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This is just plain ignorance: of course a code that sets out to model the entirety of a society will have a lot of free parameters, societies aren't described i

This is just plain ignorance: of course a code that sets out to model the entirety of a society will have a lot of free parameters, societies aren't described in detail by a simple one parameter function.... And while the systematics of population data could well be so great that the Ferguson model is hopelessly unable to offer any insight, one does not prove that by showing the code is unable to produce stupidly implausible distributions (They complain that they can't get a flat population pyramid!). At the end of the day, the final word is simply this: "A separate question is whether these bugs materially change the predictions of the code. I do not know."

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
The real issue is the picking of one function. I would be much more convinced of his analysis if he'd chosen the function randomly. That being said, I am very unsurprised at the results, given what I've seen of scientific code. However, it's worth noting that the estimates provided by these models in the past have been reasonable: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-rea... (See the P.S. where he realises that the estimates are actually pretty reasonable).