In my own work circa 2016 I used this approach in Counterpoint by Convolution (https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.07227), where we in turn argued that despite being an approximation, it leads to better results. Sadly being dressed up as an application paper, we weren't able to draw enough attention to get those sweet diffusion citations.

Pretty sure it goes further back than that still.

Yes and, I would hope that the majority of leather comes from cattle that are grown and slaughtered for meat. In that case, the amount of cattle put through the meat grinder is a function of both the demand for meat and the demand for leather, but it would be unlikely to be sensitive to both at the same time. I suspect, given that meat has so much turnover whereas leather lasts a long time, that we are meat-bound rather than hide-bound.

The most important pieces of evidence (imho) are

  - No evidence for zoonotic origin has been uncovered, *and it's not for lack of trying*.
  - Peter Daszak applied for funding with DARPA to take a bat coronavirus and insert the furin cleavage site; his proposal was rejected.
  - The cover-up started with the "proximal origins" paper: a *peer-reviewed* paper in a *respectable journal* establishing zoonotic origin with certainty in the public eye. The Fauci emails show that the authors were far from certain, and several were leaning the other way.

I work in ML, and launching a job on a cluster just to have it fail an hour later on a typo got old ten years ago. Being able to resume after silly mistakes would easily reduce debugging time by an order of magnitude, just because I need to run the job only once and not ten times.

  x = 0
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  return x

I'm genuinely fascinated that you prefaced this clearly-not-an-anecdote with "just an anecdote". If it had been an anecdote, it would have been fine without the preface. Instead it's a sweeping claim that at best requires several anecdotes to support it.

The fundamental unit of (classical) utilitarianism is good/bad sensations, not right/wrong actions. If you start by taking rightness/wrongness of actions as fundamental, you are very much not doing utilitarianism.

The grandma/surgeon examples do seem to suggest that killing grandma is good or dividing up the patient is good according to utilitarianism. That may or may not be right, depending on context -- who are the people involved, what do they bring to the table, what relationships do they have with each other and with people not mentioned in the story? You can fill out these details in ways that would lead "common sense morality" to the abhorrent conclusions also, or bite their own bullet and claim "the means justify the ends" somehow.

That's not what it says at all. It says that being exposed to a carcinogen isn't bad if you aren't going to live long enough to suffer the consequences. Plenty of things wrong with the memo but this little observation isn't it.