Living in a world that we don't understand is a humbling, human endeavor.
The history of science and the history of medicine teach us that causation is murky, at best, and that things often work for reasons that we don't understand. People have been tackling this conundrum for many years, in various ways, and there are lessons to be learned from our ancestors' insights and experiences.
The best we can do, of course, is be human. We can tinker. That's what our ancestors did.
We can self-experiment via n=1 clinical trials and set our physiologies (and healthcare systems) free.
That all sounds good--great--but, how do we tinker,
today, in the real-world, and not be
fooled by randomness in the long-run?
Ironically, John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long-run, we are all dead." This notion, unfortunately, lead him to support theories that further blunted critical short-term feedback loops in banking practices and throughout our economic systems.
The expansion of credit--debt leverage--that followed from these theories spread our economy too thin over many years while silent financial risks built up. It's like having problems with your feet and back, blaming these pains on your shoes, but then adding orthotics and arch supports to 'bolster' those shoes: the extra shoe material--like solving debt problems with ever more debt--further drowns out the biological feedback loops that shoes block in the first place. Evolution--Mother Nature--'designed' (the ultimate bottom-up, trial-and-error iteration process) your feet to interact with the ground intimately and dynamically. Shoes are like the
Gaussian: they both are platonic constructs that provide false senses of security when navigating complex terrain. This is why rugby players experience fewer severe head injuries than football players do: rugby players, playing without helmets, learn how to tackle and hit with their head up or positioned strategically to avoid head trauma, while football players, wearing helmets that they think offer protection, use their bodies as torpedos and expose themselves to catastrophe. Instead, the real solution is to remove the shoes--the toxic agent, like debt--and barefoot or wear minimal shoes like
Vibrams so that the natural short-term feedback cycles can operate properly: entrepreneurs recognize this concept as 'failing fast' but never blowing up. You falsify startup business conjectures--marketing approaches, for instance--that don't work and still keep enough resources on hand to pursue future options that emerge serendipitously--you avoid enslavement to obligations, like debt, as much as possible. In healthcare, a similar situation occurs when we provide first-dollar coverage for basic medical needs: people are shunted from experiencing the true costs of their daily lifestyle choices, and without these short-term feedback loops, patients leverage their physiologies out, assuming that the medical system will take care of them when their bodies fail. This process breeds another example of
silent erosion, where hidden negative Black Swan health risks build up over many years. So, the irony is that
Keynesian economics, which purports a short-term emphasis in the name of stability, actually exposes us systemically to the problem of being 'dead', via blow up, in the long-run: this approach builds fragile economic systems, lacking robustness to negative Black Swan strikes.
We should learn from our immune systems: Mother Nature shaped them over many, many years.
As human beings, we can try to construct some
rules to live by that hopefully position us in ways that clip exposure to negative Black Swan events while maintaining exposure to positive ones.
The
deductivist/falsification approach, embedded in a
Barbell diversification schema (80-90% hyperconservative paired with 10-20% hyperaggressive, highly diversified), appears, to me, to be the best we can do in many ways.
In order to not get fooled by randomness in the short-term, we must do our best to capture and respect short-term feedback loops--whether quantitative or qualitative--that lead to long-term results. For instance, if diseases like breast cancer and heart disease are linked to / caused by inflammation (in a general sense), then a reasonable short-term feedback loop is to measure/capture our bodies' inflammatory responses to different environmental stressors and products. The cumulative effect of '
silent inflammation' leads to negative Black Swan health strikes in a manner similar to how avalanches work (it's the power-law, fractal math of Mother Nature): Snow builds up for long periods of time, without any sign of impending collapse, and then one tiny event--a triggering event--causes the non-linear consequences of an avalanche cascade. It's like those stories you hear about people eating their morning toast and then boom: they suffer heart attacks. Their bodies' inflammatory responses that day were just like the final snow buildup event that triggered the avalanche. Our immune systems work in a similar fashion. We fend off toxins and pathogens successfully for some time until the toxicity reaches a threshold, breaks a barrier, and unleashes chaos: our bodies start attacking our own cells; our cells start communicating with each other improperly; and, unfortunate events like cancer and autoimmune disorders (Lupus, to name another) ensue. So, to avoid this type of physiological collapse, we need to identify and test (enter self-experimentation once again) short-term feedback loops for energy expenditure and for energy fueling.
Energy Expenditure: As an example, consider the condition we label as arthritis. Arthritis is a problem that builds up, so soreness, pain, and aches seem like potentially useful short-term feedback measures: After a work out, we should track how sore and 'debilitated' we feel. This is why
Dr. Doug McGuff wrote
Body by Science. To consider ways that we can limit damage while maximizing anabolism.
