ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
One thing that stands out to me is that hitting his ear means that it was definitely not intended that he didn't die. That's too close to a kill shot to be a deliberate graze or not-fatal wound, too much risk even for an expert shot. So this was definitely a failed assassination, whoever did it.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Yeah, it does appear we are in definitions territory. I understand your point, but I think mine is obviously true.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
This is nonsensical. How can responsibility not require free will? Why be mad at someone when they have as much agency as a rock rolling down a hill?
I basically agree with you that the universe is probably deterministic, but trying to argue that people don't act like free will exists is ridiculous.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Do you treat yourself and other people as being responsible for their actions? Say someone rear ends you at a stoplight because they were looking at their cellphone while driving. Do you think they are to blame? Do you get angry at them? Do you pursue an insurance claim against them?
Treating people as agentic is a fundamental basis of more or less all human interactions. Perhaps there are some ascetic monks up in the mountains somewhere who have really internalized that free will doesn't exist to the point that they actually behave as such. But in my experience nobody who says they don't believe in free will really acts like it (I'm including myself here, intellectually I think that it is clear that the universe is fully deterministic, but I don't live my life as if it were so).
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Honestly? It's a total non issue on the scale of days. I don't worry about it at all, and I've not noticed any long term decreases in my lifts afterwards or anything like that.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
If someone has capable willpower in many areas of life but still finds himself fat then we should consider whether being fat is mostly unrelated to willpower. They have excellent willpower in many domains but not in this one.
I think that generally speaking, this person does not exist. Everyone I know who is fat is also weak-willed in other domains of their life.
If there is domain-specific willpower regarding exercise, why are former military service members fat? If there is domain-specific willpower regarding dieting, then why is it that the 30-day yearly Ramadan fast does not result in sustained weight loss?
Incentives are certainly an input to [willpower], hence the section about shaming as societal intervention. The veteran was skinny in the military because there are strong incentives that helped increase his [willpower], the muslim is able to abstain from eating during ramadan for the same reason. You might think of it as [incentives]+[mental strength]=[willpower]. As circumstances change and they leave the military, or ramadan ends, or society starts shaming them less for being fat, the magnitude [incentive] reduces enough that they can't make it over the threshold and overcome [forces against].
it doesn’t appear that there is any experience an obese human can have that will reliably result in weight loss, given just how many bad experiences they have.
No, there are plenty of obese people who become fit. I think if you ask them, they will pretty much universally describe it as requiring an intense exertion of willpower to achieve. And I would be willing to bet that very many obese people would be able to lose weight if they were given sufficient incentive. Take an extreme example: if every time they ate a meal greater than 500 calories they were shocked with a cattle prod, it seems obvious that most people would choose eating smaller meals and being hungry over being zapped and they would lose weight.
fat people are already shamed explicitly and implicitly. They are shamed more today implicitly than in the past
it does not seem to me to be a coincidence that the reduction in explicit shaming has coincided with an increase in BMIs. Clearly implicit shaming results in a lower [incentive] than explicit shaming. Hence my argument that we re-implement more explicit shaming. I do want to note that you don't have to hate someone to shame them for something, and that shame can be a strong pro-social force (that's why it exists). "Love the sinner, hate the sin" and all that.
Well it’s very important to determine whether obesity is a generally volitional health state before we launch our campaign to shame half the population.
To put it plainly, it is incredibly obviously a volitional health state. It's obviously a choice whether or not to go back for a second portion, it's obviously a choice to exercise or not. The only out here is some form of argument against free will, but people who argue the choice to eat the whole pie isn't actually a choice never live the rest of their lives like they don't have free will. It's pure cope.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
I am not comfortable saying that.
Tritely: that doesn't make it untrue.
Do we see that fat people with similar intelligences and backgrounds perform worse on typical willpower tasks? I don’t recall reading this.
I don't need a scientific study to prove that fat people tend to perform worse on typical willpower tasks like "don't eat a second piece of pie, even though you want to and you know it will be bad for you."
It does in the sense that I am alleging “forces against” are of exclusive importance and “willpower” is of negligible importance (on a population scale).
The reason that advice at a population scale tends to be different from personal advice is that the majority of people are, as you put it, damned. "No brush with death can save them, no hopeful lecture can save them, no inspiring figure can save them." When you give advice to an individual, you give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't suck. When you deal with populations, the unavoidable fact is that enough people obviously suck enough that you can't give them the benefit of the doubt (plus there's no politeness or interpersonal charity to consider). The stats don't lie. They are weak, they are lazy, they have high time preference, they are stupid, and they are never not going to be any of those things. I think this is a major failure point of most high functioning people: they don't grok how low-functioning most people are.
