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...
Mathematicians have been constantly been giving bad names do their concepts...
Imaginary Numbers is one of the atrocious ones, Imaginary Numbers are part of the fabric of our reality... Meanwhile Real Number were axiomatized in a way that creates completely unrealistic numbers, "ghost-like" numbers, numbers that can never be given a name...
The first course in Analysis is ridden with examples of Continuous Functions that are not continuous in any sense humans would consider ever it...
Then there is a huge problem with how we publish Science... Decades ago, sharing all these huge datasets would have been quite difficult if not uneconomical.
But nowadays there is no reason left for not publishing the data and hopefully get academic rewards for that...
I have seen huge amounts of data not being digitized and lost because of this ownership mentality...