Writing was on the wall for dancers when Fortnite took thier moves. This is just the last nail in the coffin. It’s official : human dancers are obsolete (except childten if in service of making robots cuter and less threatening).

FoR those asking about sample and confounders…

“The study involved 105,614 women in California with an average age of 53 at the start of the study”

“The study had limitations – it looked only at women, and participants reported their own diet data – but independent experts suggested the findings were significant.”

Doesn’t have to be intelligent, just has to perform the behaviours like a philosophical zombie. Thoughtlessly weighing patterns in training data…

There is a general perception now with many in the US and even more among the US’s partners that the US government is now actively regressive, making life more difficult for most of its citizens and partners, and indeed the world. China, despite its shortcomings, is mostly seen as making progress at raising living standards, moving more towards being environmentally responsible, and as a stable and predictable partner.

Whatever the complicated on the ground realities, these are some of the ways that make China currently seem to look better too many. Since you ask.

Tax wealth, not work

This blog post hyperbolically has “do-or-die moment” in title, and then concludes with with the final breathless line, “we must act now, before it is too late” (which it claims is “every scientist’s most familiar motto”, whatever that means). Yet nowhere at all in the blog post or the paper is any suggestion of what “act” could or should be done to avoid this “die” condition.

The “limitations” section of the article is a bit telling (and at least seemingly honest).

• relies “on the instances of scientific fraud that have been reported” (i.e. someone else has already detected fraud and “acted” on it)
• speculates that there’s a lot more fraud, but has no way to quantify or measure, so it is just speculation
• “temporal changes in detection effort or in the attention paid to different fields may produce spurious trends” (um, okay, so we don’t even know if the data they do have is comprehensive enough)
• “systematic fraudulent activity has always been large but that only now has been detected” (ah, an alternate hypothesis just thrown out there that could invalidate the entire conclusion, but is not explored)
• not actually in the limitations section, but elsewhere it is also noted

I like also how the blog post admits, ‘there is still no standard definition of what a “paper mill” actually is.’ In fact no definition is offered by the blog post or the article, though the term is used constantly. (As though the problems of “paper mills” hasn’t been a known concern for dozens of years already.)

The blog post concludes with “If the model public goods game offers any prognostication”. But the “game” model is one that the author just made up earlier in the post, and arbitrarily setting the rules, boundaries and parameters for. So basically this is saying, “if my [extremely simplistic] made up analogy is true…”

I sympathize with the authors’ concerns, but this article seem to me to have a lot of problems, and not offer much of what was promised. Can’t help but wonder if PNAS picked it up just for flame-bait… which would be ironic.

Also kind of interesting to know there is a quantifiable methodology for rating chewing capabilities, which could potentially be used in other studies.

Anyhow I suspect when we are old and don’t understand what is happening to our weakening bodies some of us may have a greater appreciation for this particular study.