[cowboysauce]

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00901

Granted, I'm not very familiar with the math behind things like compression and I skimmed a few sections, but this seems to be a criticism of the authors' methods and not the general idea. They show that there are other ways to produce these quantifications of complexity that are better than what's in the original paper. But these also show that certain biological materials score substantially higher than the abiotic samples.

Some of the criticisms also seem to be nit-picking, mainly the mention of beer scoring very high on these measures, as if it's a fault. That just means it's a measure of how biotic something is, not necessarily if it's alive. Beer requires the interaction of at least three species (human, yeast, and wheat) so why shouldn't it score highly?