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Tag Archives: convexity

Health benefits from fasting that was NOT associated with reduction of calories.

Good news, but people in Medicine are a bit slow in getting the very notion of 2nd order effect /Jensen’s inequality and disentangling mentally the first from the 2nd order effect. Which is why few are getting Antifragile or the more general sensitivity to scale of a distribution. In the paper, Longo and associates saw […]

It is a huge, huge deal that battery costs are falling rapidly…

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/594853060184182784 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/595213136505933824

Another problem of averaging under convexity…

Another problem of averaging under convexity. Traditionally we have had *on average* slightly more than 2 children per woman (net of child mortality), which is the rate people converge to today. Except that in the past ~2 out of 10 children survived, today 2 out of 2. It means that we no longer have selection […]

THE PERFECT TEMPERATURE IS CONVEX….

THE PERFECT TEMPERATURE IS CONVEX. Recall that pulmonary ventilators (for patients with weak or sick lungs) are more effective if one varies the intensity (x+dx, x-dx instead of the constant previously assumed optimal x). Also recall that convexity (Jensen’s inequality, antifragility) is a general rule in natural settings rather than the exception. It just hit […]

OVERTREATMENT as short volatility…

OVERTREATMENT as short volatility: Huge vindication of the argument of Chapters 21 and 22 on the convexity of iatrogenics (only treat the VERY ill): Mortality is convex to blood pressure. Spyros Makridakis found this graph from the Farmingham study. The implication is obvious: only treat the seriously ill (and overtreat them!). But for every person […]