Black Swan Logic for n=1 Health

It's good to know where your faith is.

It seems wiser than being ignorant to the fact that, at the margin, we all have faith in something. We simply don't know everything.

That's why Nassim Taleb's Black Swan logic is so important to me.

It's practical you see.

When it comes to human health and fitness, whether energy intake or expenditure decisions, several philosophical problems concern me deeply (let's focus on nutrition here):

1. What to do (or not do) in the face of nutritional opacity. That is, what is the best modus operandi when we admit that we don't know everything about human diet and health (uncertainty and epistemic humility).

2. What to do (or not do) to account for biochemical individuality (the Hume/Popper/et al. problem of induction).

3. What to do (or not do) to respect the complex nonlinear mathematics that drive thriving, non-diseased physiologies (Mandelbot/Pareto/et al. multifractals).

To start, I respect individuality immensely; telling folks to eat this or that based on averages is like dumping dirty storm water on a blossoming Tulip in the middle of May.

Instead, in order to turn lack of knowledge into practical heuristics for use while living out each day, I turn to an aphorism-churning engine: meta-rules.

Meta-rules are rules for making rules. That is, they provide 'choice architecture' for epistemocrats. This lets the bricoleur in each of us shine through to clear (some of) the smoke away from nutritional opacity via avoidance behavior. When we engage in our own processes to deduce for ourselves 'rules to eat by' or 'rules to move by', that seems more sustainable, motivational, and insightful (plus robust to negative Black Swans) to me.

A 'meta-rule to eat by': Don't eat anything that causes a negative physiological reaction (such as excess mucous production).

A 'rule to eat by' that I deduced from this as a Patient of One: Don't eat grains--they cause negative physiological reactions (migraines) for me.

A 'meta-rule to move by': Don't expend energy in a way that causes chronic soreness (such as shin splints).

A 'rule to move by' that I deduced from this as a Patient of One: Don't jog long distances wearing clunky running shoes (instead, move in a power-law manner wearing Vibrams).

But why meta-rule making?

Simple: Because I have yet to find an epidemiological study that contained me as a subject.

That matters to me.

It should matter to you.

Because as Dave Lull likes to say, "the only experiment that really matters in the end is your self-experiment, that is, your individual attempt to refute a conjecture or falsify a hypothesis involving your own body."

And Dave reminds us of what this n=1 clinical trial deductivist decision-making bricolage lifestyle approach is all about in the first place: "Remember the foundation of our nutritional self-experimental faith, our basic conjecture that has yet to be refuted: 'Every individual organism that has a distinctive genetic background has distinctive nutritional needs which must be met for optimal wellbeing.' In these nutritional experiments or epidemiological studies, isn't there always so obviously individual variations in response to whatever nutritional items are being consumed? Is there ever the same effect, to the same degree, in 100 per cent of the people being studied? Don't we use these studies only to help us come up with conjectures to attempt to refute? We don't look to their results as proof of anything, do we?"

Since we cannot ever prove anything in science, we do want to be logical and strategic, as best as possible, about deciding which conjectures to test on our own bodies. I am not about to poison myself, so I search diligently for threads that make the most sense to me.

And the fact that evolution has blown up weak metabolic systems in the past makes me think that starting with leads based on what has survived the course of human history just might be the safest way to get my feet wet for tinkering. That's why I default to ancestry; it seems most logical to me. Those are my biological roots after all. But that's just me. We have to start somewhere. I start there.

But I am well aware of the survivorship bias (chance and randomness influence evolution too), and thus I remind myself that both science and literature (and everything in-between) provide me with mythologies that I must assess for myself. So, if I observe in the world that many other people have falsified a particular health conjecture--such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) consumption--then I take that grace nudge seriously and reason that our shared evolutionary ancestries probably make that falsification event enough reason to avoid that activity entirely. I don't need to test HFCS again on my own body--I don't want to eat something that is one chemical step away from plastic and then watch my body produce alien tissues as a result (our metabolisms simply can't handle that stuff).

And that's why Black Swan logic matters to me.

Because I want to know how to act when I admit that I don't know much of anything.

But, if I had to guess, I'd jest that people like watching figure skating in the Olympics because the skaters move about the ice according to Levy-flights; that is, they move fractally--they move nonlinearly.

We like fractal aesthetics; that's why we love music (see all my recent Twitter posts for Music Rx, thanks to Dave Lull): it paces our physiologies in healthy ways.

To good health,

Brent

Deserved versus Entitled: Performance Psychology

It matters; this distinction; the difference between feeling deserving of achieving something great versus feeling entitled to it.

And, to be explicitly clear, any feelings of 'deserving' must be framed in light of the integral roles that luck, circumstances, and chance play in our fates (it's the skills plus luck debate that varies between domains; thanks to Dave Lull).

In his choreographed address, Tiger Woods, who has perhaps pushed the limits of human performance psychology further than anyone else, isolated and voiced feeling 'entitled' as the source of his demise: interpersonal boundaries and moral codes--key components of spirituality--lost meaning and status in his life as a result (if they ever were part of his being in the first place).

There is an important thread here to consider: Many high-performing people, such as athletes, have reported that they perform best when they feel that they deserve to succeed. That is, in order to push performance levels to personal peaks, it seems that many of us have to feel authentically that we deserve to achieve various types of success--we have to believe in ourselves and the diligent practice, preparation, and work we invested up front in order to optimize performance in the moment. This feeling of deserving to succeed proves even more critical to sustaining improved performance levels in the long-run--we have to feel comfortable in our skin to continue an upward trend.

