It seems like Buettner in particular had a bunch of for-profit business ventures tied up in blue zone marketing bullshit, so that is a sort of non-academic motivation to keep the music going.
To be clear, your quote is not a claim the article makes. That sentence in the article is paraphrasing Saul Newman's claims. The article itself explicitly disavows the claim, treating Poulain and Buettner generously and giving them paragraphs upon paragraphs to respond (Newman got two paragraphs; Poulain and Buettner get twenty). The article's actual position, like the headline, is that "twenty-five years after the first blue zones were identified, it’s impossible to say whether they were ever real or not."
(I happen to agree with Newman and probably you -- it seems like there is a very clear answer to whether blue zones were ever real or not.)
You didn't miss anything. There aren't any new facts in the article. It treats the original blue zone researchers very generously, waves its hands about drawing conclusions on whether the original blue zone research was due to pension fraud or not, and generally blathers on for dozens of paragraphs talking about various things tangentially related like that some blue zone areas no longer have many centenarians or various bullshit marketing claims using blue zone language by Buettner, etc, etc.
This is basically not true. The particular makeup of the calories you're consuming matters. E.g., it is likely (but not proven) that dietary fiber is causal for reducing rates of common cancers. And also likely that dietary saturated fats cause various kinds of heart and artery disease. Similarly protein is important for muscle mass which is associated with longevity. Additionally, people who are already underweight should not reduce their calorie consumption.
No, they were fraud. Eating healthy, exercising, and having friends is great advice for statistical longevity, but is distinct from the concept of "blue zones," which were just pension fraud.
Do you think if stolen property is eventually recovered, in some condition, it's "no harm, no foul?" Or, maybe it would be beneficial for society if theft didn't happen in the first place?
Just "SF stabber mayor" would have been enough; it's fine to admit you were just extremely lazy and quick to jump to dismiss GP's claim, and apologize. It was major ish news.
It is not obvious that excluding SpaceX is (1) better for index investors or (2) what index investors/buyers want. Passive index investors buy the whole market. For better or worse, SpaceX is (will be) part of the whole market.
Most indices will be buying proportionate to float, which is probably the correct thing to do. Only the Nasdaq 100 isn't float-weighted, and there's just less money in that index than the S&P500 (even with outsized weighting, Nasdaq 100 indexers will buy about 0.5% as much SpaceX as S&P500 indexers).
There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.
You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.
They aren't scaled down between election cycles. The media ecosystem is almost fully captured by the billionaire class. We've seen directly how they change coverage and policies tilting things. Fox News never shut down between elections. They are always in campaign mode and the money keeps rolling in.
As long as you can use those writers to operate a business near profitably then they are really cheap, but FOX can’t profitably employ 100,000 writers.
The thing about fiction is, it's fiction. The author can write whatever outcome they want. It doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the real world.
I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do.
Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that.
One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.
But it does give us an idea to chew over. And we can determine how “real world” that idea is. Some of us can even see how to bend the idea a little and make a reasonable version of it “real”.
Yeah, that's the most charitable possible interpretation. But a fiction writer could just as easily write a utopias as a dystopia, and one isn't any more "real" than the other. It's just fiction.
reply