have beards?
Well, no- a certain Mr Beard doesn’t have a beard so that model is only 75% accurate…
ALL models are ‘wrong’, in the sense that they do not mirror real life completely, and so have some degree of inaccuracy.
The question is whether this is small enough to be ignored, or sufficiently large to make the modelling useless for the task you want it to do.
Climate models are a good example of the latter – they are not accurate because they are based on incorrect premises, and they are now failing badly. The usual trick, and I am sure that the Covid modellers will follow suit, is to add fudged estimations which are intended to bring the final answer a bit closer to reality, and then claim that things are near enough. The Climate people have now gone beyond that and are into ‘Look, there’s a squirrel!’ territory…..
The incorrect premises thing is a real problem when trying to talk to anyone- particularly the young- about climate change. They don’t start from 0, they start from something like, ‘CO2 is evil and poisonous – we’re producing CO2- we are evil. With that sort of thinking, you can’t get anywhere. Ask someone why they think CO2 is poisonous, why they think there is a ‘climate emergency’, or why climate change in itself is bad and they just throw insults at you- they simply will not think or question the premise. Sadly it’s the same with Covid; almost everyone I speak to about it thinks it’s the no.1 killer and to catch it is almost certain death. I have come to prefer the company of my dogs more and more over the past few years.
There is obviously a plan being followed here.It doesn’t matter whether the modelling is right or wrong or the data rigged. These articles and Daily Sceptic itself are doing the equivalent of studying the train track while a high speed express bears down on them.
I am aware of this and am doing all I can to ensure that myself and my family are not in its path. I have given up trying to convince others as they clearly do not wish to save themselves and would prefer to be part of the bleating majority. In Sheffield today they were shuffling about, masked and fearful, presumably vaccinated, without any idea what it is that they fear. I find it hard to believe that any rational person would behave like this- walking around in the open air with a piece of cloth across their face as if it will save them from something that clearly isn’t causing unmasked people to keel over and die. What hope is there for such people?
Hopefully none.
That cartoon may well be the finest I have seen in my sixty five and not quite a half years on this planet. Brilliant, especially the placing of Johnson’s left arm.