Hm, when log anonymously nothing appears on this post.
Maybe I just write crappy posts or they are being pushed down.
But it is interesting that a relative neutral post doesn't appear, but inflamed posts are everywhere...
Part of this probably has to do with the fact the brain as any other organ is constrained by resources, space and genetic makeup.
So a person with an high level of general intelligence, that fits the measures of IQ, might have issues with other forms of useful brain activities.
And general problem solving is an high intensity set of tasks for the brain and require a lot of conscious activity, this has a way of shutting down other more autonomic responses.
Neural pathways connected with social, personal interactions might be overriden or used for other purposes, instincts might be subjected to repression due to higher level functions kicking-in and creating a doubt over the initial judgement.
For most people with very high IQ we probably will have more people with either problems communicating or personality issues than people that fit in well with the background.
There are not a lot of Carl Sagan's around, and less of Richard Feynman's, and these are rather the outliers when it comes to ability to fit in and communicate while being exceptional.
The problems of ability to communicate complex information and navigate emotionall responses is one that has caused a lot of grief throughout all of history.
People often kill the messenger if they don't like the message, they persecute, imprision and ostracize anyone that has said something that triggers an emotional response or is contrary to their beliefs and values.
Many times it is politically expedient to remove intelligent people to limit competition.
There is a large amount of people with low ability for general problem solving, that rely on cristallized patterns of behaviour, that use emotional heuristics and have very low understanding of abstract concepts.
They are tied to their social networks, to their costumes, to their mannerisms and routines. In a sense, some were the result of a process of domestication or selection processes that actually were contrary to the build of high intelligence.
Because of this, I fear, that the technology has actually over-paced the population ability to adapt. And we are at a cusp of a man made planet wide catastrophe.
The UK has delayed getting new infrastructure for years, recycling isn't the only thing the authorities dragged their feet.
This is a very common occurrence and it is probably getting worse as money is being directed to subsidize rentiers instead of public investment.
Now, you can recyble pastics in many ways the problem is the low density and high volume that helps in transport costs for products but is a killer for collection of waste and recycling.
PVC, and composite packaging don't help either, this increases the cost of recycling and the issues with disposal through incineration.
The thing is that we have been focusing in these two main recycling options:
- Clear plastic stream recycling, where only one plastic type is sorted and processed.
- Comingled plastics, the german way, that mixes everything but really has very limited usages.
We haven't seen much being done on pyrolisis and catalythic reconversion of plastic wastes, both of these would turn plastics into feedstock material.
Of course investment would be greater, specially cause it means dealing with all types of contaminants, and it would be similar to refining oil.
I think pyrolisis would be a good option, though I don't know how PVC and Silicone could be handled. Since one would generate organic clorine compounds that would useless and toxic, and the other will leave silicon residue at best.
Green facism?... Surelly some wimpy Social Justice Warriors cause you worry?
In my time there were hardcore Maoistes, Trotskistes and Stalinists, those I was scared of, now these guys going on a gluten free diet, meh.
Screaming quotas, lower emmission, more recycling can be annoying, but facism?
Now if you want to breathe NOX gases, take some lead compounds into your system, drink water with benzene, please do.
But please, do it quickly. You need to increase the dosage it is clearly not working well enough.
Or someone on the director's board was conned into buying a turd.
Nuclear power plant designs are a course into maximizing complexity with more active security systems.
Water cooled reactors with solid fuel bars are a bad design, even its inventor thought it was a bad idea in the long term.
The fuels rods don't burn all fissile material, they get less dense as gaz byproducts accumulate and leave out a lot "waste" materials that could be turn into energy. The water cooling has to be kept at all times, failure in cooling generates a meltdown, exposure of the fuel rods to water will generate hidrogen.
This design is a testament to the power that certification processes have to impede new designs, of course there hasn't been serious money and political power into getting new safer designs out of paper.
There is an attempt to get fast breeders, but these have proven to be bigger disasters in the making by using reactive metals, like sodium, as coolant.
The nuclear industry has painted itself into a corner.
Seriously!?
When do UFO conspiracy groups becomes source material?
I have read all that crap material since the time of the usenet, using TIN to check newsgroups and buying OMNI magazine.
Jeezus!!... The material is repeated ad nauseam, at the time I was a teenager, but once one starts to see the inconsistencies that it is just a form of entertainment.
