alt Hacker NewsThis reminds me of the 2013 finding that showed an earlier 2010 study praising austerity as a recovery mechanism was flawed because of an Excel calculation error and lack of diligence.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-error-heard-round...
It also reminds me of the flaws in the London epidemiological model about how to respond to covid.
It just may be that these things should be reviewed a little closer by people who are obsessive about correctness
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> flaws in the London epidemiological model about how to respond to covid.
That one was fun. I got into an argument with a scientist who was (IIRC) working with or for the specific professor that made that mess, and he blamed the entire software engineering/computer science industry for making C++ too hard to use, and said it should never have been released if mistakes like this could be made. And then accused me of gatekeeping when I said perhaps they should get an expert to look over this stuff before submitting results to governments to form a policy basis.
The attitude seemed to be "I am a scientist and am clearly very smart, and therefore anything you do must be trivial in comparison. If I can't pick up in seconds what takes you years to learn and more years to perfect, you've clearly done it all wrong and it's your fault."
>It just may be that these things should be reviewed a little closer by people who are obsessive about correctness
No amount of review is enough. As anyone who's worked in quant science will attest, a model that hasn't repeatedly made correct out-of-sample predictions is most likely worthless, as it's far far easier to overfit a model to data than to predict the future.