Hacker News Reader

Comment by vikinghckr | Hacker News Reader

>This is an incredibly poor take.

No it isn't.

> It's well known that academic software doesn't follow great software engineering practices.

That doesn't make it acceptable. Also, it's also "well known" that vast majority of academic work has zero tangible effect on society. This isn't one of those works. It's possibly the most important piece of academic work that has happened in recent memory. So the bar for this is MUCH higher than typical academic research work.

>. That it isn't fully deterministic (with a fixed random seed) doesn't make thee research invalid and shouldn't discredit research that builds on the model.

It does make it invalid, when the difference between runs is as big as 80,000 estimated deaths which can lead to dramatically different government policies.

> This is another level of crazy.

No it's not. Academia is way behind the industry when it comes to modeling the economy and the real world.

View on HN

> No it's not. Academia is way behind the industry when it comes to modeling the economy and the real world.

The insurance industry is expected to ask the government for bailouts because none of their models can account for the fallout from this, just like AIG did during the '08 crisis.

Not to protect the insurance industry, which I know nothing about, but how does their hypothetical failure, misery and bailout relate to, or validate the study in question?

Criticism: Academia fails to model the real world, in contrast to industry ("is way behind industry").

Response: An entire industry of competing and well-funded actors that specialize in modeling and predicting expensive failure states also failed to model the world accurately.

Implication of Response: Where is the evidence that this is inferior to industry?

>>Implication of Response: Where is the evidence that this is inferior to industry?

A meta implication is that expert models were insufficient to inform decisions.

Well, even if they did they'd ask for it because they know they'd likely get it. And then what exactly is the incentive to account for it and pay for it with your own money if you can not account for it and get money from the government if anything bad happens?

> It does make it invalid, when the difference between runs is as big as 80,000 estimated deaths which can lead to dramatically different government policies.

Wrong. Nobody decides policy based on whether there will be 320k or 400k deaths. What matters is the order of magnitude.

80,000 deaths is more than double the current number of deaths in the UK, which is itself very high.

This difference alone is the difference between deploying the army to build field hospitals and emergency seizures of industry to make it happen, or doing nothing. And it comes from floating point differences between AVX and non-AVX hardware. The apologetics for this on HN are absurd.

> 80,000 deaths is more than double the current number of deaths in the UK, which is itself very high.

That is not relevant.

> This difference alone is the difference between deploying the army to build field hospitals and emergency seizures of industry to make it happen, or doing nothing. And it comes from floating point differences between AVX and non-AVX hardware.

No, 320k or 400k deaths will not make the difference to decide whether the army will be deployed.

If the 80k were the difference between 100 and 80100, then it obviously would impact policy.

What matters is the relative difference, not the absolute. How is this so hard for you to understand?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com