> Many people who are vaccine skeptics are also living under the delusion that they aren't likely to get COVID. Or they believe if they do, it will be mild. If

> Many people who are vaccine skeptics are also living under the delusion that they aren't likely to get COVID. Or they believe if they do, it will be mild. If they do get it and it turns out not to be mild, then they are much more likely to be willing to try an "experimental" treatment. You say it as if it were a bad thing, but competitive algorithms are a perfectly valid approach to many problems, including this one. Consider the following parable. A village in the Middle Ages is harassed by a dragon, which demands one gold coin in tribute per day. The villagers can either pay the tribute every day, or give 50 gold coins to a knight who will slay the dragon. The dragon is old and may die any day, at which point they don't need to pay the tribute, but nobody knows the future. What are the villagers supposed to do? One way to proceed is for the villagers to estimate the probability of the dragon dying on each day, and build a strategy that minimizes the expected expense. Another way to proceed is the "competitive" algorithm: pay the tribute, and if the dragon is still alive after 50 days, hire the knight. This strategy minimizes "regret", defined as the ratio between what you actually do and what you could have done had you known the future in advance. (For this strategy the regret is 2. A more complicated strategy exists with regret e/(e-1).) These kind of decisions happen all the time in life. I worked at a company whose attitude was, effectively, ship now and we'll fix bugs only after the first outage. (This is the competitive algorithm.) I also worked at a company that tried to predict in advance all possible problems that may arise in the next ten years, thinking that this strategy would lead to better long-term results. Both were successful, though I think the competitive approach was more successful in the specific domain I was working on. My point is that the strategy that you describe could be motivated by ignorance, but it could also be motivated by a pretty sophisticated understanding of the world.