Bought it just because of the interviews with Knuth and Norvig, but it amazed me how fun and interesting was to read all the other interviews also.
Definitely one of my favorite CS books.
Actually, I think most of the bad rap comes from the community. A community where the majority still thinks that using the CodeIgniter framework is a reasonable way to develop in 2022.
Worse, if you take "Imaginary Numbers" to be only the necessary complement to make polynomials factoring complete... And "Imaginary Numbers" are definitely a necessity to describe reality...
Meanwhile almost all "Real Numbers" are nothing but phantasmagorical numbers which we cannot name nor talk about them...
It seems beyond the pale that we still are teaching these bizarre axioms instead of the Computable Reals which don't have all these phantom numbers...
It does matter a lot. Knowing the origin makes us able to try to prepare for it in the future. Specifically if it was a lab leak, we should put highly stringent procedures for conducting such research. Theses labs should be isolated far away from major urban areas, and have mandatory quarantine while leaving it... For example...
TL;DR: I spoke with a lot of people in the industry and thus came to the conclusion that X will not be disruptive...
The good part of the bet is that most potential disruptions end not happening... But the exactly same median consensus is also reached about the disruptions that do end happening...