Basically, health is a bistable equilibria, so there’s a threshold you can cross to enter the sphere of influence of a new attractor state. In the presence of threshold effects (e.g. escape velocity, critical mass, romance), we should be looking for threshold strategies. Don’t just gradient-ascent yourself up the slope. Save all your resources for a massive push all at once, because isolated efforts don’t matter unless it takes you above the threshold. As long as you’re at rock bottom and you can’t descend any further, you want to increase your variance. Use the Oberth manoeuvre![1]
Basically, health is a bistable equilibria, so there’s a threshold you can cross to enter the sphere of influence of a new attractor state. In the presence of threshold effects (e.g. escape velocity, critical mass, romance), we should be looking for threshold strategies. Don’t just gradient-ascent yourself up the slope. Save all your resources for a massive push all at once, because isolated efforts don’t matter unless it takes you above the threshold. As long as you’re at rock bottom and you can’t descend any further, you want to increase your variance. Use the Oberth manoeuvre![1]
And besides—it works in Kerbal Space Program.