Cognitive Bias in Forensic Pathology Decisions was published today by Journal of Forensic Sciences

https://t.co/xvP6tVlIaE
Quite a surprise. Ferguson isn’t qualified to comment on such things. He lacks understanding of basic biological concepts, partly explaining why his predictions are often so extreme.

That said, I’ll take him as an ally. It’s clear we’re already at herd immunity. How can I be sure? London had a huge peak of excess deaths in spring. The timing of peak deaths showed clearly that the pandemic was self-limiting. Recall much debate about whether the interval...

...between lockdown & peak deaths was long enough for lockdown to have been the cause of reducing deaths? The answer was “no”. But it was close & I can understand people thinking “well, it’s close, so perhaps it was lockdown that did it?”, thereby establishing a foundational...

...myth favoured by those who genuinely believe lockdown saves lives (it clearly doesn’t).
I’ll get to London & here immunity. But those wavering about the evidence about lockdown in spring really will benefit from cogitating on this graph.

In blue are the 30 trusts with the earliest date of peak deaths in spring. In red, the 30 with the latest peak deaths. For me, this is proof that national lockdown, which began Mar 23, played no role whatsoever in turning the pandemic. You’ll see some areas had peak daily...

1/

Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'll help you understand the basics of Binomial Thinking.

The future is always uncertain. There are many different ways it can unfold -- some more likely than others. Binomial thinking helps us embrace this view.

2/

The S&P 500 index is at ~3768 today.

Suppose we want to predict where it will be 10 years from now.

Historically, we know that this index has returned ~10% per year.

If we simply extrapolate this, we get an estimate of ~9773 for the index 10 years from now:

3/

What we just did is called a "point estimate" -- a prediction about the future that's a single number (9773).

But of course, we know the future is uncertain. It's impossible to predict it so precisely.

So, there's a sense of *false precision* in point estimates like this.

4/

To emphasize the uncertainty inherent in such predictions, a better approach is to predict a *range* of values rather than a single number.

For example, we may say the index will return somewhere in the *range* of 8% to 12% (instead of a fixed 10%) per year.

5/

10 years from now, this implies an index value in the *range* [8135, 11703]:

"You don't see radio changing gradually and suddenly become radar. #Darwin's theory doesn't work for #technology, and we have to make a new observation."

- W Brian Arthur at SFI today

#evolution #innovation #invention

"Novel technologies are constructed from existing technologies. These offer themselves as components for the construction of further technologies."

- W Brian Arthur at SFI today

#evolution #innovation #invention #technology #engineering #design

Unlike the two-parent #inheritance typical to (but not ubiquitous among) #complex organisms, #technology inherits features from n parents - a "vast ancestral #network" more like horizontal gene transfer networks in #bacteria.

W Brian Arthur on sumulating #invention on a chip:

Does #Archaeology support the Theory of the #AdjacentPossible - that #innovation is combinatorial, persistent, cumulative?

In short, yes. SFI's Tim Kohler on the #Paleolithic data of #technology #evolution & the #prehistory of the infamous "hockeystick" curve:

😉 @SAPIENS_org

#Economist Roger Koppl of @SyracuseU presents a model for the #AdjacentPossible at SFI.

Output = "a combinatorial explosion" or #singularity, albeit one that arguably occurred millions of years ago, or in the distant future (since the model doesn't specify t = 0):