"Disclaimer" - I have no relationship with Gurkenglas outside the ~2hr session we just went through. But I got the feeling I should tout his skills to the community, so I'm doing it. He did not solicit my comment.
This was fun. We didn't do maths so much, because I don't have a maths problem. I have several major problems. We identified some of them.
Gurkenglas has a pretty good handle on looking at completely foreign code, grokking some high-level problems (need to refactor) and some low-level problems (useless conditionals) and even backing off and not fix...
I note your typical disdain for the anti-vaxxers. You probably have your reasons. I struggle to discount them as quickly. If I were a betting man, I would bet there are some pretty bright and well-reasoned ones in the mix. I don't think I can predict the future well, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised to find out in 10 years the anti-vaxxers were right, for the right reasons, and that we should have given their reservations far more careful consideration[0].
If you care about being fair to that class of people[1], you need to put more thought into the pos... (read more)
Decisions about covid policy have been mostly political, but vaccines weren't political before that. Consider smallpox. Smallpox was all over the world and apparently unbeatable. It was described in China in 340. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got it, and if they died history could have gone way differently. https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines. It was just a thing that sometimes happened to people, and nothing could be done about it. Suddenly, as soon as vaccines were applied to a region. Smallpox was completely eliminated there.
A simi... (read more)