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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

I feel that over-emphasizing the forgiveness of the passion clouds a full understanding of the event. Yes, the whole world knows that Christ took past sin bodily on the Cross, those before you knew him, that it was blotted out. But what about all the other elements? The wrath of the Father coming down on ungodliness because we killed His Son; the depravity of human sinfulness that would kill their own savior and utopian redeemer (and the likelihood that we would be active or passive participants if we were there); the purchasing of our souls by the priceless blood which makes us slaves to righteousness, obliged to obey Godliness, not of our own will or interest, but almost as if in bondage, not our own; the notion that deliberate sinning now becomes so bad that if we do so, it would be better to never have known Christ at all; the power dynamic of the worldly Leaders crucifying the true Leader (a punishment reserved for crimes against social hierarchy)…

Indeed in Peter’s first preachings, in Acts 2 and 3, forgiveness is not the primary mode of understanding the Passion. It’s the opposite! It’s the weight of the sin that makes the hearer’s heart pierced, who now wishes to be saved from their “wicked generation”, and is then compelled to repent [change the heart] and is forgiven. The forgiveness, in a way, can only come after we have first understood the primary modes of the Cross. If you acknowledge only a simple statement like “Jesus took away all our sins by dying on our behalf”, this is akin to “Jesus died so we don’t feel any guilt at all”, and if you don’t feel guilt you can’t care about sins, and if you don’t care about sins then the Cross loses the very meaning that drew you in — it’s totally self-nullifying. In a way, it shows you the profound dangers of misinterpreting religious language & meaning.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 5d ago

A list of Trumpisms according to colloquial usage (am I missing anything?)

Very common

Many such cases
I have concepts of a [plan]
Open the schools
Many are saying this
Big if true

Common

We do a little trolling
You’re telling me this for the first time

Used Uncommonly

Sad!
Thank you [Kanye], very cool
Fortunately or unfortunately
Lightweight (more aptly a repopularization)
Everything’s computer
Don’t we, folks
Fake news (as interjection; regional variations in popularity)
Bigly
Drain the swamp

Deprecated Use

Bad Hombres

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 6d ago

How do the Gypsies maintain their extreme exogamy? Is there something psychological going on with cultures that have intense ritual purity laws being more resiliently exogamous?

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 7d ago

Here’s what we know conclusively:

CICO doesn’t work. Has been tried, doesn’t work. Literally been tried for decades, tens of thousands of studies on it, just doesn’t work.

Here’s what we know partially, only exploring the smallest sliver:

Clear genetic / epigenetic correlates to obesity; breastfeeding correlates to obesity; hormesis-related fasting cures for diabetes; neighborhood walkability correlates to obesity.

Here’s what we don’t know:

all that we don’t know (!), in those fields we haven’t even half-explored.

Here’s a time-honored rule of wisdom:

if some territory of knowledge is proving fruitful, and isn’t even half-explored, or 1% explored, we should allocate most funding and attention to these fields, and ignore the fully-explored field which doesn’t work.

Truly, it would be better for all the obese to acknowledge they have simply been poisoned by environmental and cultural practices, and then to lobby and allocate funding to good research, instead of woefully attempting to fix a societal problem each individually — not just hating themselves in the process, but wasting time and political opportunity.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 7d ago

CICO has already been tried, so we can cross it off. Now we direct our energy to real solutions, which means finding real solutions. If I were a fat billionaire, I’d direct all my funds to epigenetic and “evolutionary” factors

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

The evidence is in our obesity rate and the studies showing that dieting usually fails longterm. You’re welcome to find any of those studies on google scholar. There’s, like, thousands.

You promised me "real solutions

You have to read more carefully: “direct precious mental energy to real solutions.” Real solutions are not found in CICO related things which have been tried to death for decades with little gain. Real solutions are going to be found in aligning humans to evolved conditions, indicated in the OP.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

CICO is useful for boxers, bodybuilders, yeah. But it’s not practical in a population-level discussion, where it’s wielded to cut down practical inquiry.

an example of a "real solution" would be?

