LOL, the first list also seems to use the US as the cut-off & first country that is a “deficient democracy”. The magic number must be between somewhere between 0.811 and 0.821.
Having spent a good chunk of my life in Canada and the US, a list that has Canada as more democratic doesn’t make any sense to me. In the end, it’s just a random mix of different measurements, weighted to tell whatever story you want to tell.
You don't think that the current crop of vaccine-skeptics are mostly well-intentioned and that the movement will ultimately fade-away decades down the line?
It seems identical to me: soft corruption and bad science shaping government policy. Annoying and bad, but also hopefully temporary (but may do damage in the meantime). I agree that it happens with all governments. Has everyone forgotten the sea of bad science that was COVID policy? Thank god they arrested that paddle-boarder!
Covid policy was bad mostly because it was driven by economic interests, not because of "bad science."
The only major scientific lapses I can think of in the US were the initial insistence that masks don't work and that the virus isn't airborne. The mask issue was influenced by the fact that they wanted to conserve masks for healthcare workers. I strongly suspect the airborne issue was heavily influenced by no one wanting to deal with the consequences: that stronger measures would be needed to reduce the spread of the virus.
Don't use scare quotes to twist what is being said.
Bad science is pretending or thinking that we know more than we do, just as much as thinking the wrong thing is true. For example, claims about the under or over-effectiveness of masks (and subsequently vaccines) is definitely bad science that erodes public confidence in scientific leaders and organizations.
And the insane vaccine mandate for *children* (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science. I'm not opposed to the vacinne, but there was most definitely no evidence to support this requirement. At best, the current science suggests an unclear risk-benefit profile, and the information at the time in no way suggested a profile that justified a full-on mandate. This violated basic medical and ethical principles.
Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.
The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.
> And the insane vaccine mandate for children (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science.
It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic. The mRNA vaccines have a very good safety profile - the risk of side-effects is tiny. The most serious side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, myocarditis, is actually caused at a higher rate (and with greater severity) by Covid itself.
The scientific community did some amazing work during the pandemic. They almost instantly developed a vaccine that is extremely effective at preventing you from dying of Covid and which has a vanishingly small rate of serious side-effects. That would have been seen as a miracle a few decades ago.
What ruined the response to the pandemic was the politics of it, not the science. One aspect of that was the insane politicization of unalloyed goods like vaccination and masking. The paradox and tragedy of the United States is that despite having the finest scientific community in the world, most of the population is scientifically illiterate and open to manipulation and fear-mongering.
> Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.
- The CDC first said masks were unnecessary unless you were sick.
- The CDC then said masks were strongly recommended, specifically cloth masks. These recommendations led directly to mandates.
- The CDC then said cloth masks were mostly ineffective compared to N95.
Masks are common sense, and I think relatively few people were opposed to wearing them. The problem that I have is the translation of low-evidence science directly into policy. This is what I’m calling bad science.
> The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.
Initial studies did not test for transmission. People felt like they had been lied to regarding this aspect of the vaccines, as it was cited as the reason for many of the mandates related to vaccines. (After all, if they only affected the individual, what would be the purpose of the mandate?) I think this was more bad communication and bad politics, but it is hard to separate these things.
> It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic.
You are over-generalizing and washing away details to argue something you feel should be correct. Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”. If the vaccine was actually useful and important, they wouldn’t have quietly rolled back mandates a year later: it was quietly rolled back because it was a mistake. I think you are wrong regarding the risk profile, the largest study I’ve seen for children is still unclear: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47745-z#Sec2 (I do think it’s likely safe, but we never had the science to justify a mandate for school children)
You can argue that the mandate was politics — that’s fine, but in that case they are inextricable. I would agree that a lot of what I’m calling bad science is actually scientific institutions taking positions under enormous political pressures. I still think that science was wielded as the weapon during this time. Which saddens me deeply, as I strongly agree that the vaccines themselves were incredible examples of the miracle of modern science.
I think you’re blaming the wrong people when you say the population is scientifically illiterate. While that’s true, I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.
> The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.