Mark Sisson listened to his body's feedback and elected to hike in the hills more often--as
Grok would have done--and do
body-weight exercises (such as hand-stand pushups) more frequently so that he doesn't feel sore, inflamed, or achy after working out--that works for him. Personally, in my current 'n=1' self-experiment, I like to hybridize Doug and Mark when I expend energy, blending in more swimming and dynamic yoga work from my own trial-and-error learning. Furthermore, in this domain of
arthritis avoidance, I know that jogging produces lots of soreness in the wrong areas (in major joints, like my knees), while sprinting briefly does not. When I am sore, I want it in the core (stabilizing) muscles of my body--not in my joints. I falsified the jogging-at-a-constant-rate-for-extended-periods-of-time conjecture long ago.
Energy Fueling: When we self-experiment with our diets, as we do when we try to mimic our
ancestral eating ways by using archetypes and mythologies, we can frame our experiences from this same deductivist/falsification perspective. For instance, residual aftertaste is an ultra short-term feedback loop that we can pay attention to. After I eat foods, I monitor aftertaste: If eating a food or drinking a beverage produces a terrible aftertaste in my mouth, then I edit it out of
my food my-thology story (it's poison avoidance). The list of metrics is an experiment in itself, but here is another possibility: If my mood or my energy levels decline precipitously in response to an item in my diet, regardless of whether this item is in the 'experimental' portion or the 'tried-and-true' section of my Barbell portfolio, then I excise this item from my energy intake schedule. In essence, we need to monitor our bodies in this grounded manner and hopefully--we can't avoid hoping; it's an inherent part of the human condition--our physiological responses, shaped by millions of years of evolution, will signal us correctly in the right directions and away from the wrong ones when nurtured in the right manners. Decades ago, when High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) intake started ramping up, if folks had listened intently to their bodies and responded to short-term feedback signals from a falsification perspective, then they would have changed course and edited HFCS-laden sodas/drinks and foods out of their diets before the long-term effects--
alien tissues --could set in. We would have falsified the hypothesis that human metabolisms can handle HFCS long ago because this poison triggers inflammation, acne, obesity, bowel problems, etc. in the very short-term.
Since I see life as an experiment, and view myself as a walking lab rat / guinea pig, this approach, however messy, resonates well with my
'n=1/m=1' philosophy. Yet, stepping back, on a broader scale, I think we fail to engender this
thinkering view and curious spirit in children because our educational approaches focus on the known, rather than on the unknown. We also tend to, culturally and psychologically, favor confirmation over
disconfirmation. I try my best--it's a work in progress, of course--to search actively, openly, and honestly for data points that disconfirm my tentative story--I know what is bad for me with much more certainty than I know what is good for me (
it's the asymmetry of uncertainty ). This approach is why I edited fruit and wine (except for a new running wine experiment with
hormesis ) out of my existing ancestral diet--these items produced water retention, bloating, and other negative results for me. So, I made the logical
negative empiricism conclusion, re-edited my
Ancestral Fitness story by entering
Fructose Detox, and continued (cautiously but boldly) forward, looking high and low for new data points that falsify other conjectures that I currently live by.
Then, as we iterate along this deductivist/falsification path, we must remind ourselves that we can learn from our ancestors in important way: Those who came before us lived out and experienced the longer time-scales that we are making conjectures about today based on short-term feedback loops, reflection, and
thought experiments. Many of our longstanding ancestral traditions--like the fact that
intermittent fasting is built into many cultures and religions or that certain cultures ban debt--reflect gems from long-term feedback--
positive Black Swan treasure hunts --that people have embedded in mythologies to teach future generations in hopes that they will learn by grace and avert hard knocks. We can heed this
proverbial knowledge and clinical wisdom in the art of living as best as possible.
We can also do, as
Nassim Taleb says:
respect complexity. If economic systems are complex and wildly recursive, then we should not be fooled (by randomness) into thinking that something as platonic--propped up on hot-air theory--as the Gaussian--so crisp, clean, and human-derived--is useful and reliable. The math of Mother Nature reflects many long-term experiments, incorporating blowups and the resulting shockwaves that occurred along the way. The elephant is the largest animal on the planet; perhaps, our governments and corporations should take a hint from this insight in regards to the too-big-to-fail problem. Thus, by respecting the complexity of Mother Nature, we are, in effect, heeding the wisdom of long-term clinical trials so that we don't have to repeat the hard knocks of our ancestors once again: each successive generation builds on previous generations, standing on their shoulders and progressing to new levels in the human experience, this way.
