5 Weeks

I started a note on my phone keeping track of different things I've done while the world freaks out about prediction models built with poor and incomplete data. It's a work in progress. It's something to mark progress, keep me focused on something positive rather than succumbing to the pull of absurdity that will define this collective inflection point. I've finally come to peace that logic and reason stand no chance against fear and irrationality feed by misinformation.

My earliest reaction to the closing and cancelling of modern life was that big decisions were being made with very poor data. How do we know that this will be as bad as they say? We were trading a health problem for an economic problem. Were we making a good trade? The last five weeks have me convinced that we are going to regret some choices. Actions were motivated by models predicting millions of people dying. Models are sophisticated ways to guess what's going to happen under a certain set of assumptions. You can't get a good model without good data. COVID 19 is a wonderful illustration of garbage in / garbage out. Decades from now lectures about modelling will caution future modelers with tales of how a sophisticated model informed by garbage data crushed the global economy.

There are no controls in this global experiment. They tell us that all this social distancing is working, pointing to all the deaths that those early models predicted have been averted by locking ourselves away. That's just a story we're being told to keep us compliant. We have no way to know if those early predictions were anywhere close to what would have happened if the virus was allowed to do its thing unopposed. You don't control a virus. You control people to thwart the viruses molecular machinery from making more viruses. Telling people that the initial models were total garbage isn't effective in getting them to stay home.

We've sacrificed more than we realize to avoid a situation that was likely to never become reality. The first few days of this scare felt like a blizzard predicted to drop 2 feet of snow was heading our way but we would end up getting a dusting of snow. There is an argument that it's better to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but should we create a bigger problem in preparing for the worst? Yes, people have died. Those deaths are tragic, but virus kill people everyday. More deaths will be called by the problems created by shutting down the economy. Will those victims be part of the final tally?