You may not build your daily system that way afterwards, but the mental model sticks

Yeah, that seems like an important distinction

Instead of always trying to make models more current and general, there may be value in making them deliberately narrow, historically constrained and weird in a well-defined way

The vitamin D angle seems much more plausible to me as a public-health issue than as an explanation for broad population-level cognitive differences

Doesn’t that make a feedback loop though? Poor health equals higher health care overhead, lower productivity, more family issues, and overall worse outcomes all over the place. That in turn is going to make educational outcomes worse and child rearing worse. Some diseases can even have lasting cognitive side effects.

What I find more plausible is that low sun exposure is one small contributor among many

Yes, I think that too. Besides sports, most young people studying today are aiming for jobs that are mainly indoors. It's not a requirement, of course, but because a lot of modern careers consist of working in offices or other enclosed environments.

No movement, No sun, Stale Air (Unless you have good ventilation). Pretty harmful if we think about it.

The paper isn't saying vitamin D determines cognition in general, just that there was a modest signal in a couple of memory measures

Women in the study weren't all starting from very low vitamin D levels

I'd read this less as "high-dose vitamin D makes kids smarter" and more as "prenatal vitamin D might matter for some neurodevelopmental outcomes, and it’s worth testing more directly"

I think "accountability sink" is the right phrase here

I think the only plausible argument for AI here is not "it knows age better than humans," but "it might be more consistent than ad hoc visual judgments by different officers"