Like I referenced in
my BIL:PIL presentation, we are each limited by our own experiences, so I think we would be
wise to create communities of self-experimenters who share their feedback notes and results with each other--particularly their falsification data points--so that we can help each other
avoid being the Turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
That's why the
Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE), as a community of self-experimenters in the Blogosphere, is so important to me. I learned from Mark Sisson because Mark's experience resonated with me as a former athlete who trained and fueled how he used to. By learning from Mark's experience now, at a younger age than he did, I have improved my chances of mitigating the effects of the poisonous diet and catabolic exercise choices that I made for many years. (I also learned from Art DeVany, Dave Lull, and many others--it's such a rich, dynamic list of mentors--along the way.)
Sure, causation will always be murky--it's the melting-ice-cube, reverse-history problem--but if we constantly and honestly scrutinize our stories from a deductivist perspective, then we will hopefully 'fail fast', re-edit our stories, and move on, like our immune systems do, more robust to the next negative event: We strengthen our 80-90% portion of our Barbell platforms this way. Being hyperconservative in this regard will vary from situation to situation, but avoiding leverage is a universal concept. Leverage for businesses gives a false sense of security and delays feedback--debt allows you to continue operating into the future without underlying sustainability. Starting a company without debt, as I have done with my businesses and business partners, exposes you to short-term feedback loops much more closely, and this helps for long-term sustainability because you build from the bottom-up, editing out things that don't work quickly--your business will disappear if you don't.
So, perhaps the best we can do is try to
barefoot as much as possible and
avoid 'false sense-of-security' mechanisms in complex systems, while learning from our ancestors, Mother Nature, and entities that have withstood large-scale shockwaves in the past: these are resilient mentors and archetypes to mimic.
I bet this topic would be a prime question for a self-experimentation community--folks would share their proverbial knowledge--clinical wisdom--in how to structure living in ways that make us robust to blow ups while maintaining exposure to
the envelope of serendipity.
Yes, I don't know the best answer to this fooled-by-randomness challenge, but admitting that is the first step to uncovering solutions. The first step is admitting humility.
Since we must be concerned about probability times impact--that's what matters--diversifying our experiments in our 10-20% Barbell portfolio portion likely helps mitigate the risk of high-impact, negative events.
No matter how tentative, this is a conversation that should, really, never cease.
We need to do our best to learn from our experiences, catalogue our observations, practice
epoche, and apply these insights to very similar situations; from one similar situation to another, searching for situations that seem similar but reject our procedures and approaches. We also need to build general maps of environments in which we don't mind being fooled by randomness--the arts, for instance--and ecologies where we don't want to be fooled by randomness--finance and healthcare, for example.
It's a humble process, but I think
we are making progress.
To good health,
Brent
(As always,
thanks to Dave Lull: my
deductivist/falsification mentor -- and --
thanks to Seth Roberts: my
self-experimentation mentor)
As human beings, we can try to construct some rules to live by that hopefully position us in ways that clip exposure to negative Black Swan events while maintaining exposure to positive ones.
The deductivist/falsification approach, embedded in a Barbell diversification schema (80-90% hyperconservative paired with 10-20% hyperaggressive, highly diversified), appears, to me, to be the best we can do in many ways.
In order to not get fooled by randomness in the short-term, we must do our best to capture and respect short-term feedback loops--whether quantitative or qualitative--that lead to long-term results. For instance, if diseases like breast cancer and heart disease are linked to / caused by inflammation (in a general sense), then a reasonable short-term feedback loop is to measure/capture our bodies' inflammatory responses to different environmental stressors and products. The cumulative effect of 'silent inflammation' leads to negative Black Swan health strikes in a manner similar to how avalanches work (it's the power-law, fractal math of Mother Nature): Snow builds up for long periods of time, without any sign of impending collapse, and then one tiny event--a triggering event--causes the non-linear consequences of an avalanche cascade. It's like those stories you hear about people eating their morning toast and then boom: they suffer heart attacks. Their bodies' inflammatory responses that day were just like the final snow buildup event that triggered the avalanche. Our immune systems work in a similar fashion. We fend off toxins and pathogens successfully for some time until the toxicity reaches a threshold, breaks a barrier, and unleashes chaos: our bodies start attacking our own cells; our cells start communicating with each other improperly; and, unfortunate events like cancer and autoimmune disorders (Lupus, to name another) ensue. So, to avoid this type of physiological collapse, we need to identify and test (enter self-experimentation once again) short-term feedback loops for energy expenditure and for energy fueling.