It is probably simply true that there is a ceiling for [willpower] for many people that is less than [forces against]. Just like how someone might be condemned by being 80 IQ to a life of poverty, never working anything but the most menial and low paying jobs, one might be condemned to a life of fatness, never being able to control their own eating due to a weak will. To quote George Carlin: "The mayfly only lives one day, and some days it rains." Most people get dealt a bad hand, and as I said before, it sucks to suck.
That being said, I think there is some hope, and that hope is (ironically?) shame. "the felt salience of death and the patient hope in deliverance from that death" are clearly insufficient motivating factors to get people to not be fat. I respond to that by pointing out the truism that many people fear public speaking more than death. I believe that people (at a population level, ha) tend to respond to their incentives. Clearly death and disfigurement and the quiet shame of fatness is an insufficient incentive. However, I notice that countries that have a strong culture of overt shame around fatness like China or Japan tend to be significantly less overweight statistically than countries that don't, like the US. I think that for most, the incentive of overt social shaming is actually a stronger incentive than death, and that therefore perhaps the best way to incentivize people to be a healthy weight is to shame them for being fat.
Both you and /u/Gaashk brought up in your replies the example of people who are just "naturally" skinny without any willpower. I don't think that invalidates my model, I think those people, including yourself, just happened to be born with/live with factors that lead to an extremely low value of [forces against] or a very high level of [willpower] such that it doesn't feel like willpower. That could be because of a low lipostat "body set weight", or natural hyperactivity, or a default low level of hunger, or any number of factors. Your coefficients are different, but that doesn't change the equation.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
No one has a compelling theory, supported by evidence, for why the obesity epidemic happened.
Massive increase in easily available food combined with a decrease in the amount of physical effort required to live seems like a perfectly sufficient explanation to explain the obesity epidemic.
your description of agency vs willpower seems to be a distinction without a difference to me; I don't see any reason to differentiate between the mental process that has you starting a thing against resistance vs continuing a thing against resistance except for magnitudes, similar to increasing the velocity of an object from 0 to 1 vs increasing it from 1 to 2; it's all just force applied. Perhaps the magnitude of willpower required to start exercising can be greater than the magnitude required to keep exercising when you already are, but it seems to be the same process to me.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
The wrinkle here is that every person who exercises has the experience of using their willpower to overcome the impulse to be sedentary. I get what you're saying, but when I look back on me thinking to myself "it seems like a lot nicer to just sit on the couch than go to the gym, but i gotta go" or "yeah i'm exhausted, but I'm going to do one more set" what I see is me making the hard decision to overcome those sedentary instincts. In every way, it looks like I used to my willpower to dictate my own behavior, and every time I fail at doing so, it looks like a failure of will to me. I personally don't see any reason to think it isn't exactly as it appears to me.
It reminds a lot of CICO discussions: it is obviously true that if you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. There are all kinds of additional layers of complication and justification and difficulty and most of all copes on top of that, but the fundamental facts are simple.
It's the same with willpower and exercise: it is obviously true that whether or not you exercise depends on whether or not you do it (tautological, obviously), and doing it is a matter of applied will against pressures to the contrary. Whether or not you overcome those pressures by force of will does, in fact, determine whether or not you exercise. So while yes, there are lots of different complications and justifications and difficulties and most of all copes on top of that, they're all really just inputs to the equation [willpower]-[forces against]=[do you work out].
When you say that there isn't a universality in how difficult exercise is, what you're saying is that [forces against] has a different value for different people. Obviously that is true. Some people find exercise easy, some people find it difficult, some people have physical ailments that make it painful to exercise, etc etc. It is obviously also true that some people have significantly greater willpower than others. But that doesn't change the fundamental question, which is "is [willpower]>[forces against]".
And in the end, what the inputs are to the equation doesn't matter, what matters is whether or not you can get over the threshold and exercise. Does this have lots of potentially nasty implications about some people getting a shit deal in life because they're mentally weak, or physically afflicted, or even just born lazy? Yep. Not only are there health implications, but like you said, there are massive moral implications to whether or not you are able to overcome your own weakness and destructive instincts. Nobody's burden is the same, life's not fair, sucks to suck.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Things like this are why I sort of support things like Keto or Paleo.
