WHY WE FOOLISHLY BELIEVED THE COVID MODELERS: A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data. In the Middle Ages, the physicians of Paris “forecast” the ebb and flow of the Black Death using the conjunctions of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The way we’re seduced by complex mathematical models today isn’t all that different from how we were seduced by astrology for millennia, as the physicist and data scientist Alexander Boxer explains in his entertaining history of this obsession.

Astrology was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Just consider that for much of the last two thousand years, the word “mathematician” (mathematicus) simply meant an astrologer; there was no distinction. . . . Astrologers were the quants and data scientists of their day, and those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.

And learn from their mistakes as we look for an escape from lockdown.