Guys, this is not the US, where "terrorists" are trotted out like the bogeyman for scare effects. In Pakistan, terrorists are real, active forces that have de facto control over significant amounts of the country. They are absolutely trying to get control their citizens, and in fact specifically to stop them from trying to overthrow the government, and you know what? Most Pakistanis support this because the citizens we are talking about are not part of any legitimate political process, but instead murders and gangsters who are responsible for thousands of deaths. If the US was doing the same thing for the same stated reasons, it would absolutely be a crock of shit, but this is not the US. Given the circumstances, trying to positively ID people buying phones is pretty reasonable.
They are being a bit more specific than that. As in "when x increases by 1.00, y increases by 0.73".
Also, common sense thinking is a notoriously bad way to evaluate anything, as it is highly dependent on the selection and weight of initial premises. It is not at all a given that cities existing thousands of years before mass transportation, elevators, and combustion engines would work anything like modern cities.
If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defense of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.
Amusingly enough (in a dark comedy sort of way), science has shown this too. They don't even have to "want to believe", it just comes naturally.
So I read through the paper, and it was certainly above my maths, but it seems the most important point was actually left out. If I understood it correctly the "extortionate" idea simply seems to be you can arbitrarily cheat, then enforce a tit-for-tat strategy until your opponent decides to give you another chance. As the modern "evolutionary" play styles seem to be built around cooperation and avoiding falling into long negative spirals, you gain an advantage. Certainly realistic, as I (as have we all) have seen these behaviors in the real world. Also not super surprising.
What I thought was interesting, and perhaps more important, was they seem to show that the player with the shortest memory controlled the game - that having a thousand turn memory didn't help against tit-for-tat, because you would end up playing tit-for-tat regardless of your larger strategy. This is an idea that I think should be explored further.
Overall it seems interesting but I imagine the applicability of the IPD to biology is somewhat limited, in that it doesn't compare the overall gains of the prisoners as a system to other prisoner's systems. i.e. a "winning" strategy very well may end up with a disproportionately large piece of a very small pie.
People with healthy immune systems don't die of flu.
What about people without healthy immune systems? Is your immune system healthy, or is the way to check just to see if you die of the flu? Or maybe you get a type that kills you because you have a healthy immune system, like the 1918 pandemic, who knows.
As for the MMR vaccine causing measles, what? Before vaccinations, 90%+ of children contracted measles. Now it's down to a few hundred a year. That's a very strong correlation, but not for your theory.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.