Actually, this is an area where I would criticize the CDC, though I understand why they did what they did. The first thing is that the US was desperately short on N95 masks, and not even medical staff who were treating Covid patients had reliable access to masks. Public health authorities were afraid of a run on masks (which happened anyways), which would make that situation even worse. The government should have explained the situation to people, appealed to their civic duty (which probably wouldn't work in the US), and taken emergency measures like commandeering stocks of N95 masks from retailers.
The other aspect of this, which one could see as "bad science," was that various studies had found that laypeople don't know how to wear masks properly, so their real-world effectiveness was in doubt. I think the correct response to that is to teach people how to wear them, not to say they don't work. But before the pandemic, there was genuinely dispute in the literature about what the best mask recommendation in a flu pandemic (which was what everyone was planning for) would be.
> Initial studies did not test for transmission.
Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.
> Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”.
It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.
> I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.
As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
> Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.
You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic. The bad science here was jumping past the evidence and claiming that the vaccines stopped transmission, when there was no data to support that. (It would be fine to say that they “probably reduce transmission” but this does not justify mandates, which is presumably why this well-intentioned-but-not-data-supported jump happened.)
> It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.
Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high, which it certainly was for children. You could argue that the risk profile was high enough for older or less healthy adults to justify the vaccine risk and release strong guidelines (and I would agree with this), but we had a much more limited risk profile for children, who were far less susceptible. We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).
And re: months, the vaccine mandate for children was for schools starting in fall 2021, over a year after the start of the pandemic and 9 months since the vaccine was deployed. There was plenty of time and data already, and I don’t think the evidence justified the mandates for children. I believe that such mandates were actually very unusual globally (so the science was certainly not clear-cut enough to have most of Europe do the same thing).
> As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
I’m not sure why you are disagreeing here, I agree with your general strategy that you laid out above. Tell people how to wear masks, what’s proven to be effective and what isn’t, what we know and don’t know about the vaccines, and appeal to their personal and civic responsibility (take the vaccine to protect yourself and others).
When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).
> You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic.
Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.
> Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high
The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.
> We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).
Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.
> When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).
You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.
> You don't think that the current crop of vaccine-skeptics are mostly well-intentioned
Well intentioned but wrong is only when you have incomplete information. Once your theory has been disproven multiple times and you still ignore it, that's not well intentioned anymore. That's just lying to yourself and others at that point.
Humanity is messy. There are very many things that I think have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but are still, somehow, up for debate.
The answer can’t be absolutism in any direction. No one, no group, and no ideology has a monopoly on truth.
No system or ideology is perfectly correct — or even reliably correct in the long run, if you make the error of building an ideology around it that assumes it will be correct. You create the conditions of its own fallibility.
The next government will make stupid decisions, be wrong, and promote falsehoods. We probably won’t even know all of them at the time.
They’ll be both corrupt and good intentioned, depending on the subject, who is involved, and why.
This current government at least admits the possibility of debate. That’s a fair sight better than most of what I’ve seen over the last 10 years from those who think they have a monopoly on truth and science.
"Your Honor, I really meant well when I aimed the gun and pulled the trigger! Sure, everyone told me it would go off and kill someone, but can't you see that my intentions were pure?"
I'm not sure what you are trying to prove here, but obviously intent matters a lot for the purposes of crime, e.g. if you believed your life was in imminent danger and shot someone, you may not be guilty of murder.
You seem to be saying that people are indeed malicious and just lying about believing vaccines cause harm (for what purpose?), but I do believe they are just misinformed and have strongly-held-but-incorrect beliefs.
It’s much cheaper than Brenda (superficially, at least). I’m not sure a worker that costs a few dollars a day would be fired, especially given the occasional brilliance they exhibit.
Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past?
Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.
I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.
If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug.
Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become.
The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
Does the answer to "is the average person better off" have a lot to do with "how many TV shows are out there"...
or does it have to do with:
- how often their boss bugs them after hours
- how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on them, their friends, their political views
- how often random strangers might get mad at them and SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc
- how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting up a school
- how hard they find it to talk to a real person to resolve an issue with a company or government service vs being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot?
I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows.
Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.
The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.
Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time.
