OUR EGGHEADS VS. THEIR EGGHEADS: THE MODELING WARS
The modeling wars rage on. Right-wing media outlets and personalities keep insisting that the eggheads have the death toll wrong and it’s safe to re-open. They’re claiming there is a vast conspiracy to fake mortality rates because… reasons? To make Trump look bad? To destroy the economy? I guess?
Basically, wingnuts are claiming that doctors are scribbling “COVID-19” on death certificates even if there is an icepick sticking out of the corpse’s head. They’re saying the death-count could be literally *anything*!
But the numbers nerds have accounted for possible errors, and they’re right up front with it. Notice that in the Worldometer: Confirmed and Probable Covid-19 Deaths: Daily Report for New York City, the number of “confirmed” deaths is 14,428 and the number of “probable” deaths is 5,327. They helpfully define “confirmed” as “having had a positive test come back from a lab” and “probable” as “has the ‘rona on the death certificate” (paraphrase). So even if every single one of those probable corona deaths is wrong, it will only change the overall number by about a third. This is the truest egghead test: they give you a way to estimate, WITH NUMBERS, how significant some error or uncertainty is, compared to their overall conclusions. Plus they check and double-check their data and each other:
You know who does NOT pass the egghead test and should not be listened to? These guys:
- Republican Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona who shut down the university modeling team at his Bureau for Public Health because their numbers don’t support his rosy predictions and he wants to open his state now, now, NOW.
- President Donald J. Trump, here blathering about models: “… They’ve been so wrong. … And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong. Those models that you’re mentioning are talking about without mitigation, well, we’re mitigating and we’ve learned to mitigate, but we can be in place, work in place and also mitigate [….]some models or charts showed higher than that. But 2.2 million people. I always felt 60, 65, 70….”
- Rush Limbaugh, because he doesn’t even pretend to know what he’s talking about. On hydroxychloroquine: “That’s just my theory. I could be dead wrong, ladies and gentlemen. I could be way off the beaten path on this. I’m just throwing it out there as an idea. I’m Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes. ‘I know nothing. Nothing. I’ve seen nothing!’ I don’t know. I’m just out there wild guessing like everybody else.”
Yes, Rush, you are wildly guessing, completely wrong, and you’re a danger to anyone who pays any attention to you. More importantly, “everybody else” is NOT GUESSING.
If you’re better at reading people than you are at statistics, you might want to judge who to trust by the company they keep: the fake-death-toll supporters include our old friends at QAnon. Also, just having letters after your name is no guarantee: Dr. Scott Jensen, MD, a Republican state senator in Minnesota is in a rush to re-open and the heck with the consequences.
And then there’s the undisputed queen of faux eggheads, Dr. Judy Mikovits, who stars in a slick, 25-minute video called Plandemic that got more than eight million views before FaceBook and YouTube took it down. Per the NY Times, “In recent weeks, she has become a darling of far-right publications like The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit.”
Mikovits has a medical degree but you can tell she’s a faux egghead because she isn’t always hedging and qualifying and explaining about exceptions. In general, eggheads live and move and have their being in a state of uncertainty that the rest of us don’t want to hear about; especially if we’re scared. But these days we have to listen to people who don’t speak in absolutes — and be wary of the ones that do:
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