The idea is that people never wanted to, but they didn't have an alternative before and it was healthy. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying that cars have made us weaker because walking to the shop was healthy, even if people's didn't want to.

Idk if it's true, but it sounds plausible enough

Respectfully, this thread might be overestimating how far the average reader went down that particular rabbit hole.

What document is she talking about?

Enough people have asked and not received answers that I'm starting to think there isn't one and this is an elaborate prank.

Somehow this is a good thing?

Really does seem like a shame. It would be great to hear more from the ones leading/managing the network.

Makes sense. Especially troubling since it's likely averaging across some unaffected and some heavily affected students within cohorts.

Wait, what's vent?

I did look and the study has two definitions, but I didn't fully understand the one in the main specification. Maybe I was just feeling slow that day.

Ken Burns documentaries are available and affordable, to be fair.

Is this just how the field gets better methods over time or a sign that we're not actually making much progress at all?

Agreed. As with OS's and text editors, I've cycled through nearly every setup possible at this point and all the big options can do all the stuff you need and they're all perfectly fine.

This is why R makes a lot of sense in an academic research environment where you have a lot of flexibility over the tools you use and progressively less as you get into applied/industry contexts where DS has to integrate seamlessly with non-statistical code bases, which is where DS was born.