Comment by SideQuark

What an odd, self-contradictory post. "In recent years, hundreds of the brightest minds of modern civilization have been hard at work not curing cancer.", along with phrases like "defective by design" and implied loss by not giving all people in a drug trial the new medicine, imply he thinks all of a thing needs allocated to what he perceives (incorrectly, trivially, shown below) as the best use. Then he states in the multiarm bandit to waste (from his multiple other statements) 10% of what is the best use on random other uses for exploration.

However all this fails. For optimal output (be it drug research, allocation of brains, how to run a life), putting all resources on the problem/thing that is the "most important" is sub-optimal use of resources. It's always better expected return to allocate resources to where that spent resource has the best return. If that place is apps, not cancer, then wishing for brains to work on cancer because some would view that as a more important problem may simply be a waste of brains.

So if cancer is going to be incredibly hard to solve, and mankind empirically gets utility from better apps, then a better use is to put those brains on apps - then they're not wasted on an probably not solvable problem and are put to use making things that do increase value.

He also ignores that in real life the cost to have a zillion running experiments constantly flipping alternatives does not scale, so in no way can a company at scale replace A/B with multiarm bandits. One reason is simple: at any time a large company is running 1000s to maybe 100k A/B tests, each running maybe 6 months, at which point code path is selected, dead paths removed, and this repeats continually.If that old code is not killed, and every feature from all time needs to be on/off randomly, then there is no way over time to move much of the app forwards. It's not effective or feasibly to build many new features if you must also allow interacting with those from 5-10 years ago.

A simple google shows tons more reasons, form math to practical, that this post is bad advice.