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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Not that I can see. They claim to have reverse engineered the methodology, but they have not obviously published what they came up with. They also have no explanation as to why they can find positive correlations with all kinds of locations but no negative correlations with anything.

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They compared with different "landmarks", and those are usually built around where people are, or people settle around where the landmarks are. I also found it strange that they didn't at least share a hypothesis of their own. But that would be mine -- settlement density and "modern lifestyles" may correllate with some negative health effects, or on the other hand with growing older and therefore being more likely to die of cancer? Maybe they'd have found a negative correllation if they tested for distances to deserts, open plains, and mountaintops.

We all know that correlation isn’t causation, but correlation isn’t always indicative of a relationship at all. You can construct a map of cancer incidence where the incidence is positively correlated with the 1/r distance to literally every point on the map! This holds for at least Pearson correlation.

I don’t claim to have an explanation of why actual cancer incidence would have this properly (I constructed my example by having an AI chug the linear programming problem given some constraints I made up so I could see what it looked like).

It is, therefore, absolutely not the case that the average correlation to distance from a random point is zero.

See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946244

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