5 ms·

Can you point to where in the article you see this "confidently wrong prediction"?

by googthrowaway42 6y ago

mturmon 6y ago
See nearby: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24843584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24843584
- googthrowaway42 6y ago
  We're sitting at 220k right now so I don't see how that is such a terrible estimate when dealing with a highly multiplicative event like a pandemic. An estimate of 10k or 1M would be something extremely off, not 170k vs 220k. You should familiarize yourself with power law processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
  - IvyMike 6y ago
    When he said "I am expecting it to end up under 170,000 or maybe 175,000.", if he had added "plus or minus 1.5M" that would have been clearer. Edit: In other words, when his prediction is given with an implied error of +/- 5000, that speaks to a level of confidence that as you point out, anybody familiar with power law processes would not dare to give.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      His 'predictions' sound like an old paper I read that predicted Farr's law that AIDs would disappear in the mid 90's. Digging, found a paper from 2007 shitting on it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1906780/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1906780/ Pubmed reference. Abstract predicts 200,000 cases total. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2308183/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2308183/ I'm left with the opinion that Michael Levitt is basically a stupid person.
      - dekhn 6y ago
        ah, yes, and the part where he helped invent molecular dynamics and won a nobel prize for it was all just garbage too?
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        Linus Pauling was pushing Vitamin C quack cures most of his life. Shockley was a believer in scientific racism and eugenics. Perhaps the proper term is fachidiot.
  - mturmon 6y ago
    > You should familiarize yourself with power law processes... Since you brought it up: my PhD was in applied probability, and I work with heavy-tailed natural data every weekday. * As my comment noted, ML literally says 170K or maybe 175K, and flat-out dismisses 220K. The latter is an interesting figure, because we recently surpassed it. We're now well out of the 170-175K envelope and still rising at about 5K deaths per week, about 20K deaths per month [1]. Note that our weekly death toll is the implied accuracy of ML's prediction. This is a failure. If ML thought there was a power law behind the mortality from an in-process event, he should have said "170K deaths or maybe 1.7M". But he didn't say that, did he? * It's interesting to see an interview with an excellent science communicator. They will say what we know, and not a bit more than that. They will choose their words carefully. They will distinguish between speculation and accepted truth. I live in southern CA, and Lucy Jones (formerly of the USGS) is such a person, for earthquakes. These people are a treasure, because this stuff is hard and it's important to get it right if you're going to make public statements. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecas...
IvyMike 6y ago
Let's take his PDF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coronavirus-2019_Data_Michael_Levitt.pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR2h3YZ4z5JuMiK9BJUotDeGKzmjCiOLo7aV3-WOC8CpzIZak8IE1--wV8M https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coro... He presented a bunch of authoritative looking numbers and graphs, and says "if we draw a curve through these, we see this trend". And it turned out to be massively wrong, but he never issued a mea culpa. Instead, he says "Going off of the only numbers that I already had, it basically quite clearly said that inside Hubei, there would be a few thousand deaths, and outside of Hubei in China there would only be a few hundred deaths. And that was enough to give people more confidence in understanding the virus, though I don’t think it really prepared the rest of the world for what was going to end up happening. " Yes, there is a reason that actual epidemiologists did NOT come to that conclusion: due to myriad factors, data about disease is messy, and you need to account for that. I never see him acknowledge that fact; I just see more "I connected these dots and extrapolated the curve predictions", even though that hasn't worked for him yet: > I think it’s going to end up with less deaths than what I thought. In March, I thought there would be a total of 220,000, but there will be less than that. Right now it is around 155,000 in the U.S., and I am expecting it to end up under 170,000 or maybe 175,000.
- googthrowaway42 6y ago
  The "actual epidemiologists" at the WHO waited months to declare this a pandemic after it was already clear it was spreading throughout the world. They did this because they are incompetent and were in the pocket of the CCP. If you want to fault this guy for something it's trusting the data out of China at all and even considering it appropriate to do analysis with those numbers. Again, 170k estimated vs 220k actual deaths is not a huge difference when dealing with a highly multiplicative event like a pandemic.
  - IvyMike 6y ago
    170k is his "final count"; 220k is the current running total. There's plenty of time for an order of magnitude of wrongness.