Much like the fantastic tales of the middle ages and renaissance, there is always market for grown-up faery tales.
If there is a large iron deposit in Antartica, great. But nothing like "Aliens" special.
I didn't make a distinction, though there is a Irony.
People in power require others to do their bidding, some are more complicit than others.
But in the end, the powerful will try to discard themselves of their promisses and of people.
A company that behaves in an unethical manner in the marketplace also deceives employees.
Who would have thought about that.
Now, I would get that they exercize their share options a lot sooner than most. So, I would think there would be a catch.
But not hidrocarbons, people forget that in western europe and the us it was common to have acid rains.
Now for some time every coal fired power station has to have a scrubber for it sulfur and particulate emissions.
That is expensive to operate, specially if competing fuels have little or no sulfur content, or generate very little particulate emissions.
The problem that the coal industry has is that it is a very dirty fuel, it has a massive direct impact as we are seeing in China.
Because, most people are by nature ignorant of the historical facts this gets discounted or we get a nice green narrative.
On the other side, solar and wind are another nail in the coffin for coal. Mostly cause they mess-up with the break even points on the operation of a power plant.
A coal plant can't be put on and off all the time, it has a lead time before it starts generating power, equipments will tear up if put into too many cooling off and power on cycles.
Also, wind and solar costs are centered on the fixed cost of financing the installation and maintenance, no extra fuelled required. So they have an incentive to sell power at any price available once built. Even if the first operator gets bankrupt, the next one buying the assets for peanuts can make a killing.
Unless it is bought by an adamant coal operator that has an ideological bent on destroying everything not emitting carbon.
That doens't mean hidrocarbons are dead, it is just shifting from fuel sources that require high priced installations and have very low flexibility, hence natural gaz.
Now, if solar and wind keep growing at the same rates, we will see more displacement of hidrocarbon fuel sources. Though we will have to deal with baseload problem on energy sources that are intermittent.
Actually overcrowding is the lesser of our problems...
The issue has been that large urban centers concentrate a lot of the good jobs that are available, so people aggregate towards them.
But that has a dinamic, of increasing the living costs in urban centers. This means people are less likely to have bigger families in big cities.
We see this in all through western europe, people are avoiding having kids and delaying parenthood because of the costs and loss of economical opportunities.
Actually in Germany one big reason to get into poverty is to have kids, cause childcare centers close early and mothers either have to rely on part time jobs or stay at home.
The issues with increasing population in big metro cities are mostly to do with jobs and opportunities being greater there than in the countryside.
If AI removes those jobs, then these cities become centers of unrest. But not because of overcrowding but because there is no hope.
Also the rats experiences where done in a way that rats would have space and plenty of food. What happened was that rats themselves turned against each other and started denying food to those of lower status or with lower propensity for aggression.
I think that, the new round of automation will kill a lot of jobs, that the those jobs that will disappear won't be replaced by new unexisting jobs.
Replacing jobs like taxi driver, truck drivers and related to driving transport machines is worrisome cause they represent a lot of the currently unskilled jobs available.
Also, replacing fast food restaurant workers will have a massive impact, even if these jobs are low quality jobs but they represent entry level and a way to get at least some basic income.
This will have a big impact, mostly cause what we do for a living is not only a way to provide our material needs but also our status.
Having a large percentage of the population with no possibility of getting a job, no income, and no status, it is a sure way for society to degenerate.
This will bleed into the middle classes, while the "safe" jobs get snuffed, like medical doctor, lawyer and others. Doesn't mean there won't be a need for them, it is just that will need less not more.
Now, think what a person that doesn't have any means to provide for themselves, what will they do?
- We, can expect a big increase in drugs consumption of the potent type, and alcohol.
- Sex industry would grow.
- Steady growth of petty crime, and possibility of high civil unrest.
- Systemic collapse of infrastructure.
- Breakdown in social cohesion, and morals will be either very loose or very strict.
Given the current political biases that complain against people living on welfare, at same time their solution is to time warp into the 19th century and privatize everything.
I find that libertarians, conservatives, neo-liberals and liberals are tottally out of tune with reality, there is a complacent ignorance of history, a tunnel vision that prevents any sensible action outside of a narrow field of interests.
Keynes was right when he said: "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." and "Ideas shape the course of history."
Yep, but you forgot about energy density, make the beam very compact.
