Sure, I didn’t mean it was impossible to put a useful number on it. But you (or whoever calculated the metric; I don’t know if that’s you) had to make a decision that 1⁄4 mile was the best distance around which to calculate, and it still apparently took days of computer time and required making up random positions for people within their census blocks. It’s absurdly complicated compared to population density, which could probably be calculated reasonably accurately thousands of years ago, if anyone cared to do so. So (I contend) population density is more available both in one’s mind, as a potential explanatory factor, and outside of one’s mind, as a statistic to try to explain some phenomenon (such as COVID results).
Anthropic clustering. I used to use this for forecasting at the beginning of the pandemic.
Sure, I didn’t mean it was impossible to put a useful number on it. But you (or whoever calculated the metric; I don’t know if that’s you) had to make a decision that 1⁄4 mile was the best distance around which to calculate, and it still apparently took days of computer time and required making up random positions for people within their census blocks. It’s absurdly complicated compared to population density, which could probably be calculated reasonably accurately thousands of years ago, if anyone cared to do so. So (I contend) population density is more available both in one’s mind, as a potential explanatory factor, and outside of one’s mind, as a statistic to try to explain some phenomenon (such as COVID results).