This is a really good point and it almost feels a little Kantian, so it seems to make sense to me. But the trouble is, when I speak of hacks, I don't mean things like defining rand() = 6. I mean things that seem really weird but after some thought, it seems to be correct. E.g. you had to add bunch of if cases to an algorithm due to some weird library requirement, and after hours of debugging the reason starts making sense and after hours of stress-testing, your algorithm produces the correct result. It's always possible you need to add more ifs and you're missing something OR the fact that you had to add ifs indicate your algorithm is not correct etc. Even after you feel comfortable a hack is good to go, that hack can still be a bug. Who knows? Engineering is all about the wisdom to decide whether something works or needs more work. It's truly amazing how stable most things are; but when you're familiar with the inner workings of a system, you're MUCH more self-conscious of possible catastrophic failures. Like, when you start reading about diseases in Wikipedia, you suddenly start checking yourself if you have those symptoms...

I think kludge is the more appropriate term here. A hack isn't necessarily a bad thing, but kludgey code is certainly not something I'd like sicked on my family.

Which is the basis of one of my arguments to anti-vaxxers: the doctors and scientists have decades of education and experience, and they take this vaccine themselves, and give it to their own children. That's the most reputable recommendation.

I don't think this is a very good argument. Anti-vaxxers care about their children very much, and therefore they DON'T vaccinate them, since they think it's bad for them. From their point of view, it's the doctors who are insane.

I think nielv's point is that the doctors who proscribe and the scientist who design these drugs have many years of professional education and generally at least a decade of experience in their fields. They have all of that domain knowledge about the vaccine, AND they care about their kids, AND they decide to vaccinate their children. They care just as much as the anti-vaxxer parents, but they also have the medical understanding to make a reasonable decision, while the anti-vaxxer's generally don't have medical or bio-engineering degrees and experience with the vaccines.

I´m pro-vaxx, but I feel the need to point out the flaw in this argument from an anti-vaxx perspective:

The same could be said about 1940s German "racial scientists", who had years of training convincing themselves about the genetic superiority of their people and the dangers coming from the "Jewish race".