joolze

"Got that? If so, you’re doing better than the author. Here’s the problem: if the probability of exposure is accumulating over time then why does it start going down? You can’t make a conspiracy secret again! The increase each year should fall toward 0 as the population dies off, leaving the plots to trail off as flat lines."

When one person is talking about a PDF and one person is talking about a CDF we all look like idiots...

And why is this narky nelly not actually showing us the goods; what is, apparently, a one line calculus error?

edit: reading his tweets he claims that eqn 3 is "derived" improperly and has a "calculus" error... when eqn 3 is just a combination of eqns 1 and 2, there is absolutely no calculus involved. Later on he goes to state that eqn 1 is the problem -- this is a theoretical concern, not a calculus one.

edit2: "Several statisticians who I spoke to or who checked the paper independently agree." ... as far as I can tell this translates to 2 people: statsguyuk, and RichardTol (who, far from agreeing seems confused).

Honestly the curves look exactly like I would expect them to look, given the author's premise. Worst thing is that his y axis is labelled a bit funny.

This looks like a physicist blowing off steam with a fun little thought experiment and I think the commentator should tone down his fucking language instead of trying to infantilize the author and the journal. If you really want to swing hard with a rant like this then you need to nut the fuck up and publish your equations and your "simple computer simulation" (What are you simulating by the way? These are just plots of functions... Have you constructed a toy population with toy death rates and toy conversations that run around in some weird drunken-walk conspiracy space?)

disclaimer: I didn't read past the alleged "math problem."