Yes, but you can't go back in time and discover what would have happened if they didn't mass vaccinate. Sure dumb luck may have caught all five cases before it spread further, but do you want to bet your life on dumb luck?

You're arguing that people put their faith in the title people wear rather than the diametrically opposed philosophies they follow. The fact that you have so many people disagreeing with you demonstrates that is not the case. What you are claiming is that what Karl Popper called the "republic of science" (AKA scientific consensus) has no place in Science and that you must personally test each and every claim. That is a ludicrous claim, it demonstrates an immature understanding of philosophy and epistemology. It's also the same old argument climate deniers and creationists use when they claim that "consensus" has no place in Science, it's simply an emotional reaction that puts ones mind at rest when confronted with evidence that unsettles it.

Of course the real problem with your argument is that unlike religion, Science does not claim absolute truth. It claims to have the most accurate answer available at this point in time. A point more eloquently expressed by Asimov in his essay The Relativity of wrong

The fact that you have just questioned Mandella without consequence provides strong evidence that there is no barrier to questioning Mandela other than self-censorship.

Yes, Science is a philosophy, the scientific method is the implementation of that philosophy. The only faith required by Science is that the real world exists and can be observed by others.

Sure, appealing to authority is unscientific but to assume there is no qualitative difference in the opinions of the two groups simply implies you think that all opinions are equal. Many people do express that ideological view, but they obviously don't believe it since nobody would go to the hairdresser to get their appendix removed.

What you are really talking about is informed trust. Why do you trust scientists to follow the scientific method and report honestly? Why do you trust wise men to selflessly mediate between you and your imaginary friend? Why don't you trust the barber to cut your appendix out?

More than that, skepticism is the fundamental principle that Science is built on, and it's no accident that it is shunned by religion. Climate deniers, creationists, flat earthers, etc, are not skeptics. A genuine skeptic practices self-skepticism (ie: questions and tests their own beliefs), refusing to change one's opinion in the face of overwhelming contra-evidence is dogma, AKA pseudo-skepticism.

..and he is preventing you from getting a speeding fine. What's the problem?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". - Karl Marx.

In otherwords everyone is a "worker" in a communist society (despite what you may think of bureaucrats and politicians). Marx thought that it would work because the communist movement belived technology was the road to equity. However they also belived that property above and beyond personal need was a barrier to the efficient use of technology and resources. Mao was a true communist in this respect in that he pulled down the "barrier" by forcing everyone to become a pesant farmer. The result was that millions starved to death.

I was a teenager when they finally booted out the gang of four. In the 40 years since that time China has dragged more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined by directing it's economy towards feeding, housing, and employing it's own people. It's a remarkable turn around, the only economic feat I can can think of that comes close to this kind of growth was the rise of Gengis Kahn.

Both the US and China practise "crony capitilisim" (moderate facisism) these days, they just implement it differently. Actual reasearch (as opposed to ideological naval gazing), into what makes a productive stable society indicates that the sweet spot for income disparity is somewhere around 10:1, ie: the top 1% earn 10X as much as the bottom 1%. Currently China has one of the worst equity ratings in the world, the US and Russia are about even but not that far behind China.

Go watch the last minute of Apollo 11 if you want "terror". Aldrin's heart rate went through the roof while Armstrong's kept plodding along normally, which just goes to show it's more scary being the passenger than the driver.

Insightful? - I think the mods missed your joke.

A small price to pay for the knowledge that Sydney is 40,000 subway cars from Melbourne.

Yes, the math behind the system in TFA was discovered by none other than John Von Neumann, who is also credited with inventing the aritechture that all modern computers are based on. FPGA routing and layout design uses path finding algorithms, the similarity is that they are both optimisers. MinMax, path finding and other optimization algorithms are all part of a branch of maths called Operations Research, or simply "logistics" to Americans. It gained it's original name and it's connection with computers during WW2.

I helped build a dispatch system similar to the one in TFA for a large telco in the 90's that planned and dispatched jobs for 6,000 linesmen and technicians. The thing spent all night calculating the most efficient plan only to have a half dozen PHB's screw it up at 5am with unwritten rules such as Senator Dick Waver needs his phone fixed now! It would then spend all day trying to work around their manual overrides via 2min partial optimization runs. That $100M system would now run on a cheap laptop. It's grandchild is still a "mission critical" system but I imagine the PHB's have got enough hardware grunt to recalculate on the fly these days.

To be honest efficient planning wasn't the original reason they implemented the system, getting the workers into a company van they could take home (union), with a laptop and phone backed by automated dispatching (engineering), meant they (PHB's) could sell $600M of prime real estate the (ex-government) depots had been sitting on for over half a century.

I remeber people making such claims but I also remeber everyone else laughing at them. I was more interested in the fact that the probe had to twice traverse a gap in Saturn's rings so as to put it in the right orbit when it arrived.

From the WP entry on UL - "UL is one of several companies approved to perform safety testing by the US federal agency Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)". If UL started handing out certs without doing the work then their license will be pulled and they will go out of business overnight.

Very few "free markets" spontaneously arise and prosper, the government creates them with the judicious use of regulation, the most basic of these regulations is property law, the saftey cert market is simply a more recent example. This is actuacully how things should work, the government defines a fair market for the public good via regulation of property and trade, business competes to implement the new market as efficiently as possible. Neither can do it alone due to self-interest getting in the way, which is why politicians and CEO's need to be kept at arms length from each other.

Surely that would imply I could rewire your neurons without affecting your ability to think.

Here's where I think people get confused - intelligence in not consciousness, nor does it imply it. For example an ants nest is intelligent in that the nests have found an algorithmic solution to the traveling salesman problem that is faster than human solutions and gives more highly optimised answers. Ants nests conquered the planet a long time ago, cell phones are still working on it, neither need consciousness to survive but they both have intelligence in spades.

This is why it's known as the "hard problem of consciousness" rather than the "hard problem of intelligence", which if you take "intelligence" to mean "the ability to independently acquire and apply knowledge" has already been solved. IBM's Watson is clearly artificial and it can answer open ended general knowledge questions that its creator cannot. It does this in the same way a natural intelligence does it - statistical inference.

One neuron at a time