Studying early life and parents’ cold exposure and temperature variability; environmental pollutants; early life hyper-palatable food exposure; microbial exposure; artificial lighting; duration of lighting in day; hormesis fasting (not normal fasting); early life walkable neighborhoods; duration of breastfeeding / weening; invisible conditioning effects (what you do before, during, after meals; what you think about when eating)

There’s a lot that should be studied. IMO we will find that it’s a confluence of things, most of which are outside the individual’s control

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

Willpower is just a modifier to your calories input, and calories output

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

IMO, it would be ideal for CICO to be banned from any discussion on the obesity crisis so we can instead direct precious mental energy to real solutions.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

Knowledge of cooking is useful, sure.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

It is easy for me, and presumably you, to not eat the donut. You believe that this is a power by our will, though you don’t believe that this should be deemed “willpower”. However, we can’t peer inside the hunger of an obese person. What is considered a power of our will may in fact be a less strong sensation of hunger. How easy would it be for us to not eat the donut if we stopped eating for two days? Because our hunger would increase, the power of our will to control it decreases, and we would likely succumb to the donut. In the same way that we are liable to nap after not sleeping. The thought is simply: what is the evidence that the skinny and the obese experience the same level of hunger? It’s possible that they experience more hunger. The circumstantial evidence indicates this. The above study suggests environmental factors influence hunger. Etc.

It’s something of a theory of mind issue to think that everyone experiences the same level of hunger or that our own ability to manage weight would remain if our hunger doubled.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

It might be helpful if you wrote clearly what you’re trying to articulate. I will clarify that I am not interested in quibbling on the literalist definition of CICO that forgets how it is used in discussions. I am simply interested in how can we practically solve the obesity crisis, which is important. I’m asserting that CICO — telling people to focus on their calories and exercise — is not a practical framework, and there’s a study suggesting that a viable framework may be looking at holistic environmental determinants.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

Different months of conception have different genetic effects on a future child. It does not have different effects on willpower. One large group in month A has the same willpower as one large group in month B. There is no reason to think otherwise. So we assume the same willpower. But the genetic effects are correlated with different adult obesity rates. Did you read the study? If you think that the month of conception can alter even willpower, then we are essentially redefining willpower and are all the way back to where we started — in needing cultural / societal changes which genetically change people’s willpower.

one might say that it would require a significant modification to the hypothetical religious/social identity

A cooking change is a one time change. You’re asking for half the humans on earth to fundamentally rewire their identity so that their primary value in life is their body; and this is implying that bodybuilders aren’t preselected for the epigenetic expressions not associated with obesity. This is an insane proposal.

Does that mean that knowledge about cooking is "useless"?

Bodybuilders — the sliver of successful ones who actually succeed in modifying their body longterm without drugs, so 0.01% of the population or less — maintain their social identity through, essentially, thousands of hours of identity maintenance a year, changing what they think about, who they look up to, what they value. A world of bodybuilders would destruct, as no one would care about civic or institutional participation. So this proposal is not serious. We could make everyone become Buddhist ascetics whose new overriding value in life is not eating. This is is similarly possible, but not a serious proposal.

Anyway, please see my weight-cycling studying x3.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

You control for willpower by looking at a cohort conceived in colder months and comparing to a cohort conceived in warmer months. This is simple. As we know that the month of conception has no bearing on willpower, and the study did not find a correlation in regards to temperature of month at birth, which I suppose may somehow change one’s willpower (if you squint), the populations are controlled for willpower.

athletes and bodybuilders modulate their body weight through diet and lifestyle. Is this suddenly useless to them if some larger population behaves one way instead of another way?

A minority successfully do this, only in the short-term, and only by significantly modifying their social identity. It comes at an impractical expenditure of willpower for the population-level. You can probably get someone to not eat for three days with the offer of $100,000; you can get a competitive wrestler to stop eating when it’s required for his social reputation; and a particularly vain bodybuilder can probably bulk and cut when he has made his appearance his entire social value. But this has no effect on the longterm rate of obesity or the general population, because not everyone can turn their entire social identity into weightlifting (neither is this desirable). In fact, even those selected for willpower and who practice willpower in regards to weight during their athletic career are not protected against obesity. Studies show that weight cycling athletes are either at the same level of obesity risk as other athletes, or even a worse level of obesity risk than the general population. We also know that the yearly Ramadan practice of willpower does not affect longterm obesity. If willpower were a longterm determinant, we would see (1) Ramadan practitioners become less obese, (2) weight-cycling athletes are particularly protected against obesity compared to other athletes. Yet we don’t find this.

