There Is No Free Lunch

There is no free lunch--really.

Reimbursement risks with radiologist extenders: there is no free lunch!

There is great allure in the concept of using qualified health care providers to assist radiologists and radiation oncologists, increasing efficiency and possibly even improving patient care delivery. However, physician services are most commonly reimbursed under a system that is resource based, and the physician work and practice expense components of reimbursement for existing procedure codes...

When Is There a Free Matrix Lunch?

The “no-free lunch theorems” essentially say that for any two algorithms A and B, there are “as many” targets (or priors over targets) for which A has lower expected loss than B as vice-versa. This can be made precise for certain loss functions [WM97]. This note concerns itself with cases where seemingly harder matrix versions of the algorithms have the same on-line loss bounds as the correspon...

There is a free lunch after all

The title of William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch (Dembski 2002a) indicates that he perceives the no free lunch (NFL) theorems (Wolpert and Macready 1997) as pivotal to his thesis asserting that “specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence.” Indeed, many statements in Dembski’s book emphasize the crucial role of the NFL theorems. However, in his response (2002b) to a review re...

Is There a Free Lunch in Inference?

The field of psychology, including cognitive science, is vexed by a crisis of confidence. Although the causes and solutions are varied, we focus here on a common logical problem in inference. The default mode of inference is significance testing, which has a free lunch property where researchers need not make detailed assumptions about the alternative to test the null hypothesis. We present the...