No, because a surgeon can tell you WHY he washes his hands and point to the historical evidence for the practice. He won't say "God tells us to wash our hands".

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

I wouldn't call it a GOOD solution, more a default if nobody comes up with something better.

It would have reduced it to an extent that it would be as good as stopped.

The fact that surgeons today wouldn't think of operating without washing their hands. I never said it was a quick victory.

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

Sure, under the hood, but the end user is more concerned with the application than he is with how it got there.

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Naturally vaccines increase your risk of shark attack. Sharks don't attack dead people. By keeping you alive through a disease outbreak, you are left vulnerable to shark attack later in life.

At this rate, I wonder if the only remaining solution is Darwinian (which they also don't believe in). Hopefully some of the unfortunate children of anti-vaxers will learn the truth and get their doctor to give them the shot anyway (but I'm guessing MAGA will move to make the punishment for that worse than for murder).

They were challenged by other doctors and scientists. The challengers won the day. The MAGA cultists would have been demanding a dose of horse paste before surgery and no Tylenol after.

Vaccines certainly did cut down on transmission (stopping it cold was a media exaggeration). Some teens got mild myocarditis, but many unvaccinated teens got COVID and more severe myocarditis or just plain died.

True, but this is 2nd or 3rd grade. Real numbers are the only numbers they've been introduced to. They will be considerably older by the time they need to learn that multiplication of other things may not be commutative.

The parents who are implored to help the kids with their homework aren't IN the class. So how are they to know that in order toe be able to help? Without the explanatory note there's no communication there.

The thing is, multiplication in real numbers (the only numbers that have been introduced in the primary grades) *IS* commutative. You might as well claim that if multiplication was division, both answers would be wrong. It need not have been explicitly taught, I figured that out just looking at a multiplication table (saved me memorizing half of the table in one simple realization). I only learned that that was called commutative later.

If you want to differentiate between a kid who figured that out and one who is just wrong, see if they always pick the larger number to add a smaller number of times. Surely that's better than punishing the kid that figured it out by marking every answer wrong.