>But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.)
>The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s.
Take a study that only shows a correlation, and then write a clickbait article about causation.
The actual study says:
>Importantly, our study design has several limitations that limit causal inference and result in the possibility of other explanations, including unmeasured confounding from biological, social, or administrative factors. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, selection bias is possible because individuals who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to enter or remain in memory intensive driving occupations such as taxi and ambulance driving.
>...
And
>Our large scale epidemiological findings raise novel questions about the linkage between taxi and ambulance driving and Alzheimer’s disease mortality. While these findings suggest a potential link between the demands of these occupations and reduced Alzheimer’s disease risk, this study design does not permit interpretation of a causal effect between occupations and risk of Alzheimer’s disease mortality or neurological changes in the hippocampus
I have noticed this for many years that when a study passes from the authors to science journalists to regular journalists to social media, information is lost at each level just like in Chinese whispers.
I can't believe anybody honestly thinks that building a powerful AI is honestly a good thing. It seems that we're all trapped in a "keeping up with the joneses" style race where even if every individual person agrees that building AI is a bad thing, they're not able to stop because they still want to beat the competition and reap the rewards. And once there are millions or billions of these AI agents running around each of whom is smarter than every human on earth, good luck trying to predict or control them..