How well did they follow the Wisdom of Crowds tenants? (James Surowiecki)
Diversity of opinion - Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
Independence - People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
Decentralization - People can specialize and draw on local knowledge.
Aggregation - Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
I would say this is based on the Matt Ridley book The Rational Optimist? Rational Optimist Book | Matt Ridley
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Fauci wrote in a paper reported on by The Australian. “Scientists working in this field might say — as indeed I have said — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci defended “gain-of-function” research in 2012
Is there a trustworthy confusion matrix on for all the various testing methods? The drive to quote "cases" in a hysterical media seems to be misleading without it. Also a definition of "cases" seems to vary widely.
My other issue is a net deaths versus dyeing from other things previously. Is there a good metric seeing as there is a economic reason to label deaths for Covid over the other usual suspects.
Does any one believe that experts in this field are any better than others? Check out Tetlock's work on forecasting.
Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from tr...
“On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” - Lord Macaulay 1840
For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enrichin...
Fourth generation nuclear weapons are as many say in the industry are the "technology of the future and always will be". I understand this is partially a thought experiment, but just to point out that the premise is far from reality.
Molecular laser isotope separation is a much more likely scenario to create fissionable material on the sly. Remember the first atomic bomb to kill people was a howitzer barrel and two lumps of Uranium 235 (not even weapons grade) shot into each other. The amount of material that actually fused would be about the mas...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlJD0i_WwdQ&list=PLC4FFB9664D0850A0
A playlist of all things Rand...
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/
Galt's Gulch Online.
How would you write into your model market psychology?
"What seems too high and risky to the majority generally goes higher and what seems low and cheap generally goes lower." - William O’Neil
Most of these chestnuts in trading continue to be repeated because of the ground truth in them. What part of the market shows the binary view of most traders euphoria and despair?
How good would have been a pre-mortem as many products in tech get before they are released to the public? https://medium.com/paypal-tech/pre-mortem-technically-working-backwards-1724eafbba02