He does have the advantage of being right though; I certainly didn't say anything like that untrained staff could administer a ventilator from a 30 day bootcamp. That is obviously stupid. Nobody in the thread did say that. The closest anyone came was pointing out it doesn't take 8 years to learn to administer a ventilator; which is uncontroversial. And that it takes less than 2 weeks to learn to press the buttons, which is also obviously true. Everybody knows they'd be killing people left and right proceeding like that left to their own devices.

Particularly my comment which seemed to spark something; it's a pretty basic fact that Ops Research people walk into situations where they aren't necessarily experts and optimise. That is a core part of the job. Every field is stuffed with experts who don't see how anyone could help them in their domain and they are generally wrong about the administrative trivia of organising a workplace. It doesn't even have anything to do with software. Ops Research is from mechanical engineering and factory optimisation.

I know bunch of doctors. I don't believe they work in an environment where the process has been mathematically optimised. They aren't mathematicians. That observation lines up very well with the "leave it to the experts" vibe of the responses here. They won't understand queuing theory for example.