Living Healthy Might Still Give You Cancer
Or, probability is not destiny
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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Q: What does the phrase âincreases risk ofâ really mean?
Today, letâs talk about health. Well, not exactly, but letâs talk about how to discern information related to health (or any other topic marred with rebuttals). Take this headline: âDo you know that eating a daily helping of processed meat increases your risk of colon cancer by 20%?â Itâs true, but not quite. Itâs a true lie.
Hereâs what it really means. A personâs lifetime risk of colon cancer is about 5% (thanks to modernity), and eating processed meat every day boosts a personâs absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, thereby making it 6%. Thatâs 20% of the 5% lifetime risk.
So, put another way, if a hundred people buy a chicken burger every day from the local eatery and eat it while commuting to office, over the course of a lifetime one of them will get colon cancer (in addition to the five who would have gotten it regardless). Thatâs not a risk you may want to take, but itâs not a death sentence either.
Itâs important to distinguish between probability and destiny. Eating processed meat every day increases the probability of cancer, but it doesnât mean that you are destined to get cancer. Just because you are a chain smoker doesnât mean you are doomed to die before your time.
Probability affects the multitude, it doesnât care about the singular. Roughly 20% of people who are severely overweight live to a ripe old age without ever doing anything about it.
But, the opposite is also true. About 40% of people with diabetes, chronic hypertension, or cardiovascular disease were fit as a fiddle before they got ill. Just because you eat healthy, donât smoke, and maintain a healthy lifestyle, doesnât mean you have bought yourself a better life span. What you have bought is a better chance of having a better life span.
And thatâs what I want to emphasise: chance, not certainty.
You are like a blackjack player (who is also an expert card counter) in a casino playing a game of odds. The card counting system (like a healthy lifestyle) works only because it tilts the odds ever so slightly from the house to you. In any particular hand, you now have a better chance of being right, but thereâs also a decent chance you are wrong. And this is true not just in health and blackjack, but in life and business as well.
When it comes to heart health, there are so many variables â exercise and lifestyle, consumption of salt, alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, trans fats, saturated fats, unsaturated fats, and so on â that despite our best efforts, any one variable or a combination of them can take the whole thing down. Therefore, it would be a mistake to pin the blame on or give the credit to any one component. Similarly, all the advice, best practices, battle-tested strategies, rules, laws, and frameworks to make the best decisions in life and business can only take us so far. There are too many variables that are out of our control.
Probability is not destiny. We may make all the mistakes and come out unscathed, and we may make all the right moves and still lose. But our primary goal should always be to do whatever possible to increase our odds, i.e., focus on what we can control â be it business, investment, health, or happiness. Rest is chance.
Interesting Finds
In 2015, Tom Turcich set out to circumnavigate the globe by foot. He has been walking ever since. For Turcich, that moment came when he was 17, when his close friend died at age 16. And the thing he decided he would do was see the worldânot just on a fleeting, greatest-hits style vacation, but as a sustained lifestyle, with all its ups and downs. (Ann Babe / Afar)
Playing action games in reasonable doses is positively powerful. Researchers found that 3D games can improve the functioning of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain thatâs involved with learning and memory. Meanwhile, it was also found that video games can aid mental agility and enhance strategic thinking. (Thom James Carter / WIRED)
The dark triad makes us more creative but also more likely to cheat. Two decades ago psychologists came up with the now infamous âdark triadâ of personality traits to understand why some people donât think twice before cheating on a test or picking on someone weaker than them. (Scott Barry Kaufman / Scientific American)
How do you ask good questions? It is often better to preface a question with a confession of some sort, or with information from yourself. Also, high status people get better answers than do low status people. So be high status. Or at least credibly pretend to be high status. (Tyler Cowen / Marginal Revolution)
You may not know this, but astronomers hate manned space flight. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both believe that cars and vans should drift around empty, depriving millions of skilled drivers of their livelihood, while for some reason space rockets â tailor-made for computerised telemetry and remote operation â become vastly more useful if there are three billionaires onboard. (Rory Sutherland / The Spectator)
Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he denounced his mother for criticising Chairman Mao. Now Zhang wants to make amends. Thirty-six million people were hounded and perhaps a million died in the turmoil unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. They were condemned by their political views and social background or someoneâs whim, enmity or attempt at self-preservation through incriminating others. Victims included the father of Chinaâs new leader Xi Jinping, who fell from grace and was sent to labour in the countryside. (Tania Branigan / The Guardian)
Optimism, as I practice it anyway, is an attitude and a strategy, not a description of the world. As an optimist, I try not to dwell on boring careerists and derivative claptrap. Instead, I seek out the exceptions to the rule and appreciate what I find. Just because the average is low doesnât mean that you canât personally consume high quality. And even when the quality I consume is far from ideal, I try to mentally change the subject to another dimension where I have blessings to count. (Bryan Caplan / EconLog)
My Directive
A good balance of Explore and Exploit is needed in life and work.Â
Too much exploit would mean no new learning, too much explore would lead to unwanted outcomes.
Quote to Note
Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
â Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Talk to Me
Do you agree with what I said, or do you think otherwise? Send me counters, comments, questions, and memes. đ¤đ¤
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