The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
> Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.
A lot of today's news footage with experts etc. these days is also not shot from studios but from online calls. Actually flying somebody out onto location is pretty uncommon; and I would say with the rise of filmed podcasting, that podcasters are more likely to have people on set than television news is.
Daily TV News is limited by travel times. If some story breaks finding the right person and getting them on an airplane and then into a studio can be impractical.
> it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time
Do we, though?
I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the quality of the choreography stood out to me as something you would never see in a movie today. Certainly not in one take.
I would say that has more to do with the decline in musicals involving small numbers of people doing choreography, and the current movie system de-prioritizing dance as an important skill. The highest grossing musical movie happened in 2024 with Wicked, and the second half of that movie is probably going to do the same thing next year.
Youtube has some marginal value, but I'm not sure "storytellers" bring a materially positive impact (and I reject the "richer" aspect outright). We had libraries in the 90s and they didn't force you to watch ads.
That’s my point. We still have libraries! And most have online lending programs, so you can access way more ad-free books than you ever could have in 90s. How is this not richer?
show business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York.
i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
I wish this argument would die. We're asking for a better future among futures, not a better future compared to the past.
It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of touch and dismissive.
Gaza Health Ministry only counts those that show up at hospitals. The first big Lancet study a year ago estimated 200k. I've seen more recent studies estimate higher, with an additional year of killings.
Also, Israel has attacked or destroyed most hospitals in Gaza. So the Health Ministry's counting is obviously hindered.
I don't believe that what you're saying is correct at all.
Only 34,344 of the GHM estimate are confirmed identities. The rest of either missing but presumed dead or gross adjustments. They are open about using "media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza".
The Lancet study published in January 2025 estimated 70,000 as of October, 2024. This is higher than the GHM estimate, but I can't find anything close to your 200k estimate.
So you may believe in your estimates, but they are many multiples larger than any other credible source that I can find... so it's odd to wave these figures around without any sources, links, etc.
It’s literally the same numbers as the posted ones, and exactly aligned with what I’m saying.
> The current official toll is 64,718 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured, since the start of the war on 7 October 2023
You may have been misled by the headline “X killed or injured”.. those are two different things, and we’re talking about the number killed.
I don’t know if those numbers are accurate (the article about the IDF solider claims it is), but I’m not even questioning that. The GP is claiming that an order of magnitude more people have been killed than even GMH claims.
> Halevi stepped down as chief of staff in March after leading the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the first 17 months of the war, which is now approaching its second anniversary.
> The retired general told a community meeting in southern Israel earlier this week that more than 10% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population had been killed or injured – “more than 200,000 people”.
The point is that we know 64,000 is almost certainly an undercount. Notably it hasn't changed much in the last year since the Hamas ministry of health collapsed.
The commenter above is correct in saying the bound of deaths is very likely between 45,000 and 600,000. We have good reason to suspect it was over 100,000 late last year. We won't know the actual number until an independent assessment can occur.
You are using the "more than 200,000 people" quote to imply that the GHM estimate of 64,718 is wrong, but it is completely in line with it. There is nothing about this revelation that suggests the existing estimates are too low. I don't know what I'm supposedly cherry-picking.
More explicitly: 64,718 killed + 163,859 injured =~ "more than 200,000 people"
I don't understand what basis you (and other commenters) have to suggest that these estimates are all wrong, you merely say "we have good reason". What reason?
GP here. The GMH number doesn’t include indirect deaths, i.e. all the deaths that happen because of war that aren’t bullets and bombs. Disease, famine, not getting cancer screenings or antibiotics because all the hospitals have been blown up… that stuff.
So while 680k (the current highest estimate) is probably higher than reality, god i hope it is, it’s also true that reality is probably much higher than the current GMH numbers.
“65,000 is the number of Palestinians are certain killed, including over, of which 75% are women and children.
In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza.
And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.”
The death toll could be that high. I hope to hell it isn’t. But we don’t know and won’t know until the killing stops. We do know that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, and at least 150,000 people injured.
