This video (spotted in a comment at Jo Nova's) does a pretty good job explaining how an "AI" system, capable of beating the best Go players in the world, actually has no insight whatsoever into the game. Faced with a stupid strategy that wasn't covered in its training, it had no answer.

Strikes me the recent widespread awe about ChatGPT, etc., is just another step along the path of worship/abuse of poorly understood maths. Tiljander sediments had the sacred significance (never mind that newer sediments needed to gravitate below older ones). Now computers can win difficult games against top players (never mind that they lose against a foolish strategy).

mailman,
At a sufficiently academic level, Ferguson can maintain that his predictions haven't been proven wrong. His horror scenario was predicated on if we do nothing so, since what we did was a long way from *nothing*, it was natural that the figures would differ.

Rubbish, of course, and, as you say, what should you expect to get from a multitude of guesses except a guess.

I think lessons have been learnt by the general public but the memory won't last more than twenty years or so. It won't be Ferguson by then, but some other charlatan is bound to surface selling bogus certainty and another generation of bureaucrats and politicians will lap it up.

tomo,
10^-9 probably is around the order of human CO2 emissions' contribution to warming over the last century.

That counter reminded me of an Aus. comedy sketch from the early '90s (I think). D-Generation or Fast Forward or some such, but I can't turn it up on YouTube. As a sketch of the sketch, it started with a newsreader telling us that three people had died in a car accident and that those figures would be coming up on the deathalyser, and sure enough the counter bumps up to 3. Then we hear of 5,000 people in India dying in floods. The counter bumps up to 53, at which point the newsreader tells us that "those are, of course, racially adjusted figures". The next story is of an aboriginal man who has died at the hands of police in Western Australia. Deathalyser unchanged. Moment of embarrassed silence from the newsreader.

It continued, but that was the key part for me. Was particularly funny at the time because the "deathalyser" was exactly the sort of gimmick that the TV channels were all playing with in those days of advancing electronics. So nice to see that the gimmicks persist at Sky UK.

Listened to a recent ABC Law Report where I learnt that of about 60,000 fines for breach of COVID rules in NSW, 33,000 have been withdrawn following a Supreme Court judgement, and all the rest are likely to be dropped too. In all cases it appears that the legal point was that there was no clarity on exactly what the person had done and no clarity on exactly which regulation had been breached.. The key point of that was that it made it impossible to mount any defence.

The fines appear to all have been $1,000 or more, so it's not chicken feed. Of the examples given in the podcast the most ridiculous was the fellow, alone in his car, who stopped in a headland car-park overlooking the ocean. Police came up, tapped on the window, and handed him a fine.

Thing is that, while I'm glad to hear that the fines have been found unlawful, real harm was done by handing out those fines and this won't fix it. Where are the repercussions for the lawmakers and police? (not that that will fix it either, but it might give them pause for next time)

One point of mild amusement was the interviewer trying (and failing) to coax his guests to match his level of indignation that the withdrawing of all these fines meant the "anti-vaxxers" were let off too.

Short but to the point an expose of US energy policy

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6326096887112

Rob,

Seems Fergusson and his model (and his subsequent behaviour) have just been quietly forgotten...almost as if people dont want to learn any lessons from any of this?

I didnt realise the model had so many variables that for even an untrained heathen like me sounds like trouble (as in...how can you ever get anything remotely useful when you literally have to take a million guesses and the infinite number of relationships between each of those gazillion guesses) to get some kind of number thats just a guess (at best!).

Mailman,
I only recall code reviews of the rewritten model. They found numerous technical problems, but I don't remember anyone going for the deeper question of the flawed model itself. The Wikipedia entry gives a fair bit of info I wasn't aware of.

The whole idea of sophisticated epidemic modelling is daft. Naive models with fixed rates of contagion and fatality are ok and Ferguson would have been more honest to use one of those with a big arm wave for the confidence interval rather than to play make believe with his complex model and (I now learn) its 940 input factors. For God's sake!

tomo,
Trudeau will have some difficulty wiping the memories of his freezing the finances of people who disagreed with him, raising the stakes from you may not work to you may not eat.

Thing is, it's not only Trudeau and Daniel Andrews. The whole process of party politics selects for psychopaths.

It's been amusing listening to Trudeau re-writing his pandemic actions. Apparently he never forced anyone to do anything, simply made it possible for them to do the 'right thing'.

So does anyone have an update on what happened with the deep dive in to Fergussons code that was used to justify destroying everything?