That argument has always irked me. Grandparents have always played a huge part of societal evolution and would he like to guess how that plays out? Everything from watching the kids and family stability to being repositories of tradition, knowledge and government. Jeez.
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Could be, I was looking at this part of the interview
By way of comparison, the virulent aids virus that killed wantonly in the 1980s crested and declined when it gave way to a milder form of virus…
So I took his “evolutionary pressure” argument to mean that the virus would be changing, not us. Either way, he’s wrong.
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Is there any reason the entirety of the article isn’t “this asshole said only 500 people in the US would die, and as we are at 4x that number or more already and all signs are it is continuing to go up as opposed to people coming back to life the only reason to look at the rest of his words is to find out a bunch of other stuff that also isn’t true” ??
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litigators need only to sow doubt in the courtroom.
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What irks me most about these kind of people - an academic in one field who brags his big brain is soo smart that his opinion automatically matters on all other topics…is the assumption that their contrarian viewpoint deserves respect and credibility just because they thought of it.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of shitting in the punchbowl then complaining about being called out for it.
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The newsworthy part isn’t that some crackpot asshole made some inaccurate predictions. It’s that he his baseless, dangerously inaccurate article was able to gain traction in the highest levels of the Executive Branch including the people setting policy for the Coronavirus response.
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Therein one can see the difference between an intellectual and a dude who could afford education.
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He’s a step earlier in the right wing grift supply chain than the few you listed. He’s one of their go to peddlers of garbage science that confirms their desired outcomes. When a Bannon or the like needs a source to cite for their assertions they point to guys like him.
There is excellent money in providing a thin veneer of respectable cover to companies wanting to gut the regulations they don’t like.
Yes, because we came very close to real policy being made because of it and so we need to disassemble the underpinnings and not let it slide as a minor arithmetic error or we risk it coming back when the costs of the closure are a little higher and the audience even more willing to hear it. The problem with a good public health quarantine at this scale is that the better it works, the higher the costs and the more obscured the benefits.
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I did this back on March 16, 2020 (the same day Mr. Epstein published his so-called paper), using total U.S. deaths data from Worldometers.info. Even my simple prediction grossly understated what’s happened since:
Nevertheless, and this is the important part, the model foretold a really scary April and May.
For those preferring a log-linear plot:
The number’s doubling every three days now, more or less. I predict 10,000 deaths in the US by next Sunday. Maybe self-quarantine and social distancing will move the curve in a good direction, but I wonder where the curve will flatten out.
THE IMPORTANT THING IS, I’m not an epidemiologist (had to use the spellchecker there). I have done some regression as a bioengineer, but, as seen above, my model sucked after a couple day’s prediction. There was no knowledge of infection rates or anything like that, just pure regression on data freely available. The log-linear plot does suggest some slowing in the last two days, but who knows where it’s going. But thanks to people like this asshole, and the total fucking dipshit in the oval office, the number of deaths is going to be a lot more than it needed to be.
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Bwahahaha
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Just occurred to me that I really miss Isaac Asimov. He’d be laying into the bullshit artists right now.
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his slight of hand is that he’s not talking a particular number. he’s saying that diseases can’t spread exponentially because if they did then everyone would be dead from ( insert prior disease here. )
his argument is that
“taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin”
( what the crap is that? ive read the origin of species and that sure isn’t there ) will generate weak and strong versions of the virus just like it (hasnt) with aids, h1n1, and syphilis (not a virus) and so infection will be linear not exponential.
[eta: even that basic question is so off base it’s hard to believe. in the discussion he posits that exponential means “everyone dies” on multiple occasions. but, in fact lots of people survive, and it’s not from having “weak viruses” ]
the man’s an idiot. he’s probably good at being a lawyer because he can convince himself of anything.
this part struck me as the ultimate trumpism:
This tendency takes time. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be longer.
hey, i said a thing but don’t hold me to it. i could still be right eventually.
except in this case he really can’t because the progression isn’t linear.
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Perhaps if he would like to stand up against that wall over there…
Good thing I don’t answer to anyone on my site.
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I had Epstein for two classes in Law School and the guy is super smart in his core areas, but he has absolutely no idea where his core areas begin and end.
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Oh so he’s also racist? Cool cool.
Notice it’s always the assholes who are first to demand respect.
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“See also: Dunning-Krueger effect”. Nice burn, Wikipedia.
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This is where 90% of your cranks come from. Oh, that problem in your field? I can solve that with my mighty brain without any knowledge of your field or the fact that anybody who’s gotten through the 102 course knows that’s not gonna work.
Physicists are notorious for doing this.
(I think the cartoon is a little unfair. I mean, I can think of an invertebrate zoologist who was a well know crank in certain fields.)
Anyway, notice how unpleasant this guy gets when he’s challenged. What else is he going to do? He doesn’t really have much in the way of an argument, and he can’t admit he’s wrong.
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I had a very good physics lecturer at college who was convinced that the second law of thermodynamics invalidated evolution.
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