You can find people who have terrible willpower in regards to substances, energy drinks, candy, and yet don’t gain weight. Then you can find people who exhibit amazing willpower in all facets of life, and yet are fat.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

You are wrong in one way, but only because you made a single assertion. Humans are not machines as they have particular evolutionary forces at play that need to grasped to make sense of their behavior.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 8d ago

There are determinants unrelated to willpower and unrelated to personal lifestyle changes which cause obesity. This is one factor and there may be many others. Everyone who uses “CICO” in obesity discourse means that, by everyone attempting to modify one of these variables, we can sizably reduce waist sizes. What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.

Unless willpower and lifestyle changes can be shown to significantly modulate obesity rates at a population-level, and in the long-term, in a way that isn’t merely survivorship bias or an outlier, then CICO is as useful, insightful, and interesting as saying “narcoleptics need to stay awake”, “insomniacs need to sleep”, and “a thirsty sailor adrift at sea must never drink salt water”. It acts as a brainworm that just derails actual discourse around obesity.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 9d ago

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory

That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.

conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy

The significance is in the extrapolation. The takeaway is to not have babies in winter in Japan (that would be silly), but that we may be able to modify obesity significantly through pre-conception cold exposure, the limit cases of which are explored in the study. Japan is probably not even a top 100 place in the world where residents experience genuine cold for prolonged periods, due to their urban living and wealth to buy clothes.

You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.

Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 9d ago

A blow to the CICO theory of obesity: Pre-fertilization-origin preservation of brown fat-mediated energy expenditure in humans

In mice, cold environments before pregnancy can "pre-program" fat-burning traits in offspring. Could the same be true for humans?

People conceived in colder months consistently had more active brown fat in adulthood

Cohort 4 explored energy use after eating (DIT). Again, those from the cold-fertilization group burned more calories post-meal. In Cohort 5, the DLW method showed these individuals had higher Total Energy Expenditure in daily life, even after adjusting for physical activity and body composition.

Cohort 2, which included adults of all ages, showed that cold-conceived individuals had lower body mass index, less visceral fat, and smaller waistlines. These benefits were linked to increased brown fat activity, as confirmed by structural equation modeling. Interestingly, in younger participants (Cohort 1: males aged 18–25), BMI differences were minimal, likely because they had not yet experienced age-related fat gain.

A deep dive into weather data found that lower outdoor temperatures and wider day-night temperature swings during the months before conception were the strongest predictors of adult brown fat activity.

I find this noteworthy for three reasons —

There’s possibly an easy and natural intervention for obesity. The Japanese neurotically dress for the weather, so how great will the effect be for those who accept the cold? “College woman walking to a party in winter wearing a short dress” was a joke when I went to school, but it was apparently pro-natal. Is it the fluctuation which is most significant? Does it need to be tied with the day-night cycle?
This is more evidence that humans are shockingly attuned to specific conditions they evolved in, which should be reverse-engineered to find more potentatial interventions for human flourishing. We are much more animal than we like to admit.
How many other “willpower problems” have less to do with willpower and more to do with 2nd and 3rd order effects which are hidden from us, or which compound invisibly? There are probably many more for obesity alone.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 10d ago

I like the idea of the Tree in Genesis being an endangered species; it is not in the consuming of the fruit of “knowing good & evil” that we damned ourselves, but in preventing its flourishing and multiplication; that our consuming it halted the spread of the knowledge of good and evil, which required the tree to remain in a virginal state carefully tended by God. The tree itself was, in a sense, monogenes — one of a kind, only-begotten. This then has environmental implications: the very first sin which doomed us was our harm to endangered nature in its virginal state. And we see how the Gospel factors into the story of salvation: the monogenes of God (and endangered Messiah of man) must perish on a dead tree, after spreading the seed of Moral Wisdom involving good fruit from good trees, to resurrect in the appearance of a gardener (to Magdalene).