How about pouring it into a plank length beam?
And that would be your carrier wave to pump other photons.
Then build a beam that warms a local space line to a ridiculous big temperature and then... try to get stuff faster than light in a vacuum. Photons or vapors...
Unless there is infrastructure to mine the elements for fuel and materials outside Earth, then there is less need to bring out bulk supplies from Earth.
The Moon and Ceres might be obvious sources for volatile elements, there are a lot of challenges in doing this.
The first one is, that we have 0 experience in mining in low gravity environments.
The second and very important we need lots of energy to do mining, even if we accept processes that have very low yields or handle very low mass batches.
Also, mining an asteroid for volatile elements requires ways to extract and capture mass. Store the output and refine it, to get a suitable raw material that isn't too full of contaminants
The question that is more important is, how long someone is willing to foot the bill till all this supply chain starts scaling into a reasonable size. Where we are talking on the order of hundreds of metric tonnes instead of a measly kilos being transported.
Yep, because all of your infrastructure is an gravity well with g equals to 9.8 m/s.
If you start having towing and refueling infrastructure in orbit in several way points the math gets more favorable.
Most rich people's houses aren't in very defensible positions to start with, even if they have tall fences or walls.
Ok, so they get into the bunker while someone is checking where the bunker door is... This is, in case all society goes to hell.
What are the odds of someone finding a way in, if it has enough determination and demolition experience.
I guess if it is a temporary situation, like a riot or terror attack then it does the trick. But a large event which causes societal breakdown??
The rich depend on scores of people that provide for them services and essentials. Some of these are necessary for what they need to project power.
Without institutions, without supply chains that support global economy, being rich after a collapse of society is not exactly a better position.
If people knew more about history, they would knew that in the American continent civilizational collapse was quite common.
In part due to geographic limitations, and not having cattle and horses, civilizations would disappear quite frequently.
This came with the usual abandoning of urban settlements, cannibalism, and loss of knowledge either technical, scientific or historical.
We might know more about the Mayas, but there were others in North America that built large mounds and cities and could work metals that disappeared without leaving a record.
This thing of the government being inept, have you seen private bureaucracies at work?
Big corporate bureaucracies are as inept most of the time as state bureaucracies. The moment you have an organization with more than 100 people and company policies or laws start to encroach and accumulate to prevent abuses or set preferred policies then as time goes by you'll see a mismatch between desired outcomes and real outcomes.
Now, the problem is that at this point incremental improvements in productivity, technology or administration require ever more resources to be accomplished, this means that big bureaucratic tend to be the norm in both private and state organizations.
You forgot if output is not sold it doesn't really count.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
Do you think the European colonies in the Americas were cost effective from the start?
It took quite a lot of support from to get those colonies self sustainable, specially if it wasn't possible to enslave the natives to do their master's bidding.
The colonies were sold in Europe as way for riches, and to get more land, but mostly to get windfall riches after the Spanish stroke the motherload with the Aztecs and the Incas.
All other colonies had to endure several decades of very little growth and dependency of their country of origin,
The moon is a lot worse cause there null infrastructure, and the affordable technology for getting to orbit and out of Earth orbit doesn't exist yet.
But we now have ways to automate stuff, and we could send automated stations that could assemble buildings and materials in the Moon.
Probably, have an automated station building materials and equipment for some years would make it feasible to colonize the moon.
Nice, then you have leads to do randomized controlled studies where before you would have to guess. I bet there is a strong correlation with the amount of surveys done with followup controlled studies on a given subject.
That is called empirical work that builds up a case. Eventually you will have a more precise picture, that's science.
Yep, correlation != causation.
But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Also, we don't have the abstract of the article, or the introduction to the survey questionnaire, but it is possible that there is a health condition field.
Like a health status, or if the person has a previous condition or another health issue.
So it logical to assume that there was some tracking on that.
Plus, you can be "healthy" and not know that you have a congenital or genetic condition or even cancer.
That is why in situations you are not sure about causality you'll use random testing, that's what it is used for pharma trials.
This survey from what I can read was survey done on groups to control a set of variables related to preventable death, and check for clusters.
Very much standard course of action, if it is an open survey the raw data probably is available in anonymized form so other teams can check the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, when log anonymously nothing appears on this post.
Maybe I just write crappy posts or they are being pushed down.
