Do you think Costco really is associated with 2.2 million deaths?
replyNo, but how do I know that the authors used the same methodology? The most they say about it is "we developed our own methodology by guessing what they did, and we changed stuff around until the results from our methodology matched their results", which is very unconvincing to me.
replyThe fact that they had to guess what the original author did is already an issue in itself. What we see here is that: 1. the original author did not sufficiently document their methodology and 2. when a best effort at reproducing the results is applied and we look deeper, we then discover that the results are wacky.
replyThey didn't! They mentioned receiving "eight lines of code" and, at the end of the article, write:
reply> It is especially telling that no matter what landmark we applied to the methodology, we have yet to get a negative result. There is, in fact, a real chance that you simply cannot get a negative result from this method.
My guess: The code is not shareable. Maybe its method is laughably disprovable?