[jaydaigle]

I'm a bit late to this, sorry; one of my students let me know this thread existed!

I want to encourage you not to try to use this formula or anything like it to make concrete predictions. You are, unfortunately, right that the numbers we have access to are crap. But that doesn't mean that our modeling will be any better; we'd need to use the public numbers as input. And those public numbers are crap.

There are people whose entire job is to figure out ways to make useful predictions from the information we have. Their estimates aren't great, in part because the numbers they're using as input are crap.

But the numbers they have for input are as good as what we have, so we're unlikely to manage better. And in the worst case we can easily Epstein ourselves and generate predictions that are wildly, embarrassingly off the mark.

I'm not saying you should trust the official or expert numbers. But they're almost certainly better than what you'll manage on your own.