Top all-time · #14656
Nicholas Lewis
Personal blog · nicholaslewis.orgsciencedata
Nicholas Lewis's personal blog at nicholaslewis.org covers science and data. Since 2019, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Why herd immunity to Covid-19 is reached much earlier than thought”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nicholas Lewis's posts on COVID modelling, lockdown evidence, climate models and trust in science. The comments mostly cite the posts as support, and two judge an article as interesting or worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nicholas Lewis, an independent Climate Science Researcher, based in the UK. Climate Science Researcher - Data Analysis - Probability - Statistical Inference - Climate Variability - Climate- Climate Science - Physics of Global Warming - Bayesian Inference - Radiative Forcing - Global Climate Mo
Most-linked posts?
- /wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lewis_Climate-Sensitivity_talk_Dublin2019-slides.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-15
- Why herd immunity to Covid-19 is reached much earlier than thought2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-12
What Hacker News says?
Heck more than one. Try "Determining the optimal strategy for reopening schools, the impact of test and trace interventions, and the risk of occurrence of a second COVID-19 epidemic wave in the UK: a modelling study" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4... Published August. Based on the Covasim model, paper describing it here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20097469v... Th…
Comment linking /did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim/
on “The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire”Submitted Why herd immunity to Covid-19 is reached much earlier than thought as a story · 37 points
HN discussionIf in 50 years, we find out that the predictions made by our models had been wrong (either the measures we take to reduce CO2 don't lead to the results we expected, or the warming we see is outside of the expected ranges) - in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong? This has already happened. Models developed in the 1990s didn't match what happened in the 21st century. The resulting c…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lewis_Climate-Sensitivity_talk_Dublin2019-slides.pdf
on “First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming (1856)”I feel like this study is missing the forest for the trees. Which section of society has the highest trust in scientists? Probably it's other scientists, closely followed by science journalists. Yet this article is set in the paradigm in which people are divided into "the public" and "scientists", with the latter being universally correct and the former in need of education by the latter. Over the past few years I'v…
Comment linking /did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim/
on “Trusting science leaves people vulnerable to believing pseudoscience”Is that why this article is flagged? Because of who wrote it? Do you have any specific disagreement with anything he wrote? Because it seemed to be an interesting article with many things in it I didn't know, written in an engaging style. From glancing through the comments below it seems people are angry because this guy isn't angry, and doesn't believe the world is doomed. Why climate change is good for the world -…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lewis_Climate-Sensitivity_talk_Dublin2019-slides.pdf
on “We've Just Had the Best Decade in Human History”I've read a lot of public health papers in the past year, probably more than 50. Here are some of the problems that cropped up in papers that were used by governments to support policy decisions. Many of those policy decisions later turned out to be incorrect, like lockdowns and mask mandates, both of which easily count as drastic and neither were textbook. In fact pre-COVID pandemic control plans by the WHO explici…
Comment linking /did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim/
on “The Gaslighting of Science”> On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. Wow, next they'll review one doctors handwriting and conclude that hospitals should be defunded, with their job handled by horse doctors... Non-intended randomness is of course bad, but it's bad mainly because it makes it harder to track down causes of actually important problems with the produced distributions. The worst p…
Comment linking /imperial-college-uk-covid-19-numbers-dont-seem-to-add-up/
on “Imperial College London have released their Covid-19 epidemic simulation”It's because new cases peaked at the end of April for Sweden, so the population is probably already most of the way towards herd immunity. How is that possible? Two main theories are being explored: 1. The population didn't start out 100% susceptible like the models assume. Some large fraction of people may have pre-existing immunity from prior coronavirus infections. 2. The population is non-homogeneous. The models…
Comment linking /why-herd-immunity-to-covid-19-is-reached-much-earlier-than-thought/
on “Just 7.3% of Stockholm’s inhabitants developed Covid-19 antibodies by April 30”That's a cute story (read to the end for the twists). I really came to hate this problem when reading COVID research. Primary case for the prosecution is a paper like Flaxman et al, "Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe" [1]. It claims that lockdowns saved ~3 million lives. Amongst other problems this paper has: it is built on circular logic [2] and an over-fitted model [3…
Comment linking /did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim
on “Academic Urban Legends”