It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. - Albert Einstein (Nature 2018).
In this post, I'll walk you through how you could have created an algorithm for assigning prior probabilities to all hypotheses called the Universal Prior. It's really a universal prior, since there are many. The formalization that uses this prior to learn about the world is called Solomonoff induction, which Alex and Luke wrote a great post giving an intuitive introduction here. Marcus Hutter took Solomonoff induction a few... (read 6055 more words →)
I would think diseases adapt via an evolutionary like process. If people who display visible symptoms spend less time interacting with others (stay home from school, don’t go to parties, take sick leave), then there’s selective pressure to have less symptoms. Either those symptoms aid in transmission, or there isn’t any standing variation in coughing / sneezing severity which seems unlikely.