Schmidhuber has written about recursive self-improvement since his diploma thesis in the 80s: "Evolutionary principles in self-referential learning, or on learning how to learn: The meta-meta-... hook".
Your quote sounds like it could just as well have been from that thesis.
I wish that people who say things like "learn to live with it" actually meant it. We do indeed need to learn from the past two years, and that will result in something quite different from pretending that we're still in 2019.
Zeynep has been wrong so many times during the pandemic that it hurts. She will not admit to it, though. She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic, in the same way it is claimed for Omicron now. She's very naive about how the immune system works.
Her writing is generally more propaganda than science.
Besides, I wish that causality had been mentioned more than once in passing. Due to the existence of the ladder of causality, many important queries cannot be answered by mere observation, or even by intervention; such queries require counterfactual reasoning, and structural causal models generalize because they describe something that is very invariant in the world.
They're processed foods, but not ultra-processed. Generally that means advanced factory processes and chemicals that are only used in industrial settings. Factory made bread is likely to be ultra-processed, however.
Sounds like a case of Goodhart's law,
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
What do you make of studies such as this? Their baseline was strictly lifetime abstainers, absolutely no people who stopped drinking for medical reasons. Still, moderate drinking results in lower all-cause mortality.
This is a very uneducated comment, considering available research. While some doubt can be cast on the J-shaped curve, we have a lot of evidence for all-cause mortality either decreasing or at least not increasing with low levels of consumption.