(p. A4) As more reliable data comes in, said Dr. Spiegelhalter, “the Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly becoming a constrained problem.”
. . .
Statistical science, he said, “is a machine, in a sense, to turn the variability that we see in the world — the unpredictability, the enormous amount of scatter and randomness that we see around us — into a tool that can quantify our uncertainty about facts and numbers and science.”
But as he acknowledged in his book, “The Art of Statistics,” models “are simplifications of the real world — they are the maps not the territory.” (This is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “On Exactitude in Science,” about a map growing as large as the territory it was meant to represent.)
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 7, and has the title “Embracing the Uncertainties.”)
The Spiegelhalter book mentioned above, is:
Spiegelhalter, David. The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data. New York: Basic Books, 2019.