When I see passages like that quoted below, I wonder if the authors are falling for the economist's fallacy, assuming that objective, quantifiable, repeatable m

When I see passages like that quoted below, I wonder if the authors are falling for the economist's fallacy, assuming that objective, quantifiable, repeatable measures are ipso facto measuring what they want to measure. I have not seen anything in this paper persuading me that understanding is a consequence of compression, rather than vice-versa. A weakness of the Turing test (Turing, 1950) is that a program might pass the test simply by exploiting weaknesses in human psychology. If a given system passes the test we cannot be sure if it was because of the quality of the responses or the gullibility of the judge. In contrast, Hutter’s compression test is more reliable. The more that data is compressed, the harder it becomes to compress it further (Chaitin, 2006). Because there is no way to cheat by using a simple heuristic, data compression presents a reliably hard standard. We argue that this process of identifying deep patterns through compression is what people mean when they attribute both ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’.