More hardass than me!
This guy, Saifedean Ammous, is more hardass than I am!

Epidemiology is a pseudoscience based on the astonishingly idiotic idea that diseases are programmed to spread & kill according to mathematical curves when there is absolutely no reason to believe this. But epidemiologist morons get paid more if they pretend it's true, so they do.

He's solidly correct that math models are murder. But the profession of public health wasn't totally infected by math until this year. Most public health officials were using real science and real knowledge about viruses and immunity, until around March 1, when all of them switched instantly to mass murder.

Neil Ferguson's exponential nonsense was largely ignored by public health experts until this year, when his wildly wrong fake predictions suddenly became absolute truth and gospel and "SCIENCE".

Ammous later says:

The only deadly pandemic in modern times came at the end of World War I, when most the world didn't have sanitation. No pandemic since has killed more than pneumonia kills every year. But the epidemiologists still get paid to pretend their exponentials bear relation to reality.

Yup. Sanitation was the main difference. Also, the 1918 epidemic was part bacterial pneumonia and part viral influenza. Viruses weren't well understood or visible in 1918, so it's impossible to backdate the real mix; but the scientists in 1918 were seeing a lot of pneumococcus bacteria in the flu cases they examined. So 1918 wasn't necessarily an exception to the general rule.

The big point is simple. As I try to point out every day, NATURE DOESN'T DO EXPONENTIALS. NATURE DOES TANH OR SIN. Negative feedback is everywhere in life. A species that starts growing ALWAYS runs into negative feedback, whether the growing species is a virus or a bird or a human. Other animals compete or eat the overpopulated species, or it runs out of food, or it runs into immune systems in the animals it's trying to attack.

Any "expert" who tries to tell you that anything in nature will go exponential is LYING. You can be 100% certain. When you know how things work you don't need the details.

Exponential curves ONLY exist in pure math or software. Debt and Dow can go exponential now because they are pure math, unconstrained by the limits of real business or resources. The government can print an infinite amount of bonds or currency to sustain those curves.
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