I certainly agree that there’s a very very good chance that no lives will be saved if we do a great job quantifying the potential benefits of test-pooling and disseminating that information. But I still think it’s an activity with a sufficiently high expected value as to be worth someone’s time to do … compared to other ways that theoretical CS types could be spending their time to “help the war effort” :-)
I certainly agree that there’s a very very good chance that no lives will be saved if we do a great job quantifying the potential benefits of test-pooling and disseminating that information. But I still think it’s an activity with a sufficiently high expected value as to be worth someone’s time to do … compared to other ways that theoretical CS types could be spending their time to “help the war effort” :-)