Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Decision-making process and data toxicity etc


Absolutely amazing statement of Taleb in the manner of Dugin or Pereslegin – very counter-intuitive but really-bad-true!

… doctors need to justify their salaries and prove to themselves that they have some work ethics, something “doing nothing” doesn’t satisfy. Indeed at the time of writing the personal doctor or the late singer Michael Jackson is being sued for something that is equivalent to overintervention-to-stifle-antifragility (but it will take the law courts a while before they become familiar with the concept). Conceivably, the same happened to Elvis Prestley. So with overmedicated politicians and heads of state.
There is a biological story with information. I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. So too much information would be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system and too much of it confuses our biology. Here again, as with the story of the news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful.
In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects —data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.

Well, too much data is toxic... Say it to the bioinformatic scientists :)

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