Mewis
2mo ago
Part of epistemic hygiene is keeping away from people who themselves, don't argue in good faith. You yourself suggested that I not take everything written online seriously!
You can figure out how the world works. But the best way to do that is through direct experience. You yourself were forced to resort to Ultima Ratio - your own personal experience. That's also what I'm doing. What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?
Again, you fall back on the research. But it's not obvious to me what guidance the research gives. If you perform calorie tracking and get an incorrect result, like a TDEE estimate that is too high, there's no study that can tell you why you got an incorrect result or what to do about it.
Mewis
2mo ago
Oh, I like Peter Thiel as well. I don't really know what you mean by "all I need to know".
I mean, look, clearly there are gay men who give themselves over to a life of mindless hedonism. There are straight men who do that too! Most of them do not end up running billion dollar companies at the cutting edge of technology. To an extent, Sam Altman might see AI as his "baby". In that sense he is probably not that different to many other CEOs or founder-owners who see their company as their baby, or artists seeing their art as their baby, or anything. But that's something quite different from being a hedonist or a short termist or a misanthrope. Many parents would set the world on fire to keep their babies warm. That doesn't make them misanthropes or short termists.
Mewis
2mo ago
Right, but the whole argument against fats is that being fat is immoral because it indicates a lack of discipline. Being anorexic is not a lack of discipline. Indeed, deliberately starving yourself and going on extended fasts used to be seen as a praiseworthy spiritual practice.
Mewis
2mo ago
If the only priority was weight loss, you would eat zero calories a day, not eight hundred or five hundred. You don't need a calorie tracker to do that. Most CICO advocates also suggest that you shouldn't do this and should target a small sustainable deficit of 500 calories. That makes sense to me because you couldn't target a deficit like that without calorie tracking.
Mewis
2mo ago
I did not originally suggest that it's wrong to judge people for their bodies. I just asked if that same judgment applies to people who have otherwise unappealing or unhealthy bodies. Is it immoral to be very skinny or to be weak? Do we consider people with severe eating disorders to be immoral - so long as they keep themselves in that sweet BMI spot? What about anorexics - certainly, one cannot fault their discipline.
Mewis
2mo ago
I honestly don't see what's not plain about my post. There are plenty of examples of straight men with children who have done abominable things, and I have given some of them.
Mewis
2mo ago
Ah, my mistake. I should have remembered Yakov, but I didn't know about Artyom.
Mewis
2mo ago
Why not? Racism is a human category - if scientists, with their authority, deem it to include me, I am certainly in no position to stop them. Words mean just what we want them to mean, no more and no less.
I don't really mind who runs the government. It seems unlikely that it would be lizardmen.
But consider weight gain and weight loss. It becomes obvious that this is a much more important topic than racism, the government, or the shape of the earth. After all, being fat or small and weak are moral issues, as has been discussed in this thread. Not having a great physique makes you an inferior person, whereas living on a flat or round earth, having a lizard for President, or having a scientist deem you racist (water off my back, really).
Epistemic hygiene is a community practice, not an individual practice - nor do I think it includes ignoring criticism. But in my case, I think epistemic hygiene might include not treating with maximum charity a group of people who seem to be strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to the Laws of Thermodynamics as a defense.
Mewis
2mo ago
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less. Being crazy and ambitious is a prerequisite to doing great things. And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous. If only he could be as pro human as Joseph Stalin (two children), Robert Mugabe (four children) or Genghis Khan (innumerable children)?
Mewis
2mo ago
If you don't think that foods can contain twice the amount of listed calories, then why is it reasonable to assume so?
Suppose you do this, and eat 800 calories with a 1600 BMR, but don't lose any weight. What should you, go down or up in calories? Maybe you go down to 500 or something, but this week the portions are actually accurate, and you lose weight, but too much weight. So you go back up, and next week you don't lose weight, so you have to go back down... What information is being gained here? On any given week, you don't actually know if you're going to lose weight at all or too much weight.
I don't know why we're arguing about this. I think calorie counting works for weight loss, though I am less sure now that you have told me how inaccurate nutritional labels are.
Mewis
2mo ago
This is what people are telling me right here in this thread! I agree that it's silly to count vegetables. I never counted vegetables - I was told I was doing it wrong!
Look, call them weakmen if you like, but I was told, when I was not getting anywhere counting calories, that it was because I was lying, or crazy, or had a tapeworm, or that it was scientifically impossible to eat 4 thousand calories a day and not gain weight, or that the labels on my food were probably wrong. Who knows? As a non-scientist, I don't have the ability or authority to evaluate or challenge these claims. And if that takes the form of personal criticism, you definitely can't ignore it or defend against it. Maybe they are strawmen - how am I supposed to know?
Mewis
2mo ago
Well, what can I say - good for you. Personally, I find that calorie counting does not work very well for predicting weight gain, even after a year of trying it. And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content, and it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out, then perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. If you put in garbage data, and you get an impossible result like a TDEE of 4000, then is it actually reasonable to persist?
It seems like false precision to me. CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil. When estimates of calorie content can be off by so much, how is that not false precision? Particularly in the context of weight gain, it's not even rational to refuse to eat food that can't be measured.
Mewis
2mo ago
Sure, the skinny/fit one. Outside of the context of perfectly spherical cows, BMI is really just one variable among many - race, age, gender, all of which could justify discrimination. Men, for example, are much more likely to be criminals than women are, while old people are much more likely to die.