But it is interesting that a relative neutral post doesn't appear, but inflamed posts are everywhere...
Just checking if comments appear or are cached, or otherwise.
Part of this probably has to do with the fact the brain as any other organ is constrained by resources, space and genetic makeup.
So a person with an high level of general intelligence, that fits the measures of IQ, might have issues with other forms of useful brain activities.
And general problem solving is an high intensity set of tasks for the brain and require a lot of conscious activity, this has a way of shutting down other more autonomic responses.
Neural pathways connected with social, personal interactions might be overriden or used for other purposes, instincts might be subjected to repression due to higher level functions kicking-in and creating a doubt over the initial judgement.
For most people with very high IQ we probably will have more people with either problems communicating or personality issues than people that fit in well with the background.
There are not a lot of Carl Sagan's around, and less of Richard Feynman's, and these are rather the outliers when it comes to ability to fit in and communicate while being exceptional.
The problems of ability to communicate complex information and navigate emotionall responses is one that has caused a lot of grief throughout all of history.
People often kill the messenger if they don't like the message, they persecute, imprision and ostracize anyone that has said something that triggers an emotional response or is contrary to their beliefs and values.
Many times it is politically expedient to remove intelligent people to limit competition.
There is a large amount of people with low ability for general problem solving, that rely on cristallized patterns of behaviour, that use emotional heuristics and have very low understanding of abstract concepts.
They are tied to their social networks, to their costumes, to their mannerisms and routines. In a sense, some were the result of a process of domestication or selection processes that actually were contrary to the build of high intelligence.
Because of this, I fear, that the technology has actually over-paced the population ability to adapt. And we are at a cusp of a man made planet wide catastrophe.
The UK has delayed getting new infrastructure for years, recycling isn't the only thing the authorities dragged their feet.
This is a very common occurrence and it is probably getting worse as money is being directed to subsidize rentiers instead of public investment.
Now, you can recyble pastics in many ways the problem is the low density and high volume that helps in transport costs for products but is a killer for collection of waste and recycling.
PVC, and composite packaging don't help either, this increases the cost of recycling and the issues with disposal through incineration.
The thing is that we have been focusing in these two main recycling options:
- Clear plastic stream recycling, where only one plastic type is sorted and processed.
- Comingled plastics, the german way, that mixes everything but really has very limited usages.
We haven't seen much being done on pyrolisis and catalythic reconversion of plastic wastes, both of these would turn plastics into feedstock material.
Of course investment would be greater, specially cause it means dealing with all types of contaminants, and it would be similar to refining oil.
I think pyrolisis would be a good option, though I don't know how PVC and Silicone could be handled. Since one would generate organic clorine compounds that would useless and toxic, and the other will leave silicon residue at best.
Green facism?... Surelly some wimpy Social Justice Warriors cause you worry?
In my time there were hardcore Maoistes, Trotskistes and Stalinists, those I was scared of, now these guys going on a gluten free diet, meh.
Screaming quotas, lower emmission, more recycling can be annoying, but facism?
Now if you want to breathe NOX gases, take some lead compounds into your system, drink water with benzene, please do.
But please, do it quickly. You need to increase the dosage it is clearly not working well enough.
Or someone on the director's board was conned into buying a turd.
Nuclear power plant designs are a course into maximizing complexity with more active security systems.
Water cooled reactors with solid fuel bars are a bad design, even its inventor thought it was a bad idea in the long term.
The fuels rods don't burn all fissile material, they get less dense as gaz byproducts accumulate and leave out a lot "waste" materials that could be turn into energy.
The water cooling has to be kept at all times, failure in cooling generates a meltdown, exposure of the fuel rods to water will generate hidrogen.
This design is a testament to the power that certification processes have to impede new designs, of course there hasn't been serious money and political power into getting new safer designs out of paper.
There is an attempt to get fast breeders, but these have proven to be bigger disasters in the making by using reactive metals, like sodium, as coolant.
The nuclear industry has painted itself into a corner.
Seriously!?
When do UFO conspiracy groups becomes source material?
I have read all that crap material since the time of the usenet, using TIN to check newsgroups and buying OMNI magazine.
Jeezus!!... The material is repeated ad nauseam, at the time I was a teenager, but once one starts to see the inconsistencies that it is just a form of entertainment.
Much like the fantastic tales of the middle ages and renaissance, there is always market for grown-up faery tales.
