Tag: pareto

Outgrind?

MIKE1 Comment

The big idea from Outlive is that most health advice centers around avoidance (smoke in the lungs, sun on the skin, cells overloaded with sugar).

The next chunk of advice centers around basic things: move some, cultivate relationships, eat nutritious foods. It’s two 80/20 systems stacked on each other.

But we think about the last mile because we like to feel like we’re doing something. We like to feel that action is progress.

Pretty good is pretty good.

On his great blog, Justin Skycak writes about this in terms of “grind”.

Think of grinding on a project 50% of the time. If you double that to 100% that’s a 2x increase. What might take two years now takes one. That’s a sizeable change.

But “If you’re pushing 80% of the time, then the multiplier drops to 1.25x. You’re getting fairly close to max capitalization.”

Pretty good is pretty good.

This might be a more optimal situation too because of another idea: you have to be consistent before you can be heroic. I often said this to myself during a lot of Zone 2 training during 2024 (ultimately this worked out for me, I set a PR in the half marathon of 1:32:30).

There’s not a lot of return for grinding away at something all the time relative to most of the time. Like with Outlive’s advice, pretty good is pretty good. And, having the extra wiggle room allows for other things like serendipity and consistency.

Outlive (book advice)

MIKE2 Comments

My thoughts of Outlive by Peter Attia revolve around two 80/20 ideas.

First, 80% of health outcomes derive from an absence. Don’t smoke. Don’t be overweight. Don’t under sleep. Don’t be sedentary. Avoid environmental contaminants. Avoid sunburns. Regardless of what someone does do, if they don’t do those things their health will mostly be fine.

Then 80% of the remaining 20% is about what people do do. My rough prioritization:

  1. Exercise, make it easy. Do enjoyable things. Do accessible things. Design it!
  2. Sleep better. Put the phone away through design choices.
  3. Continue the birthday cake diet along with tasty vegetarian foods.
  4. Poop in a box. It’s relatively costless and early prevention of colon cancer seems to matter.
  5. Avoid sunburns, especially in Florida!

To be accurate rather than precise the thinking looks like this:

0-80% of the effect is from avoiding the really bad things.

81-96% of the effect is from doing the basic good things: get stronger, eat better and less, sleep well.

97-99.9% of the effect is from optimization: finding spring water, taking metformin, and so on.

But, being a loss averse human being I don’t do any of the optimization. The chance it helps in a meaningful way is so small compared to the chance it mucks things up.

The Psychology of Rotten Tomatoes

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In an article for Wired, @SVZWood writes about Rotten Tomatoes, the website one in five Americans use to inform their movie choices. Wood’s article showcases three helpful ideas:

Simple algorithms. Rotten Tomatoes has become a successful business and top website based on a simple algorithm—counting. Two movie curators read reviews each day, judge them as positive or not, and then count the totals. If a movie has more than sixty percent positive, it’s marked as fresh.

Numerical authority. There’s something about people, numbers, authority, and precision we just can’t get over. Wood captures this, writing, “There is an authoritative allure in the site’s numerical scores….(people) reflexively—and nonsensically—trust a fresh sixty percent Tomatometer over a Rotten 59%.”

In an age of big data and algorithms and random forests, it’s helpful to keep in mind that simple systems work. One example, football.

Numbers feel secure. They’re a rationalization blanket in a world of unknown things under the bed.

Jobs-to-be-done. Reviewers don’t like the binary nature of fresh or not. Wood notes that, “there is no Underripe or Overripe tomato.” In the terms of Bob Moesta, this is the difference between a supply-side orientation and demand-side orientation.

In JBTD theory, the goal is to find what customers want to do that rather than what a supplier wants or thinks the customer wants. Reviewers (supply) want to share their nuanced take rather than a 👍 or 👎 via their Twitter account. The customers (demand) just want to know if a movie is bad, potentially good, or very good. This plays out in some interesting ways that Rotten Tomatoes has plucked.

For example, a review which is glowingly positive and a review which is slightly positive are both coded as positive. This leads to extreme scores. This is a feature, not a bug. It’s the information people want to know.

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