Mewis
2mo ago
According to you, food can have up to twice the amount of calories listed on the packaging. Leaving aside whether this is reasonable, that means that the person who thinks he's eating 2000 calories could actually be eating 4000 calories. This is obviously a large enough variation as to blow any attempt at tracking calories out of the water, to say nothing of variations in BMR. It's like piloting a plane with only one button and no altimeter. The interface being simpler doesn't make it easier - it can make it harder, because you don't get feedback! As you yourself suggest, it can take many months to get accurate predictions of weight loss, and maybe never get accurate predictions of weight gain.
Controlling one's food intake is actually pretty easy. My favourite cheat meal, I joke, is nothing. Eating is honestly just a chore.
Mewis
2mo ago
Yes, I agree that judgment contains a moral dimension, and it's not without basis to apply the concept here - clearly, the consensus that is being built here is that fat people are bad people. But is that judgment actually useful or valuable? That is to say, that if Linda, 52, obese, white, divorcée, six years of experience, applies for an admin position, should her fat ass go to the back of the line? Should you factor in his fatness when deciding if Uncle John is invited to the barbeque? On a population level, have obesity rates skyrocketed over the last hundred years because we've become less moral, and not because it's harder to exercise that discipline in the Oreo Age?
(Of course, I wrote that comment for entirely orthogonal reasons - I often worry compulsively that other people judge me based on being small or weak. And the question stands - would we consider judging an anorexic*, or a weak man?)
(*Anorexia is of course, interesting to me, because I can see the appeal. In many ways it's the inverse of morbid obesity in that it's the fetishization of discipline and adhittana. It's admirable really in a kind of Prince Pamiya kind of way.)
Mewis
2mo ago
The body's system of weight, hunger, and energy regulation is of comparable complexity to the forces on a modern aircraft. It is, of course, designed to be simple enough to interact with that even dumb apes can feed themselves, but it is also not foolproof, which is why dumb apes in a food rich environment sometimes turn into 600lb whales. And of course, even with the advantage of modern scientific knowledge, you actually don't really seem to know what's happening at any particular stage. The person eating 2000 calories a day could, according to what you've written, be in anything between a 2500 calorie surplus (4000 calories in, 1500 out) and a 1000 calorie deficit (2000 calories in, 3000 out, which would correspond to gaining five pounds or more in dry body weight in a week or losing two or more pounds of dry body weight in a week, a prediction so vague as to be totally useless. I don't calorie count and I never find my weight fluctuating that much. So what good actually is this method? Because it seems by what you're saying, that it's hopelessly imprecise to measure either calories in or calories out.
And, far from being based on the Laws of Thermodynamics, totally inviolable scientific principles, now you don't know what drives weight gain. Ex150 sounds better and better.
These are all things I have seen or heard CICO advocates write online in other places. Whether that is true CICO, or if they are CICOINOs, I don't know.
Mewis
2mo ago
Yeah, I think every person needs to iterate to find what they can and can't live without. To me food has never been a real treat, just a chore. If anything, it's quite liberating to have an excuse not to cook hot food and just eat like a degenerate student again.
Mewis
2mo ago
I have a similar understanding of the published literature to you, I think - but knowing that planes crash when their altitude decreases is not enough to avoid crashing a plane. The published literature tells us, for example, that calories out should probably exceed calories in by about 500 and then you'll lose weight. But as I've heard in this thread there is no reliable way to measure either, calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content. Which is a reasonable start.
But all this amounts to is a fine motte. The actual bailey of CICO is that everyone who follows a calorie tracker and gets an incorrect result is lying or denying science, that it's physically impossible to fail to lose weight on 1800 calories or to fail to gain weight on 4000 calories, and that hormones don't affect weight.
Mewis
2mo ago
I concede that in addition to society's values, you also inherit a bit from evolution. Either way, you are not forming your values. For example, you say that it's not fair of you to have a negative reaction to DS people. But you didn't invent that notion of fairness independently.
Mewis
2mo ago
That's silly. Of course you should make a judgment on the people you live with and whether they will steal from you or not. That is an example of a very useful judgment. Judging people on the TV is not useful.
Mewis
2mo ago
I really didn't miss hot food and certainly didn't miss the hassle of cooking and washing up. Maybe I will try some overnight oats or something more substantial.
The big issue with inflatable mats is that they're very prone to leaks.
Mewis
2mo ago
So people need to make changes - to what end? What ideal body type are people supposed to be striving for? I mean even over thirty years I've seen expectations of what men should look like change a fair bit.
Mewis
2mo ago
My actual experience of CICO was exactly the opposite. It worked initially but when I tried to bulk, I found it predicted weight gain very poorly. Since CICO is of course, perfect and never wrong, it must have been a mistake I was making, and since I couldn't find my mistake, I decided to spare myself the stress and anxiety and stopped tracking.
If you're implying that I don't believe in the laws of Thermodynamics, I'm not. I'm not questioning them. I'm questioning the broader doctrine built around that motte, including the claim that calorie tracking always works and that it's impossible to eat 4000 calories a day and not gain weight.
If you're suggesting that counting calories is as difficult and complex as building semiconductors, you're free to make that claim, and I shan't bother arguing with it.
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