mdp553's comments

Speaking as an infectious disease epidemiologist - epidemiology is a broad field and includes people from many different backgrounds. The type of epidemiology I do (dynamic modeling of epidemics) leans more towards people with backgrounds in statistics, physics, math, and engineering when compared to the more "traditional" types epidemiology (if there even is such a thing anymore).

This is seemingly exactly what Finland is doing according to the article. Finland is trialling this approach with on a small subset of eligible people (n = ~ 2000) to assess the effects and allow feedback, etc.

Which is why this was trialed on a small subset first to evaluate hypotheses such as what you suggest. According to the article, those receiving UBI were not economically less active than controls who were not receiving it (i.e. they had similar probability of being employed).

Looking that the case of adult non-western immigrants learning to ride in places like the Netherlands or Denmark suggests it is not as easy as simply explaining the operation of a bike [0]. I'm not sure if they learn more quickly than children - that could be interesting to see.

Tangentially, and anecdotally, I can see that children in Denmark (or at least Copenhagen) seem to learn more quickly than American kids to ride adult bikes because they never use training wheels. They first start on strider-type bikes that teaches them the balance needed, so once they graduate to pedal bikes they don't need the training wheel and pick it up fairly quickly - at least relative to my experience as a kid in the US.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/utrecht-cycli...