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Well at least they are upfront about their bias...and I must tell you, as an academic, I'm SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you to find ugly code in a research paper. An

by avs733 7y ago

Well at least they are upfront about their bias...and I must tell you, as an academic, I'm SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you to find ugly code in a research paper. And from my prior experience working as a defense contractor, I'm SHOCKED SHOCKED I tell you to that its possible for governments to possibly use messy code for decisions making. But what I'm most shocked by is that a software engineer thinks them not understanding a model from another field is a valid critique of it (so shocked I laughed). If you are curious about the reliability of this particular source you can start at the end and read backwards: "On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves." Sue may be a great programmer but she regularly steps out of commenting on the code to comment on the model...which is like the guy who designed the tractor wheels telling the farmer what to plant. While readability of code may be nice, not a single comment she makes actually disputes the findings of the model. Some things in nature are actually stochastic (I'm sorry...RANDOM ::clutches pearls::). If you think the entire world is deterministic great...show me the computing power and societal knowledge that can account for those variables. And if your solution to global health is capitalism, look at the gates foundation, if you wanna look at what other approaches have gotten us, look at the Carter Center and Jonas Salk. Epidemiologists didn't build the ObamaCare website... In the past 100 years, epidemiology has: * Brought us a world where infectitious diseases are no longer the SINGLE LARGEST CAUSE OF DEATH to the human species * Made workplaces safer, and the food chain safer * Reduced the maternal death rate by 90% * Eliminated small pox entirely and eliminated multiple other diseases practically I don't know Sue, but I'm team Salk not team Sue here...what a loon.

smsm42 7y ago
You are right on many points here, but I think you are completely wrong on randomness point. Randomness from the model, randomness from real word being non-deterministic and randomness from bugs in the code are qualitatively different. Yes, you can't make real-world experiment to produce exactly the same values all the time (if you did, you'd probably suspect something is wrong...). Yes, model can be probabilistic and return different results. But if different results come from race conditions in the code, and these are significantly different, then the model doesn't model what it is supposed to model, it's no longer the model of the real world. It's a model or the real world plus buggy code with random CPU scheduling. It's fine if we lived in a computer simulation running on a buggy VM with race conditions - then it would model our would perfectly. But since there's no indications we are in such world, the error introduced by this bug - and it looks it's not negligible at all - makes model diverge from the real world, and decisions regarding the real world made based on this wrong model are also wrong. It's a big problem, and no amount of other deficiencies of the article - which you appropriately highlighted - diminishes this very serious problem.
thu2111 6y ago
Computer simulations eliminated smallpox? Do tell.

by avs733 7y ago

smsm42 7y ago

You are right on many points here, but I think you are completely wrong on randomness point. Randomness from the model, randomness from real word being non-deterministic and randomness from bugs in the code are qualitatively different. Yes, you can't make real-world experiment to produce exactly the same values all the time (if you did, you'd probably suspect something is wrong...). Yes, model can be probabilistic and return different results. But if different results come from race conditions in the code, and these are significantly different, then the model doesn't model what it is supposed to model, it's no longer the model of the real world. It's a model or the real world plus buggy code with random CPU scheduling. It's fine if we lived in a computer simulation running on a buggy VM with race conditions - then it would model our would perfectly. But since there's no indications we are in such world, the error introduced by this bug - and it looks it's not negligible at all - makes model diverge from the real world, and decisions regarding the real world made based on this wrong model are also wrong. It's a big problem, and no amount of other deficiencies of the article - which you appropriately highlighted - diminishes this very serious problem.

thu2111 6y ago

Computer simulations eliminated smallpox? Do tell.