We're in the midst mass hysteria --- the kind of thing you normally see in history books. What do you expect? What's more disturbing to me is seeing how otherwi

We're in the midst mass hysteria --- the kind of thing you normally see in history books. What do you expect? What's more disturbing to me is seeing how otherwise-reasonable people are excusing bugs in this model (bugs that they would never accept in other software) with flimsy rationales presented aggressively. You have to keep in mind how people actually think. Most of human reasoning capacity doesn't go into the beautiful work of intellectual exploration. Instead, most of the time, we use the faculty of reason for the crude and dirty job of finding support for our preconceptions. When facts conflict with one of these preconceptions, we invent excuses to discard the facts --- the smarter the person, the more elaborate the excuses. Facts seldom change anyone's mind. In certain circles (including, unfortunately, circles composed of smart and influential people) it's become taboo to oppose the lockdowns, in part because the pro- and anti-lockdown positions have developed certain partisan connotations in the United States. At the same time, the weight of accumulating evidence (empty hospital, declining infection rates, repeated large modeling errors, high serum antibody prevalence, a very steep age curve, and large economic losses) is beginning to make the pro-lockdown stance untenable. But a lot of pro-lockdown people, having become emotionally invested in their position, are unwilling to back down. Consequently, we see a ton of elaborate excuses for discarding, ignoring, and suppressing information that further weakens the pro-lockdown position. The HN community is composed disproportionately from these circles, many of which claim to make up the "respectable" part of society. The HN flags on this article are part of this process of rejecting ideas that conflict with dearly-held preconceptions. The author of the code review post makes valid points and the snide dismissals in the comments on this article say more about the makeup of HN commentariat than they do about the code review itself.