bitter_michael

I had a similar question and am generally curious if google has an internal IRB or equivalent for these studies. Given their outsized influence, there is a reasonable chance of uncoordinated interaction between their efforts and other ongoing studies. For a trivial example, consider interaction between google maps rerouting experiment near an event and localized uber surge pricing.

I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present

This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function.

If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.

Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd