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Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

Summary:
Look like same thing as Reinhart/Rogoff Excel error....Darwin makes an appearance with these people ofc right on cue: The Imperial team’s response is that it doesn’t matter: they are “aware of some small non-determinisms”, but “this has historically been considered acceptable because of the general stochastic nature of the model”. Note the phrasing here: Imperial know their code has such bugs, but act as if it’s some inherent randomness of the universe, rather than a result of amateur coding. Apparently, in epidemiology, a difference of 80,000 deaths is “a small non-determinism”. These people are really f_cked up... I feel bad for them... I like this part too: On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by

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Look like same thing as Reinhart/Rogoff Excel error....

Darwin makes an appearance with these people ofc right on cue:

The Imperial team’s response is that it doesn’t matter: they are “aware of some small non-determinisms”, but “this has historically been considered acceptable because of the general stochastic nature of the model”. Note the phrasing here: Imperial know their code has such bugs, but act as if it’s some inherent randomness of the universe, rather than a result of amateur coding. Apparently, in epidemiology, a difference of 80,000 deaths is “a small non-determinism”.

These people are really f_cked up... I feel bad for them... I like this part too:

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.

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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