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The idea of latent risk is interesting, but it doesn't seem like the interesting part of a latent risk is it's riskiness. It's true that smoking a cigarette a

The idea of latent risk is interesting, but it doesn't seem like the interesting part of a latent risk is it's riskiness. It's true that smoking a cigarette a day accumulates your risk of dying early, but the important part is the accumulation. We can see that if we replace smoking cigarettes with eating donuts, and replace dying early with suffering from obesity. Then we've got exactly the same phenomenon---a bunch of small decisions that are rational taken singly, but disastrous when put together. But there's nothing risky about it---if you eat 5 donuts a day and leave everything else about your life equal, you will become obese with probability 1. We don't have a really great theory of this kind of boil-the-frog-by-inches phenomenon yet (unless Jon Elster has buried one somewhere in one of his many books, which wouldn't surprise me... and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Elster anticipated a lot of Taleb somewhere, he's done so so much work on rationality over time), but latent risk probably isn't it.

Tycho 8y ago
This just seems like an incorrect analysis, not a limit of rationality. Dosage matters. Dosage specifies a quantity and a time frame. One donut per day is fine. Five donuts is not.
- paultopia 8y ago
  One donut per day isn't fine, not for a person who was already consuming maintenance calories. A single dunkin donuts donut hovers around 300 calories. A pound of fat is ~ 3500 calories, so a donut per day is ~35 pounds a year. The BMI formula is (lbs/height_inches^2)*703. Allegedly, average male height in the us is just shy of 5'10, female 5'4, so let's just run with 5'7, or 67 inches, as a canonical height. So doing a tiny bit of algebra and taking a derivative, you get ~.16 bmi per pound. A person with 25bmi is classified as normal; 30 as obese. That means that in a little bit over a year you can go from normal to obese on one donut a day.
  - Tycho 8y ago
    Why would you assume i meant this was on top of maintenance calories? I find it so bizarre that people look at food this way, that the main challenge is to not over-eat. To somehow eat more without incurring surplus calories. The real challenge is to acquire the necessary number of calories to support your activity. Once you achieve that goal, stop eating, duh.
    - paultopia 8y ago
      Narrow answer: the maintenance calories thing was implicit in my original comment (in the "and leave everything else about your life equal," i.e., in addition to the stuff you're already eating, which is presumably hovering around some equilibrium). Broad answer: the number of people who struggle with their weight is pretty good evidence that the main challenge is, in fact, to not overeat for millions of people.
      - Tycho 8y ago
        I think the framing of the question is part of why people struggle. People obsess about gym/running and eating certain types of food. All of that is completely unnecessary. Whatever your level of activity is, eat to that goal. Sometimes i’ll be eating something like a donut and someone will say “do you know how many calories are in that??” as if it’s impossible to simply eat a snack and count it towards your daily energy requirements accordingly. Or as if there are two types of food - ones which keep you alive and ones which taste good but contain these bad things called calories which make you fat and which pose an endless battle against temptation. Another thing which people bring up is slowing metabolism which also seems irrelevant since it’s simply the rate of conversion, not the yield. If people struggle i would frame it in terms of willpower - much harder to resist excessive binge eating after a strenuous workout than after something leisurely like a walk. /rant

Tycho 8y ago

This just seems like an incorrect analysis, not a limit of rationality. Dosage matters. Dosage specifies a quantity and a time frame. One donut per day is fine. Five donuts is not.

paultopia 8y ago
One donut per day isn't fine, not for a person who was already consuming maintenance calories. A single dunkin donuts donut hovers around 300 calories. A pound of fat is ~ 3500 calories, so a donut per day is ~35 pounds a year. The BMI formula is (lbs/height_inches^2)*703. Allegedly, average male height in the us is just shy of 5'10, female 5'4, so let's just run with 5'7, or 67 inches, as a canonical height. So doing a tiny bit of algebra and taking a derivative, you get ~.16 bmi per pound. A person with 25bmi is classified as normal; 30 as obese. That means that in a little bit over a year you can go from normal to obese on one donut a day.
- Tycho 8y ago
  Why would you assume i meant this was on top of maintenance calories? I find it so bizarre that people look at food this way, that the main challenge is to not over-eat. To somehow eat more without incurring surplus calories. The real challenge is to acquire the necessary number of calories to support your activity. Once you achieve that goal, stop eating, duh.
  - paultopia 8y ago
    Narrow answer: the maintenance calories thing was implicit in my original comment (in the "and leave everything else about your life equal," i.e., in addition to the stuff you're already eating, which is presumably hovering around some equilibrium). Broad answer: the number of people who struggle with their weight is pretty good evidence that the main challenge is, in fact, to not overeat for millions of people.
    - Tycho 8y ago
      I think the framing of the question is part of why people struggle. People obsess about gym/running and eating certain types of food. All of that is completely unnecessary. Whatever your level of activity is, eat to that goal. Sometimes i’ll be eating something like a donut and someone will say “do you know how many calories are in that??” as if it’s impossible to simply eat a snack and count it towards your daily energy requirements accordingly. Or as if there are two types of food - ones which keep you alive and ones which taste good but contain these bad things called calories which make you fat and which pose an endless battle against temptation. Another thing which people bring up is slowing metabolism which also seems irrelevant since it’s simply the rate of conversion, not the yield. If people struggle i would frame it in terms of willpower - much harder to resist excessive binge eating after a strenuous workout than after something leisurely like a walk. /rant