Can you point to where in the article you see this "confidently wrong prediction"?

mturmon 6y ago

See nearby: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24843584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24843584

googthrowaway42 6y ago
We're sitting at 220k right now so I don't see how that is such a terrible estimate when dealing with a highly multiplicative event like a pandemic. An estimate of 10k or 1M would be something extremely off, not 170k vs 220k. You should familiarize yourself with power law processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
- IvyMike 6y ago
  When he said "I am expecting it to end up under 170,000 or maybe 175,000.", if he had added "plus or minus 1.5M" that would have been clearer. Edit: In other words, when his prediction is given with an implied error of +/- 5000, that speaks to a level of confidence that as you point out, anybody familiar with power law processes would not dare to give.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    His 'predictions' sound like an old paper I read that predicted Farr's law that AIDs would disappear in the mid 90's. Digging, found a paper from 2007 shitting on it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1906780/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1906780/ Pubmed reference. Abstract predicts 200,000 cases total. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2308183/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2308183/ I'm left with the opinion that Michael Levitt is basically a stupid person.
    - dekhn 6y ago
      ah, yes, and the part where he helped invent molecular dynamics and won a nobel prize for it was all just garbage too?
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        Linus Pauling was pushing Vitamin C quack cures most of his life. Shockley was a believer in scientific racism and eugenics. Perhaps the proper term is fachidiot.
- mturmon 6y ago
  > You should familiarize yourself with power law processes... Since you brought it up: my PhD was in applied probability, and I work with heavy-tailed natural data every weekday. * As my comment noted, ML literally says 170K or maybe 175K, and flat-out dismisses 220K. The latter is an interesting figure, because we recently surpassed it. We're now well out of the 170-175K envelope and still rising at about 5K deaths per week, about 20K deaths per month [1]. Note that our weekly death toll is the implied accuracy of ML's prediction. This is a failure. If ML thought there was a power law behind the mortality from an in-process event, he should have said "170K deaths or maybe 1.7M". But he didn't say that, did he? * It's interesting to see an interview with an excellent science communicator. They will say what we know, and not a bit more than that. They will choose their words carefully. They will distinguish between speculation and accepted truth. I live in southern CA, and Lucy Jones (formerly of the USGS) is such a person, for earthquakes. These people are a treasure, because this stuff is hard and it's important to get it right if you're going to make public statements. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecas...

IvyMike 6y ago

Let's take his PDF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coronavirus-2019_Data_Michael_Levitt.pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR2h3YZ4z5JuMiK9BJUotDeGKzmjCiOLo7aV3-WOC8CpzIZak8IE1--wV8M https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coro... He presented a bunch of authoritative looking numbers and graphs, and says "if we draw a curve through these, we see this trend". And it turned out to be massively wrong, but he never issued a mea culpa. Instead, he says "Going off of the only numbers that I already had, it basically quite clearly said that inside Hubei, there would be a few thousand deaths, and outside of Hubei in China there would only be a few hundred deaths. And that was enough to give people more confidence in understanding the virus, though I don’t think it really prepared the rest of the world for what was going to end up happening. " Yes, there is a reason that actual epidemiologists did NOT come to that conclusion: due to myriad factors, data about disease is messy, and you need to account for that. I never see him acknowledge that fact; I just see more "I connected these dots and extrapolated the curve predictions", even though that hasn't worked for him yet: > I think it’s going to end up with less deaths than what I thought. In March, I thought there would be a total of 220,000, but there will be less than that. Right now it is around 155,000 in the U.S., and I am expecting it to end up under 170,000 or maybe 175,000.

googthrowaway42 6y ago
The "actual epidemiologists" at the WHO waited months to declare this a pandemic after it was already clear it was spreading throughout the world. They did this because they are incompetent and were in the pocket of the CCP. If you want to fault this guy for something it's trusting the data out of China at all and even considering it appropriate to do analysis with those numbers. Again, 170k estimated vs 220k actual deaths is not a huge difference when dealing with a highly multiplicative event like a pandemic.
- IvyMike 6y ago
  170k is his "final count"; 220k is the current running total. There's plenty of time for an order of magnitude of wrongness.