Some of them, like the encrypting ransomware requires no special privileges at all, but simply access to user files, and to network files that the user has read/write access to.

Those are special privileges. I don't think you truly appreciate the meaning of POLA. When you run a program with a POLA shell, it literally has access to nothing except the memory in its own address space and any parameters it's passed via the command line. Here's a simple example of copying a file in a traditional Unix shell:
$ cp foo.txt foo.bak
To implement the desired copy functionality, the cp command must have access to the entire local environment, including the entire file system since it can lookup an arbitrary path. This is an absurd amount of authority for a program that merely copies bytes from a source to a sink. Now here's a POLA version of the same command:
$ cp < foo.txt > foo.bak
Notice that the only permissions cp needs are explicitly specified in the command. They are then opened by the trusted shell and passed in as file descriptors, a read-only one and a write-only one, to the untrusted program. The explicit permission grants are obvious, and POLA shells generalize this type of pattern to compartmentalize all programs.

For whatever reason, Outlook allowed it to be executed, and the user clicked the dialog that might have prevented it, and then the script went to town encrypting files on the user's own folders and the share.

A perfect failure of POLA. In a proper least authority environment, it would have been perfectly safe to run that program because it would have had to raise a request to the environment for a set of read/write file descriptors and your user would have been rightly suspicious of any program requesting access to so many files.

It won't ever be a target.

Famous last words. Developers and system administrators are high-value targets since they potentially have access to numerous systems with sensitive information.

However, powershell *puroports* to have security features like execution policies and signing, so it draws more scrutiny.

Both terrible "security" policies. What would a signature possibly mean to me as a user if I don't know you? With or without a signature, my choice is still: either I run this script I need to my job, or I don't and I can't do my job (or it gets much, much harder). So basically PowerShell's security is no better than any other shell that's come before it; it projects a false sense of security, and like UAC before it, it just gets in your way.

So given the fact that getting a job done is king, and running scripts or programs written by potentially malicious people is the only reasonable way to do your job, then running arbitrary scripts must be made safe. The means to achieve this is the Principle of Least Authority (POLA), and POLA environments can and have been done before, even within commodity POSIX and Windows systems.

The earliest secure POSIX shell that I recall was Plash. Now we also have Shill (requires a kernel module) and the Capsicum shell (also requires kernel modules). Windows can be made POLA secure out of the box as was demonstrated with Polaris.

It's just amazing that we fail to learn the mistakes of the past even when solutions are available.

My experience is that the people in a generation older than I am have much better English than the average person of my age.

You mean those with decades more experience with a subject are more skilled, knowledgeable and adept? Colour me shocked.

Experimental data have also to make sense.

No, experimental data simply has to be consistent or anomalous. Anomalous requires investigation into possible errors. "Making sense" is a matter of interpretation, which is part of theoretical research, not empirical research.

Obviously, the further back you go, the less able they would be able to cope.

I'm not sure that's true. People from the recent past have already formed opinions on many subjects of modern interest, like transgenderism. Someone from the 50s would probably be quite bigoted against homosexuals and transgendered people. Someone from ancient Greece not so much, particularly since homosexuality was more accepted then.

A person who has no experience with such things would at least be able to form their own opinions rather than conform to societal norms from their time. The further removed from their time they are, the more adaptable they will be to new social norms. I imagine the same will hold for people frozen now. They'll be able to adapt more readily if they wake up 500 years from now rather than 100 years from now.

Uh. You don't know how to spell "weird". I don't think we should take you very seriously.

I hope you realize you just agreed with my point.

He's more like a little boy who has no idea what to do or how to do it.

Little boys and girls are tyrants. Children are sociopaths who must be trained to be civilized human beings [1]. Sometimes training doesn't take, ergo, Trump.

[1] There's a quote around there that says this better than I could, so if anyone knows it please let me know!

It is even, we might say, unreasonable and without sufficient evidence... employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing... First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information...

Except politicians know even less, and mislead and misinterpret even more than scientists. So basically, the suggestion isn't to move to a system of perfect rationalism, which as you've said, doesn't actually exists. The proposal is instead to move towards more rationalism driven by empirical justification. It would almost certainly be better than what we have now.

"Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere."

Except this reinforces a false narrative that sexual orientation is a choice, when it's really not. The point of divergence for the new Trek verse is after Sulu was born, and he was almost fully grown. That's not how the "magic ingredient" that determines our sexuality works.

The fact remains that women do worse on interviews than men, and hence it's not surprising that companies hire them less.

I don't think that's what it's saying. It's saying that 1.4 times as many men get a job through their site because they stick with it longer, where 7x more women than men just leave after 1 or 2 failed attempts.

[...] we need to give women the same levels of false confidence that men have in the face of constant rejection.

I can certainly support the idea of instilling more confidence despite rejection because that's perfectly rational, but I don't think the insulting label of "false confidence" is warranted.

male dominated offices/teams/companies have a higher probability of disfunction

Evidence? Specifically, what evidence exists that whatever dysfunction may exist in the common office/team/company directly follow from gender?

What happened to the party of small government and suspicion of government interfering with people's personal lives?