>The purpose of the model is to show that we can reproduce the survival rates we see in reality, even if there are no effective treatments.

That's a great argument in the abstract, but it ignores the fact that there are effective treatments for colon cancer. The fact that we can reproduce real survival rates in a counterfactual world where there are no effective treatments for colon cancer does not actually give us a model of the real world because the counterfactual explicitly contradicts known scientific facts.

What you have to do in order to make this argument is to show that there are Markov models where early detection does not work despite the fact that some cancers will cause death if untreated and not if treated. You cannot simply rely on models that have clearly impossible transition probabilities. You need possible models. Or you have to show that the absolutely massive amount of scientific literature and clinical experience about how to treat colon cancer is somehow flawed.

Some people are defending this because the blog post is attacking a specific argument, but I don't see how that can work. I am pretty sure that Nassim Taleb and most other people who are capable of putting together a coherent statistical argument (even a flawed one) understand that colon cancer can be treated sometimes.