It is far beyond least squares as it was and is practiced
There already was stuff in the stats literature in the 1990s that was much better but people in the physics community (such as myself) were not aware of that literature. On the other hand, stats people were not particular aware of the way power laws were occuring in physics.
I saw things that did not add up ten years earlier and Mark Newman did too but we were both so caught up in the rat race, consensus reality, collective delusion, whatever you call it that I left physics before I could address the problem and he suffered through years of bullshit before he could find the time to do something about it.
Watching Mark write great papers, write great book chapters and suffer from tremendous anxiety over his career was a big reason why I left.
There already was stuff in the stats literature in the 1990s that was much better but people in the physics community (such as myself) were not aware of that literature. On the other hand, stats people were not particular aware of the way power laws were occuring in physics.
I saw things that did not add up ten years earlier and Mark Newman did too but we were both so caught up in the rat race, consensus reality, collective delusion, whatever you call it that I left physics before I could address the problem and he suffered through years of bullshit before he could find the time to do something about it.
Watching Mark write great papers, write great book chapters and suffer from tremendous anxiety over his career was a big reason why I left.