18th October 2020
Extract from an email that I’ve received about Grattan’s bad report
This extract is self-explanatory.
==EXTRACT==
Seeing my fellow Victorians in collective delusion has been very upsetting. I am ‘on the left’ and often am scared to speak.
The misuse of agent based modelling, throwing around terms like ‘the science says’ and backing it up with ‘this super computer has a fair bit of grunt’ has infuriated me.
One thing that really troubled me was that the Grattan Institute ‘Towards COVID zero report’ (https://grattan.edu.au/wp-
The reliance on top down data to justify personal bias is out of control. The agent based model is a joke. It’s great for understanding how systems impact on each other, or perhaps for prediction where you have a few flu seasons worth of data in context. Or perhaps if you are modelling something like bee migration. But to set thresholds for the country?