“It’s stupid to predict based on three data points,” Marc Lipsitch told me, referring to the flu pandemics in 1918, 1957, and 1968. “All you can do is plan for different scenarios.” If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.
