He also states: “If a hoard (sic) of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness.”

Wrong. If a horde of barbarians descends on the lecture theatre, the professor will be delighted to see so many people taking in an interest in, say, recent developments in differential calculus.

The only place I’ve read about in an SF book where I’d really like to live is the world of Neal Stephen’s Anathem, and that’s mostly because they keep all the nerds in big nerd communities where they nerd away without being hassled by the outside world.

I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain

It may need to be removed for the purpose, but they’ll be fine because you can just ask an LLM how to put it back again when you’re done.

Mosquito nets are still an effective intervention against malaria, not least as “there’s a vaccine” is a very, very long way from “everyone is vaccinated” especially as really useful interventions such as draining marshland where A. falciparum breeds or attempting to eradicate it with insecticide are substantially harder and, also, take time. Given that half of all deaths from malaria are in children under 5 and that the malaria parasite is not transmitted between humans but from mosquitos to humans the herd immunity effect doesn’t really exist if people are still getting bitten. (FWIW, my dad literally wrote a book called “Malaria”)

EAs are wrong about a lot of stuff but they’re not wrong about malaria eradication being about more than vaccines.