Since I see life as an experiment, and view myself as a walking lab rat / guinea pig, this approach, however messy, resonates well with my 'n=1/m=1' philosophy. Yet, stepping back, on a broader scale, I think we fail to engender this thinkering view and curious spirit in children because our educational approaches focus on the known, rather than on the unknown. We also tend to, culturally and psychologically, favor confirmation over disconfirmation. I try my best--it's a work in progress, of course--to search actively, openly, and honestly for data points that disconfirm my tentative story--I know what is bad for me with much more certainty than I know what is good for me ( it's the asymmetry of uncertainty ). This approach is why I edited fruit and wine (except for a new running wine experiment with hormesis ) out of my existing ancestral diet--these items produced water retention, bloating, and other negative results for me. So, I made the logical negative empiricism conclusion, re-edited my Ancestral Fitness story by entering Fructose Detox, and continued (cautiously but boldly) forward, looking high and low for new data points that falsify other conjectures that I currently live by.
Then, as we iterate along this deductivist/falsification path, we must remind ourselves that we can learn from our ancestors in important way: Those who came before us lived out and experienced the longer time-scales that we are making conjectures about today based on short-term feedback loops, reflection, and thought experiments. Many of our longstanding ancestral traditions--like the fact that intermittent fasting is built into many cultures and religions or that certain cultures ban debt--reflect gems from long-term feedback-- positive Black Swan treasure hunts --that people have embedded in mythologies to teach future generations in hopes that they will learn by grace and avert hard knocks. We can heed this proverbial knowledge and clinical wisdom in the art of living as best as possible.
We can also do, as Nassim Taleb says: respect complexity. If economic systems are complex and wildly recursive, then we should not be fooled (by randomness) into thinking that something as platonic--propped up on hot-air theory--as the Gaussian--so crisp, clean, and human-derived--is useful and reliable. The math of Mother Nature reflects many long-term experiments, incorporating blowups and the resulting shockwaves that occurred along the way. The elephant is the largest animal on the planet; perhaps, our governments and corporations should take a hint from this insight in regards to the too-big-to-fail problem. Thus, by respecting the complexity of Mother Nature, we are, in effect, heeding the wisdom of long-term clinical trials so that we don't have to repeat the hard knocks of our ancestors once again: each successive generation builds on previous generations, standing on their shoulders and progressing to new levels in the human experience, this way.
Like I referenced in my BIL:PIL presentation, we are each limited by our own experiences, so I think we would be wise to create communities of self-experimenters who share their feedback notes and results with each other--particularly their falsification data points--so that we can help each other avoid being the Turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
That's why the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE), as a community of self-experimenters in the Blogosphere, is so important to me. I learned from Mark Sisson because Mark's experience resonated with me as a former athlete who trained and fueled how he used to. By learning from Mark's experience now, at a younger age than he did, I have improved my chances of mitigating the effects of the poisonous diet and catabolic exercise choices that I made for many years. (I also learned from Art DeVany, Dave Lull, and many others--it's such a rich, dynamic list of mentors--along the way.)
Sure, causation will always be murky--it's the melting-ice-cube, reverse-history problem--but if we constantly and honestly scrutinize our stories from a deductivist perspective, then we will hopefully 'fail fast', re-edit our stories, and move on, like our immune systems do, more robust to the next negative event: We strengthen our 80-90% portion of our Barbell platforms this way. Being hyperconservative in this regard will vary from situation to situation, but avoiding leverage is a universal concept. Leverage for businesses gives a false sense of security and delays feedback--debt allows you to continue operating into the future without underlying sustainability. Starting a company without debt, as I have done with my businesses and business partners, exposes you to short-term feedback loops much more closely, and this helps for long-term sustainability because you build from the bottom-up, editing out things that don't work quickly--your business will disappear if you don't.
So, perhaps the best we can do is try to barefoot as much as possible and avoid 'false sense-of-security' mechanisms in complex systems, while learning from our ancestors, Mother Nature, and entities that have withstood large-scale shockwaves in the past: these are resilient mentors and archetypes to mimic.
I bet this topic would be a prime question for a self-experimentation community--folks would share their proverbial knowledge--clinical wisdom--in how to structure living in ways that make us robust to blow ups while maintaining exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
Yes, I don't know the best answer to this fooled-by-randomness challenge, but admitting that is the first step to uncovering solutions. The first step is admitting humility.
Since we must be concerned about probability times impact--that's what matters--diversifying our experiments in our 10-20% Barbell portfolio portion likely helps mitigate the risk of high-impact, negative events.
No matter how tentative, this is a conversation that should, really, never cease.
We need to do our best to learn from our experiences, catalogue our observations, practice epoche, and apply these insights to very similar situations; from one similar situation to another, searching for situations that seem similar but reject our procedures and approaches. We also need to build general maps of environments in which we don't mind being fooled by randomness--the arts, for instance--and ecologies where we don't want to be fooled by randomness--finance and healthcare, for example.
It's a humble process, but I think we are making progress.