“caught” also implies they’ve been hiding it… It’s been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.

Why shouldn’t it be?

I think everyone should have a critical mind about anything that matters. I’m not comfortable blindly trusting things either, but… we can only do our best and can’t be an expert in everything. We have to trust to some extent.

Of course it can go wrong, if it couldn’t, we wouldn’t be using the word “trust.” That said, not getting a Tesla anytime soon…

But yes, I trust the medicine I buy to not have cyanide in it, I’m not going to run a lab to make sure it doesn’t. If I buy medicine I have to trust it, the alternative is insanity. Thank goodness for the tamper evident seals! “You mean the ones you can bypass in a way that’s undetectable?” Yes, of course they’re not perfect but… I still gotta trust it and the whole supply chain if I want my ibuprofen, and it’s better than nothing.

Point taken for the rest of your examples, sorry, not going point by point.

Last thing, I just wanna make it clear yeah there’s a difference in “just trust me bro” from one expert no matter who they are, and trusting widespread expert consensus (and that goes for anything, and yes I recognize consensus can be wrong too okay).

I’ll grant you the effect is less because of the mutations (and I would be interested in seeing a paper about it, I might have to look up some research), but it also doesn’t help that the vaccination rate is and has been so low because of misinformation, to say the least.

But it is! Do you trust the food you eat? Who knows what could happen… If you take any medications at all, you must trust in some part the whole supply chain. If you drive a car, especially a new model, you trust the designers, engineers, and QA to make something that won’t kill you. Do you fly? Do you enter your banking or financial info into any computer?

I’m not saying we should blindly trust anyone, especially not a single person, but we have to trust the experts at least some, in every field. And when those experts all basically agree… What else is there to do? Or society is built on trust.

Herd immunity is a real effect. If vaccines help you not catch the disease, then an unvaccinated person is less likely to catch the disease in a population with a high vaccination rate. Because the disease doesn’t spread as much.

If you can lower the infection rate so that on average, each sick person results in less than one other sick person, infections die out instead of growing. That is “herd immunity.”