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I don’t doubt it, but covid-sim is not the best example of this effect. In this case, people are worried that poorly written simulation code is informing policy decisions that affect billions of people. They are not demanding that it should be fixed, they are demanding that it should not be relied on in its current state.

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They're worried that there isn't testing code to prove that it's correct. If it's proven correct in other ways, it doesn't need unit tests.

Yeah, the code's bad – so what? It wasn't written by programmers. Most simulation code is bad, but if it's been proven correct it doesn't need to be good.

From what I can tell, this is a matter of conflicting conventions in different fields meeting head-on.

To be clear, I am not arguing for or against the validity of the claims regarding covid-sim. I am only saying that this is not a good example of the effect where people feel entitled to get open source code that fits their needs.

Dunning-Kruger powered software developers with beliefs that they are in any way qualified to say that mathematical simulations checked by dozens of actual scientists with PhDs are not valid ask that results are ignored because there's no unit tests.

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