However, once we achieve sustained success in some narrow niche, as Tiger has done with golf, we must be mindful to avoid the cognitive trap that morphs 'deserving to succeed' into 'feeling entitled' to success and receiving the associated benefits that high-performance confers on folks in our society. That is, as bricoleurs/epistemocrats, we must keep engaging in the activities that we have deduced tend to produce successful results. We can't deviate from our roots. When commentators joke, "I don't know how Tiger Woods found time to play golf," remarking about his extracurricular activities over the past few years, they are hinting at what Tiger admitted as well: Tiger felt entitled and thus lost touch with and strayed from the roots that produced his epic success throughout his childhood and early career. Interestingly, Tiger's success in the major championships dropped over the past few years, perhaps, I suspect, because his off-the-course behavior permeated onto the golf course and altered his psyche so that he no longer felt as deserving--in a genuine way--of succeeding like no other golfer had done before: the cognitive dissonance of dominating golf while simultaneously philandering uncontrollably and irresponsibly was too much for even Tiger's high-performing brain to compartmentalize with a 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' persona continually. He was juggling a chainsaw, a torch, and a knife all at once--stretched too thin--and it all blew up in his face on that unexpected November night.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see if/when Tiger will feel, deep down inside, deserving of unmatched success. I suspect, somehow, he's going to need broader human development progress outside the ropes in order to achieve epic success on the course once again.

Regardless of Tiger's fall from grace (and yet-to-be-seen recovery), we can all reflect on our own experiences with performance psychology and can consider the fundamental and important difference between feeling deserving of success and feeling entitled to succeed. For example, when it comes to restoring, maintaining, and enhancing health, when we act diligently and respect our bodies, we should feel deserving of the positive wellness results that follow. That's healthy performance psychology. But, we must always be mindful of the processes that ultimately produce results (and avoid negative outcomes) because the only sustainable way to avoiding feelings of entitlement is to stay actively engaged in the activities that we honestly feel make us deserving of performing well in various settings. Believe in yourself, yes, but never lose touch with the habits, environments, and processes that you've deduced that tend to prepare you properly to seize opportunities and perform your best.

Deserving is sustainable; entitlement is false-sense-of-security.

Seek sustainability: our brains can only compartmentalize so many things.

To good health,

Brent

PS. Here's my annual spring project with my friends:

Game Plan Academy (GPA)

Ancestral Fitness Bricoleurs: Two e-patient epistemocrats at play at UCLA

Above: Just two Ancestral Fitness Bricoleurs (thanks to Dave Lull) presenting an epistemocratic n=1 self-experimentation clinical poster at UCLA.

(Notice Professor Aaron Blaisdell's primal Grok On! shirt ... we both wore our Vibram Five Fingers shoes too ... barefooting is infiltrating academia slowly but surely!)

Aaron and I had fun. We received lots of positive feedback and great questions from folks, and we enjoyed interacting with other curious thinkerers, particularly those who had never viewed health from the ancestral (evolutionary biology) lens before and thus found our poster 'pathbreaking' (*please leave a comment or email me if you want a PDF of our poster).

Here is the published abstract that accompanied our poster presentation for the Symposium:

The Role of Nutrition in the Epigenetics of Health: A Patient-Driven Approach.

Aaron P. Blaisdell*, UCLA Department of Psychology & Brain Research Institute
Brent C. Pottenger*, MHA, University of Southern California, School of Policy, Planning, and Development

There is a health crisis in America. We need health reform, ultimately, in order for any efforts at healthcare reform to succeed sustainably. Modern humans suffer from numerous stressful diseases linked to the metabolic syndrome, such as diabetes and obesity, yet these health maladies were nonexistent during most of our ancestry. In modern science, evolution is the default perspective for inquiry. In modern healthcare, however, evolution is almost nowhere to be seen. Neolithic and (especially) post‐industrial diets combined with modern sedentary lifestyles have pushed our physiologies dangerously far from their adapted environments, and it is becoming exceedingly expensive and ineffective for modern medical practitioners to fix the resulting damage done to our bodies or halt the epidemic flood of illnesses collectively referred to as the diseases of civilization. In fact, the current generation of children may live shorter lifespans than do their parents—a startling reality that should shock health experts into creative, collaborative solution‐searching.

Recently, research scientists, physicians, health experts, and patients have spontaneously organized online around a new direction in physiology that respects our evolutionary heritage as human beings. This Ancestral Health community has emerged in the Blogosphere as people have spread their ideas, insights, and discoveries with the world openly and freely. Starting out on the periphery, this self‐organizing community has gained momentum as more and more patients have interacted with these resources to shape their lifestyle choices. We present the perspective of this community and its emerging influence through the eyes of the presenters, both as e-patients taking their own epigenetic health and healthcare decisions into their own hands to treat their longstanding chronic health conditions (sinus infections, migraine headaches, and erythropoeitic protoporphyria) that resulted from deviating too far from their ancestral nutrition traditions.

This bottom-up, informed-patient driven approach will foster new, unique approaches to solving our existing healthcare crises by remedying our own broken and diseased bodies. This is an opportunity to support interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation between people who are passionately concerned about restoring, maintaining, and enhancing people’s health states.

I think we made small-scale positive progress on these goals/directions, which is encouraging. Also, a few people knew about the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, which was neat to see.

One day at a time; one step at a time; one poster session at a time.

That's the Patient of One ethos anyways: n=1

Listen to your body.

Parkour!

To good health,

Brent