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ploomans

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But the chances for a Trump win were still above 20% if I remember me well. So it's not really a big surprise that Trump won. These are the kind of the odds in russian roulette. Nobody would be surprised if someone got killed playing it while the most likely outcome is to survive.

I don't think "less hard on your digestive system" is an advantage but rather a disadvantage. Just like "less hard on you bones" is not really an advantage for astronauts that spend a couple of weeks/months in space.

If you want to have a healthy body you have to put it under a stress level for which it was designed by evolution. I.e. exercise once in a while and don't just sit in front of your computer, eat enough fibres and harder to digest food, etc

I agree that Brazil has in general high taxes (especially for what you get in return from the government) but don't just assume this is true in every situation.

I'm a gringo "permanently" living in Brazil and from a tax standpoint it was actually better for me to open a Brazilian company. You don't have to pay taxes on dividends you get from Brazilian companies but you do have to pay taxes on dividends from foreign companies. + Depending on your margins opting for the "simples" tax regime may give you lower corporate taxes than a US/EU company

The chance to be involved in an armed robbery are small in every big city in the world. Based on anecdotes people will always over or under exaggerate the chances.

Just to give a counter example: I lived in Brussels, Philadelphia, Oslo, Sao Paulo... the only place about which I have a first hand "armed robbery" story was in Oslo of all places: a coworker got actually shot in the back when he bravely (but stupidly) turned his back and said "no, you are not going to shoot me".

He was lucky and was only a couple of weeks out but he carried his X-rays of the bullet with him because nobody would believe him otherwise.

I recently read the latest book of the same author on the same theme "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life".

I highly recommend it if you don't mind the higher degree of technical content than your average popularizing science book

I think the underlying cause is similar to the publication bias they mention in the article.

For almost all A/B tests, A is actually not much different from B. But due to small sample sizes you will see after the first week, at random, a rather strong positive or negative result. And now the publication bias/selection bias kicks in. If you see strong negative results in the first week you will quickly give up and start a new A/B test. If the initial results show positive results you get excited and keep testing but then in most circumstances you get reversal to the mean at high sample sizes. This would most likely also have happened to the experiments you terminated early but you selected them away and in your memories only for the good initial results a reversal to the mean often seem to happen.

Most A/B tests, ran for a long enough time, will show insignificantly differences. Blogs may give a different impression but again explained by publication bias.

I always compare A/B testing to genetic mutations. Almost none have a strong impact on the fitness of an animal but once in a very long while you have a positive one. Luckily they accumulate and you can get some impressive results with A/B testing (aka natural selection)