If there is a large iron deposit in Antartica, great. But nothing like "Aliens" special.
I didn't make a distinction, though there is a Irony.
People in power require others to do their bidding, some are more complicit than others.
But in the end, the powerful will try to discard themselves of their promisses and of people.
A company that behaves in an unethical manner in the marketplace also deceives employees.
Who would have thought about that.
Now, I would get that they exercize their share options a lot sooner than most. So, I would think there would be a catch.
But not hidrocarbons, people forget that in western europe and the us it was common to have acid rains.
Now for some time every coal fired power station has to have a scrubber for it sulfur and particulate emissions.
That is expensive to operate, specially if competing fuels have little or no sulfur content, or generate very little particulate emissions.
The problem that the coal industry has is that it is a very dirty fuel, it has a massive direct impact as we are seeing in China.
Because, most people are by nature ignorant of the historical facts this gets discounted or we get a nice green narrative.
On the other side, solar and wind are another nail in the coffin for coal. Mostly cause they mess-up with the break even points on the operation of a power plant.
A coal plant can't be put on and off all the time, it has a lead time before it starts generating power, equipments will tear up if put into too many cooling off and power on cycles.
Also, wind and solar costs are centered on the fixed cost of financing the installation and maintenance, no extra fuelled required. So they have an incentive to sell power at any price available once built.
Even if the first operator gets bankrupt, the next one buying the assets for peanuts can make a killing.
Unless it is bought by an adamant coal operator that has an ideological bent on destroying everything not emitting carbon.
That doens't mean hidrocarbons are dead, it is just shifting from fuel sources that require high priced installations and have very low flexibility, hence natural gaz.
Now, if solar and wind keep growing at the same rates, we will see more displacement of hidrocarbon fuel sources. Though we will have to deal with baseload problem on energy sources that are intermittent.
I find it funny that people take little issues so much at heart.
Actually overcrowding is the lesser of our problems...
The issue has been that large urban centers concentrate a lot of the good jobs that are available, so people aggregate towards them.
But that has a dinamic, of increasing the living costs in urban centers. This means people are less likely to have bigger families in big cities.
We see this in all through western europe, people are avoiding having kids and delaying parenthood because of the costs and loss of economical opportunities.
Actually in Germany one big reason to get into poverty is to have kids, cause childcare centers close early and mothers either have to rely on part time jobs or stay at home.
The issues with increasing population in big metro cities are mostly to do with jobs and opportunities being greater there than in the countryside.
If AI removes those jobs, then these cities become centers of unrest. But not because of overcrowding but because there is no hope.
Also the rats experiences where done in a way that rats would have space and plenty of food. What happened was that rats themselves turned against each other
and started denying food to those of lower status or with lower propensity for aggression.
I think that, the new round of automation will kill a lot of jobs, that the those jobs that will disappear won't be replaced by new unexisting jobs.
Replacing jobs like taxi driver, truck drivers and related to driving transport machines is worrisome cause they represent a lot of the currently unskilled jobs available.
Also, replacing fast food restaurant workers will have a massive impact, even if these jobs are low quality jobs but they represent entry level and a way to get at least some basic income.
This will have a big impact, mostly cause what we do for a living is not only a way to provide our material needs but also our status.
Having a large percentage of the population with no possibility of getting a job, no income, and no status, it is a sure way for society to degenerate.
This will bleed into the middle classes, while the "safe" jobs get snuffed, like medical doctor, lawyer and others. Doesn't mean there won't be a need for them, it is just that will need less not more.
Now, think what a person that doesn't have any means to provide for themselves, what will they do?
- We, can expect a big increase in drugs consumption of the potent type, and alcohol.
- Sex industry would grow.
- Steady growth of petty crime, and possibility of high civil unrest.
- Systemic collapse of infrastructure.
- Breakdown in social cohesion, and morals will be either very loose or very strict.
Given the current political biases that complain against people living on welfare, at same time their solution is to time warp into the 19th century and privatize everything.
I find that libertarians, conservatives, neo-liberals and liberals are tottally out of tune with reality, there is a complacent ignorance of history, a tunnel vision that prevents any sensible action outside of a narrow field of interests.
Keynes was right when he said: "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." and "Ideas shape the course of history."
Him?
What part of photons or vapors didn't you understand?
Glasses you need, hummm...
