[mike_hearn]

Sure it took off. There's no conceptual problem with your predictions affecting people such that your inputs change.

This is why I was careful in my post to talk about public sector models (academic, government). There are lots of private sector actors successfully modelling aspects of society and the economy: actuaries, quants, even day traders. They're all acting on the predictions of a private model in a dynamic and even adversarial environment, yet they succeed. The problems here are not on the conceptual level, they're to do with the prevalence of sub-zero intellectual standards in the public sector. Nobody forces academics to make a big fuss over models that have never been validated, or which have massive CIs, or which generate so many or such long term 'scenarios' that they're effectively unfalsifiable.

All these things are the kind of pseudo-scientific modelling practices that result in firings or bankruptcies when done in the "real world". Government subsidies keep the low standards going in the public sector. Ultimately, ending this farce requires the social studies to be defunded, as is now happening in NZ and hopefully soon in the rest of the world.