
Why I Do All This Walking ... (by Nassim Taleb) - rg
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/whyIwalk.pdf
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rg
From the article: "Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as a
simple energy deficits/excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned
equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple
causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of
filling up the tank of your new BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and
exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades
and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then
welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workout provide your
body with information about stressor in the environment. As I have been saying
throught, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the
trap of using simple thermodynamics with the same physics-envy and with the
same mentality and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the
economy as a web of simple links. And both are complex systems."

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Aron
So let's setup a system whereby a customized email is sent to users every
morning: "Today was a great day! You walked 25 miles before a thrilling and
ultimately triumphant encounter with an aged caribou that took 30 minutes of
fierce running. Clean water was extremely scarce, but you managed also to find
some grubs along the way. Feast away, the meat rots in 24 hours. Injuries
included minor laceration to the left quadriceps and some blistering of the
feet. Your search for a mate goes empty handed."

It's left up to the user to replicate the salient details in reality. Although
perhaps with a mobile device, this app could be real-time.

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mbrubeck
Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm) came to a very similar conclusion here:
[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/02/10/health-and-the-happy-
ha...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/02/10/health-and-the-happy-hamster/)

 _"I wander around the Metro DC area as I work, covering as many coffee shops
as I can, attempting to work up to the ranging average of 10-30 miles per day
of our hunter-gatherer ancestors."_