Or Troll you are...
Yep, but you forgot about energy density, make the beam very compact.
How about pouring it into a plank length beam?
And that would be your carrier wave to pump other photons.
Then build a beam that warms a local space line to a ridiculous big temperature and then... try to get stuff faster than light in a vacuum. Photons or vapors...
Unless there is infrastructure to mine the elements for fuel and materials outside Earth, then there is less need to bring out bulk supplies from Earth.
The Moon and Ceres might be obvious sources for volatile elements, there are a lot of challenges in doing this.
The first one is, that we have 0 experience in mining in low gravity environments.
The second and very important we need lots of energy to do mining, even if we accept processes that have very low yields or handle very low mass batches.
Also, mining an asteroid for volatile elements requires ways to extract and capture mass. Store the output and refine it, to get a suitable raw material that isn't too full of contaminants
The question that is more important is, how long someone is willing to foot the bill till all this supply chain starts scaling into a reasonable size. Where we are talking on the order of hundreds of metric tonnes instead of a measly kilos being transported.
Yep, because all of your infrastructure is an gravity well with g equals to 9.8 m/s. If you start having towing and refueling infrastructure in orbit in several way points the math gets more favorable.
Most rich people's houses aren't in very defensible positions to start with, even if they have tall fences or walls.
Ok, so they get into the bunker while someone is checking where the bunker door is... This is, in case all society goes to hell.
What are the odds of someone finding a way in, if it has enough determination and demolition experience.
I guess if it is a temporary situation, like a riot or terror attack then it does the trick. But a large event which causes societal breakdown??
The rich depend on scores of people that provide for them services and essentials. Some of these are necessary for what they need to project power.
Without institutions, without supply chains that support global economy, being rich after a collapse of society is not exactly a better position.
If people knew more about history, they would knew that in the American continent civilizational collapse was quite common.
In part due to geographic limitations, and not having cattle and horses, civilizations would disappear quite frequently.
This came with the usual abandoning of urban settlements, cannibalism, and loss of knowledge either technical, scientific or historical.
We might know more about the Mayas, but there were others in North America that built large mounds and cities and could work metals that disappeared without leaving a record.
This thing of the government being inept, have you seen private bureaucracies at work?
Big corporate bureaucracies are as inept most of the time as state bureaucracies. The moment you have an organization with more than 100 people and company policies or laws start to encroach and accumulate to prevent abuses or set preferred policies then as time goes by you'll see a mismatch between desired outcomes and real outcomes.
Now, the problem is that at this point incremental improvements in productivity, technology or administration require ever more resources to be accomplished, this means that big bureaucratic tend to be the norm in both private and state organizations.
You forgot if output is not sold it doesn't really count.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
Slashdot should have made Depressive mod points
Do you think the European colonies in the Americas were cost effective from the start?
It took quite a lot of support from to get those colonies self sustainable, specially if it wasn't possible to enslave the natives to do their master's bidding.
The colonies were sold in Europe as way for riches, and to get more land, but mostly to get windfall riches after the Spanish stroke the motherload with the Aztecs and the Incas.
All other colonies had to endure several decades of very little growth and dependency of their country of origin,
The moon is a lot worse cause there null infrastructure, and the affordable technology for getting to orbit and out of Earth orbit doesn't exist yet.
But we now have ways to automate stuff, and we could send automated stations that could assemble buildings and materials in the Moon.
Probably, have an automated station building materials and equipment for some years would make it feasible to colonize the moon.
Nice, then you have leads to do randomized controlled studies where before you would have to guess. I bet there is a strong correlation with the amount of surveys done with followup controlled studies on a given subject. That is called empirical work that builds up a case. Eventually you will have a more precise picture, that's science.
Yep, correlation != causation.
But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Also, we don't have the abstract of the article, or the introduction to the survey questionnaire, but it is possible that there is a health condition field.
Like a health status, or if the person has a previous condition or another health issue.
So it logical to assume that there was some tracking on that.
Plus, you can be "healthy" and not know that you have a congenital or genetic condition or even cancer.
That is why in situations you are not sure about causality you'll use random testing, that's what it is used for pharma trials.
This survey from what I can read was survey done on groups to control a set of variables related to preventable death, and check for clusters.
Very much standard course of action, if it is an open survey the raw data probably is available in anonymized form so other teams can check the results.