I don’t think her statements aren’t even factual: the current estimates aren’t the confirmed identities, they include estimates for missing and presumed dead. You don’t think the GHM would publish larger estimates if 1/3 of every living person in Gaza was missing or dead? It’s hard to have an objective conversation when numbers are just made up.
I am not asserting a specific number. There have been between 65,000 and 680,000 gazans murdered by the idf directly and indirectly. I think it’s unlikely the number is as high as 680k, but there is absolute chaos on the ground, doctors and hospitals and records destroyed. We won’t know until the slaughter stops what number is real.
If you want to let the lack of a specific number hold you up while the killing continues, that’s up to you.
If you're basing this on the Lancet letter about indirect deaths, that's an estimate that includes future deaths that could be linked to past events of the war. So "have been" isn't the right tense.
It's also non-peer-reviewed, and based on rather arbitrarily picking a multiplier of 15x from a range of past conflicts' multipliers. One author described the figure as "purely illustrative" in a now-deleted tweet.
I mean sure, you are just asserting a range. It is also true that there have been between 0 and 2,000,000 gazans killed by the IDF, but this fact does not do anything useful in discussing the issue. (And just like the 680,000 gazans "murdered by the IDF" it is nearly impossible to be accurate, fabrication because it defies reality.)
Sure 0-2mil is possible, as is all the atoms in your body aligning and allowing you to step thru a wall.
But those who are well informed agree it the data supports a number above 45k, probably above 65k, and the highest estimate published is 680k. If we use a higher number we are just making shit up. If we use a lower number we are choosing to ignore a data point without a specific reason to write it off. “It defies reality” isn’t an actual reason - it’s just an assertion that it’s wrong. Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
but either way, the tens of thousands of innocents killed and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of gaza is appalling - and arguing about specific numbers is pretty pointless if we don’t agree on that.
You are missing my point. To me it seems like 680k is just making shit up. Why is this reasonable? I can't even find what this "data point" is based on, so I'm not sure what I am supposedly ignoring! Just say where it is coming from, that isn't a person throwing out a random number.
I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?
> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.
- begins with the high estimate from [2], which uses some very questionable data (like WhatApp chats) to argue that most deaths were not counted by GHM
- extrapolates it to the present, as if the casualty rate were a constant
- multiplies it by 5, which was the multipler that was somewhat arbitrarily picked in that Lancet letter [3]
- forgets that this includes future deaths (attributable to past conflict events), and uses the past tense as if all these supposed indirect deaths already occurred
They also end up with an estimate of "about 380,000 under-five-year-old infant" deaths, which seems unlikely since there were never more than about ~340k children under five in the strip.
Overall, it's about as believable as that letter which claimed Hamas was under-reporting starvations by over three orders of magnitude [4].
Before there was an alternative used to take taxis in Toronto occasionally, and the common refrain was that the card machine was broken. And sometimes no change was available. These kinds of soft scams were common.
So it’s not a hold-up, but definitely a form of robbery.
San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions. Certainly not all driving conditions, but no one is throwing a Waymo into a small town in the way you describe. Expanding slowly and cautious seems like the rational thing to do, I’m not clear what you are proposing as an alternative (or specifically what the alleged fraud is).
> San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions.
This could very well be true, but if you’re looking at it from a perspective of someone who lives in a rural area with real winters, for driving purposes, those all look like pretty much equivalent large American cities without a winter.
Note that the tour itself was found quickly using a heuristic solver (https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/computation.html), the achievement here and all the computation is to establish that this is the lower bound (assuming I understood correctly).
So, the heuristic solver worked pretty darn well :) Although, I’m not sure how close it would have been the heuristic algorithm you are describing (I suspect that it is considerably more advanced for good reasons, randomly picking will take too long to converge).
The algorithm that OP describes is more commonly known as 2-opt [0]. The heuristic used in this case is referred to as LKH which I assume means the Lin-Kernighan Heuristic [1]. The latter is sort of a meta generalisation of the former.
Having spent a good chunk of my life in Canada and the US, a list that has Canada as more democratic doesn’t make any sense to me. In the end, it’s just a random mix of different measurements, weighted to tell whatever story you want to tell.