Honestly, what you're describing sounds like the older models. If you are getting these sorts of results with Opus 4.5 or 5.2-codex on high I would be very curious to see your prompts/workflow.

The shortcomings are aplenty, but they don't bother me. The things it can do weren't possible 2 years ago. I'll leverage those and take the bad with the good.

Similar experience with Tesla FSD. I know other Tesla owners who tried it a few times and think it's trash because they had to disengage. I disengage preemptively all the time but the other 90% of my drive being done for me is not something that used to be possible. I tried to give up my subscription because it's expensive and couldn't hold out two days.

Still, an expert, by definition is just someone that has "comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a subject." You could argue that as soon as you've acquired enough knowledge on a subject to form an accurate opinion, you have yourself become an expert.

Although I'm guessing when you're referring to "experts" you mean "establishment experts." For example, your average doctor whose spent decades studying medicine as opposed to your online research on how to best treat/prevent a certain ailment (you didn't provide an example so I am just referring a fairly common one). What's the difference between your expertise and theirs? On one hand, they have decades worth of rigorous academic study and personal experience over you, on the other hand, you may have a "fresher" perspective that may be devoid of certain institutional biases. I would just strive to stay humble.

I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.

We aren't just shutting everything down to save lives, we're shutting everything down because we some reason to believe that if 70% of the population gets this disease in a very short amount of time 20% of them are hospitalized, and at least 2% die (in truth, the CFR would skyrocket if we don't flatten the curve), the societal and economic havoc would be much worst than the one resulting from these government imposed quarantines. At the highest end of the risk spectrum, it could be orders of magnitude worst. Do we know that for sure? No, hence the Russian roulette analogy: some chance of extremely high risk, esp. when it comes to the entire planet: NOT WORTH GAMBLING.

If you think that world leaders are currently sacrificing the economy just to save lives, you are not paying attention to what they have been doing.

True, this is only in China. In most other countries, it's still too early to be able to collect great data because of how quickly the situation is evolving (the denominator is bound to be wrong due to delays between cases being detected and the amount of days it takes before cases evolve into severe/critical condition or death). But it's data, and you can't easily dismiss it.

> So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math.

This isn't entirely true. The epidemics in China, South Korea have more or less been resolved, and many of the steps being taken in other countries are based on comparing the outcomes in those countries compared to ones that are failing to slow the spread of the disease with disastrous consequences (Italy).

> But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable.

It's possible that the health experts are not taking the economical windfall into account, but the politicians enacting the laws probably are. These decisions are being made in rooms with people who, with their knowledge pooled together, most likely have more information about the disease and the economic impact of their decisions than you.

Secondly, the reasoning for national shutdowns earlier rather than later is to shorten their length. As of now, local government officials are hoping not advocating 3-6 month shut down, but rather trying to avoid one by shutting down now. I remember reading the figure of 2 weeks but I cannot find it quickly now. We will see.

This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?

2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.

I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...

But that's not what this is. This is investors and executives who found a money pump and are pumping as hard as they possibly can without any regards for the health and wellbeing of the human machine they're putting pressure on. At some point, you have to give people the time to live their lives outside of work or the world is going to become a worse place. They become stressed and depressed, and it affects their families and friends, and and then has a ripple effect on society.