Same, but for me it's fasting, intermittent or otherwise. The easiest way I've found to cut caloric intake without much effort or unhappiness is to just skip 1-3 meals. I've found that once you've done it a couple times, it becomes pretty easy to avoid getting "hangry", which is the main objection friends have given me when I recommend it. "I could never do that, I get so horrible to be around when I skip a meal."
There's a ton of science about fasting being good for you (e.g. it's great for insulin resistance), and I think it makes sense from an "is it lindy" perspective. Certainly our hunter gatherer ancestors didn't eat three meals a day everyday, so it makes sense to me that our bodies would be optimized for skipping meals.
I've fasted for as long as four days. Longer fasts like that are definitely much more difficult, not because of hunger (you more or less stop being immediately hungry after about 24 hours) and more because you have to deal with some physical weakness, imbalanced electrolytes, things like that. Definitely well worth doing, I strongly recommend it, but definitely much more difficult than just fasting for a day or less.
You're making a common, fundamental mistake: the problem isn't that they don't have housing. "Homeless" is a misnomer. The problem isn't where they sleep, the problem is how they act. They aren't homeless because rents are too high, they're homeless because they have failed to hold down a job, or pay their rent, or maintain relationships with friends and family, or stay out of jail, or prioritize their own well being.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/05/hes-just-been-a-wrecking-ball-accused-arsonist-in-sw-portland-apartment-fire-hit-with-stalking-order-day-before-blaze.html This is what happens when you give them free housing (though an admittedly extreme example). This is not a problem of allocating sufficient money, this is a problem of "what do you do with people who destroy everything around them when given freedom."
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Cognitive decline is an unavoidable part of aging. Every 70 year old i have ever talked to about it will admit they used to be sharper when they were younger.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
I'll second cjet, this is a stupendous article. Your review of "from third world to first" was one of the first things I ever read on themotte (and I read the book myself because of it), and I'm glad you're still writing.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
There comes a point where "is it their fault" doesn't matter. If someone is regularly violently criminal, it doesn't matter if it's because of a brain injury or they're just a sociopathic asshole, what matters is that they be stopped from victimizing other people. Whether or not they are morally culpable is a secondary concern over the need to incapacitate them for the benefit of their would-be victims.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
What's the deal with the ants/gamergate connection?
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Not having read your article
this seems like a bad-faith article
classic stuff.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Actually, thinking about it, I think there's a pretty easy way to differentiate on a policy level: criminal record. People down on their luck, the "have nots", won't have meaningful criminal records. The anti-social, criminal drug addicts, the "will nots" or "can nots", will. Where I live, pretty much everybody who ever gets arrested for criddler shit already has a significant record of violent crimes. You'll see a news story about "man arrested for charging after somebody with a machete", and when you google them they've got years of arrests for similar crimes. A massive amount of the west coast's homeless problems could be solved by simply keeping those people in jail, and it would be easy to deny those people access to resources like free housing if they have any arrests in the last five years (I'd be open to excluding victimless crimes like simple drug possession).
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
What a profoundly shameful and mindless thing to say.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
As with most things, the ability to identify the groups is hard
No, it isn't. It may be difficult to do at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable, but you can tell the difference between a "I'm in a bad situation and need a little help to get back on my feet" and a "meth just feels better with a machete in your hand" in about two minutes of conversation.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
Human suffering is not a solvable problem.
Especially and particularly the suffering of people caused by their own decision making. You can't solve people fucking their own life up without preventing them from having the freedom to control their own lives.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
I can see, perhaps, an argument for benefit to social stability by everyone having buy in. "Stupid, terrible things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen, and that's the value of democracy," seems like the strongest argument against democracy.
That being said, it seems like the trend line for social stability is pointed in only one direction, so the argument that we should have democracy to keep things stable is looking pretty weak these days as well.
ArmedTooHeavily
4mo ago
I don't have any particular knowledge of methane infrastructure, but I am an engineer with some relevant general knowledge.
You are incorrect.
Leakage is an unavoidable part of any fluid system, and the larger the system, the more leakage you can expect. Shit leaks, especially on an industrial scale. Your domestic gas lines are very small and minimally manipulated, gas systems in industrial systems are very large, involve lots of things that can break, and are manipulated regularly.
Yes, this is the obvious conclusion of the ubiquitous extreme fearmongering about trump.
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