Zvi comments on Quantified Health Prize Deadline Extended - Less Wrong
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It does not seem vanishingly improbable to me. Any organism that must eat complex foodstuffs (which includes all animals big enough to see) must deal with the fact that they have no way to obtain precisely the right quantity and proportions of everything that they need. Their bodies therefore need to be robust to wide variations in their dietary content, resulting in a plateau, possibly a very wide one, between deficits and excesses that do measurable harm. If this is so, then there is no such thing as the exactly optimal amount of a nutrient. Instead, there is a broad range, and if you manage to hit that barn door it doesn't matter where.
That explanation seems to require:
Already, there are a lot of substances I ingest that cause varying effects - increased productivity, increased creativity, increased fun, decreased pain - that each has its own tradeoffs. Even if it exists, I think the 'plateau' doesn't account for everything I care about, and there is obvious room for improvement.
And it would be really weird if the plateau didn't have some little peaks and valleys on it.