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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

I just doubt that in many cases there is a dominant factor that explains most but I think that instead there are often several factors of more or less equal importance. We made that mistake already in nutrition ("fat is the main problem") and it caused decades of problems. The proportion of these factors is also highly individual.

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Why do you believe that it’s more likely for several factors to have roughly equal importance than for one factor to be the most important?

As an aside, the mistake in nutrition was simply that it wasn’t true. And it also wasn’t a “mistake,” it was a lie that the sugar industry paid to spread.

the mistake in nutrition was to think that fat is the dominant factor. In reality, if you eat too much sugar, too much fat, not enough vitamins, exercise too little or too much, don't take care of your mental health, drink too much caffeine, smoke, drink too little or too much or just have bad genes you have a chance to get health problems. There is no dominant single factor you can focus on to be healthy for sure.

>Why do you believe that it’s more likely for several factors to have roughly equal importance than for one factor to be the most important?

if you pick n numbers at random, it's not likely that one of them is bigger than the half of their sum.

That really depends on the distribution of said numbers. You're probably assuming uniform distribution, but there are power law distributions like wealth where the 26 richest people own as much as the bottom 3.8 billion combined.

to be honest, I don't know much about probability.

but my intuition says that if you pick all variables from the same distribution, this should still hold.

At first, we don't know anything about the factors, so they are assigned a random importance. or am I missing something?

What if n=1 ? :)

You don't accept the possibility this could be true?

What's missing here are facts.

To dismiss something based on something anecdotally unrelated seems short-sighted.

Doubt =/= dismissal

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