Where does the idea of a random choice even come from?
If you don’t have much good information about what the fitness landscape looks like—for example, if the literature is opaque and often contradictory—then there’s going to be a lot of randomness in the effects of any choices you make. It’s not random in the sense of a blind jump into the depths of the fitness landscape—the very concept of what counts as “food”, for example, screens off quite a bit—but even if the steps are short, you don’t know if you’re going to be climbing a hill or descending into a valley. And in complex optimization problems that have seen a lot of iteration, most choices are usually bad.
You can, of course, iterate on empirical differences, and most people do, but the cycle time’s long, the results are noisy, and a lot of people aren’t very good at that sort of reflection in the first place.
But it’s not that the choice is random—it’s that the consequences of choices are rather uncertain.
its fitness landscape might be friendlier
Well, first it’s well-bounded: there is both an upper bound on how much (in health and longevity) you can gain by manipulating your diet, and a clear lower bound (poisons tend to be obvious). Second, there is hope in untangling—eventually—all the underlying biochemistry so that we don’t have to treat the body as a mostly-black box.
Another thing is that there is a LOT of individual (or group) variation, something that most nutritional research tends to ignore, that is, treat it as unwanted noise.
A major problem is that it’s legally/politically/morally hard to experiment on humans, even with full consent.
If you don’t have much good information about what the fitness landscape looks like—for example, if the literature is opaque and often contradictory—then there’s going to be a lot of randomness in the effects of any choices you make. It’s not random in the sense of a blind jump into the depths of the fitness landscape—the very concept of what counts as “food”, for example, screens off quite a bit—but even if the steps are short, you don’t know if you’re going to be climbing a hill or descending into a valley. And in complex optimization problems that have seen a lot of iteration, most choices are usually bad.
You can, of course, iterate on empirical differences, and most people do, but the cycle time’s long, the results are noisy, and a lot of people aren’t very good at that sort of reflection in the first place.
But it’s not that the choice is random—it’s that the consequences of choices are rather uncertain.
Well, first it’s well-bounded: there is both an upper bound on how much (in health and longevity) you can gain by manipulating your diet, and a clear lower bound (poisons tend to be obvious). Second, there is hope in untangling—eventually—all the underlying biochemistry so that we don’t have to treat the body as a mostly-black box.
Another thing is that there is a LOT of individual (or group) variation, something that most nutritional research tends to ignore, that is, treat it as unwanted noise.
A major problem is that it’s legally/politically/morally hard to experiment on humans, even with full consent.