This segment points to today’s hubris, or tragic blindness: over-confidence in technology or failure to consider the risk of “garbage in, garbage out” which is “infecting” every domain - from healthcare to government policy to economics. “Though none of them were epidemiologists, Mecher, Hatchett, and Glass were convinced that computer m…
This segment points to today’s hubris, or tragic blindness: over-confidence in technology or failure to consider the risk of “garbage in, garbage out” which is “infecting” every domain - from healthcare to government policy to economics. “Though none of them were epidemiologists, Mecher, Hatchett, and Glass were convinced that computer modeling would transform epidemiology. In The Premonition, Glass reflected on old-school scientists like Henderson with a kind of pity. “I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?’ ” he told Lewis. “They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have the tools.” Tools like computer models.
Henderson, on the other hand, believed that basing pandemic mitigation strategies on hypothetical models—models that themselves were based on hypothetical assumptions—could lead policymakers deeply astray. He said that people behaved in unpredictable ways that models could not capture. “
This segment points to today’s hubris, or tragic blindness: over-confidence in technology or failure to consider the risk of “garbage in, garbage out” which is “infecting” every domain - from healthcare to government policy to economics. “Though none of them were epidemiologists, Mecher, Hatchett, and Glass were convinced that computer modeling would transform epidemiology. In The Premonition, Glass reflected on old-school scientists like Henderson with a kind of pity. “I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?’ ” he told Lewis. “They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have the tools.” Tools like computer models.
Henderson, on the other hand, believed that basing pandemic mitigation strategies on hypothetical models—models that themselves were based on hypothetical assumptions—could lead policymakers deeply astray. He said that people behaved in unpredictable ways that models could not capture. “