This is a weird comment, Eric, and not an accurate characterization of the interview w/IHME. People should listen for themselves. A lot of our questions are implicitly or explicitly critical. But it is an interview, not a critique (or an endorsement). fivethirtyeight.com/features/polit…
I do express empathy with IHME in the interview—and have expressed it on Twitter too—because 1) building models is hard 2) criticizing them is easy and 3) some of the criticisms are dumb. But I don't think I've offered much praise for the technical details behind their approach.
When I've seen smart technical criticisms of IHME, I've tried to amplify/add to those (see below). It's also not my field, though, so as an outsider, my comments are going be more tempered than they would be for say an election or NBA model.
