Kristian G. AndersenGeverifieerd account

....for those following along who do not know Kristian for the expert he is...

1/ I think a lot of this disagreement between @edwardcholmes, @K_G_Andersen et al. and the @PREDICTproject boils down to what we mean by "predict". As an ecologist who moonlights in quantitative finance to predict stock price movements, I have some opinions on this...

2/ sensu Simon Levin, prediction is a problem of pattern and scale. "Prediction" of weather, for example, does not mean we predict the exact time and place a raindrop lands. Instead, there are tunable scales of space and time over which we can make predictions

3/ We can predict probabilities of rain in a broader region - that's useful. Over some timescales, such as a month, however, we may be able to predict temperature but not rainfall (e.g. which pattern is predictable depends on the scale).

4/ When it comes to "prediction" of viral emergence, we're predicting rare events like tornadoes or hurricanes. There may be "seasons", depending on the phylogenetic scale (some lineages don't spillover at all), and there can be some clear precursors ('thunderstorms' etc.)...

5/ The global virome project is doing the virological equivalent of measuring the clouds - such measurements will help us put the rain of pathogen spillover/emergence into context....

6/ Now, back to finance. When we say we "predict" stock prices, we mean that we estimate parameters. Instead of some null hypothesis, such as an equal risk of viral emergence across the world and across all viral lineages, we can estimate parameters of higher/lower risk.

7/ Models of viral emergence, like climate, weather, or stock models, boil down to estimation of parameters, and our capacity to estimate the spatial/temporal/phylogenetic landscape of risk can be reasonably expected to see improvements with the global virome project.

8/ If we're getting mad at @PREDICTproject for overselling our potential to predict/forecast outbreaks, they're not the only ones who have oversold an argument. In the @nature paper you linked, you compare the multi-year budget of the GVA to a single year budget of US NIAID.

9/ I think we could all benefit from taking a chill pill and realizing that (1) we don't know what we'll discover/predict from the global virome project but, like measuring clouds, it can potentially help us understand the tornadoes/hurricanes of spillover.