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 11d ago

What do we think of Severance? I only just started watching it because I figured it was normieslop, but I find the theme pretty intelligent. I love that all the ambient media and conversations in the show are tangential to the topic of memory. The show is thoughtfully made imo, but I’m only on episode 3.

The idea of your “laboring identity” being totally cut off from your holistic identity, and what that means for the You in workmode, is fascinating as a thought experiment in how humans construe motivation. If you were really in severance, in the show, of course you would have no motivation to work, because you don’t have the experience of reaping what you sowing, only the annoying sowing. It’s like the Homer Simpson quote, when he does something stupid for short term gratification he says “that’s a problem for future Homer”; he doesn’t know who future Homer is, and future Homer doesn’t know who past Homer is. If your identity between sowing and reaping, future and past is severed, morale / motivation suffers; the greater memory we have of joy when we work, the greater we are able to bear the annoyances of working.

So I find severance vs integration interesting because its at play in a lot of human dysfunction: delayed gratification, procrastination, low vs high time preference, work-life balance, counterfactual thinking about future events. Probably every human requires the practice of greater integration in order to increase their wellbeing, because we are imperfect forecasters and rememberers. You can even see how drug culture worsens quality of life, because so much joy is just not remembered.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 12d ago

The most chaotic amalgamation of ideology I have seen in the wild is someone named Abba Alabanza, who appears to combine reggae with tradwife homesteading, Christian fundamentalism, obesity awareness and critiques of black nationalism.

https://instagram.com/abba_alabanza

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 13d ago · Edited 13d ago

New data from Pew on the Israel-Palestinian topic

the public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip

Negative views of Israel have increased, but in a unique way according to demographics. 50% of Republican-leaning Americans under 50yo have a negative view, up from 35% in 2022. For the Dem-leaning in this age bracket, there’s been only a 3% shift toward negative views. For 50yo+ Republicans, negative views have increased by just 3% to sit at 23%; but for Dems in this age bracket, there’s been a 13% increase to 66%. Most of the shift in the public’s dislike of Israel has occurred among younger Republicans and older Democrats. This is interesting data, because there’s been an idea circulating that the shift in public perception of Israel is driven by younger minority progressives. And while that’s a big part, the data really tells us that Americans have changed their view in recent years in ways unaccounted for by demographic change, but which can be explained by the war. Because in just three years, from 2022 to 2025, we’re seeing huge shifts in regards to views on Israel while demographics have only changed slightly.

I think this shift is clear when looking at the media young people consume. Theo Von inconspicuously doing an “early life check” on the Sackler family in his interview with JD Vance; Shane Gillis on KillTony a few days ago; the popular youth streamer “iShowSpeed” refusing to talk to people if they mention they are Israeli. Pro-Israel Americans need a feasible game plan for dealing with this shift which doesn’t fall victim to the Streisand Effect. The current strategy of deporting foreign national students is bad, because the negative publicity far outweighs the tiny changes on university campuses. Zone of Interest came out in 2023, and our media reported on October 7th crimes well enough, yet these clearly didn’t move the needle on public favorability. There doesn’t appear to be any youth figure who can shift perceptions.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 14d ago

Slaves are not a productivity boost(they usually perform worse than free labor)

Not sure how this passes the intuition test. If I force you to labor in a mine and beat you if you don’t, the mines will be productive, and I don’t have to pay you much. Or, if I have to pay a cook $30 an hour to come to my house, it is more productive if I pay you in $4 beans and beat you if I don’t comply. All of the extra “resources” saved could be taxed to raise armies.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 14d ago

My notes are disorganized, spread out over my app and screenshots, so I’ll give you topics to plug into google scholar. When you learn something, that information goes through a reconsolidation window <8 hours, which is the memory cementing into your brain. Now, when you remember something (from the cues that point to the old memory), the old memory is “reactivated” and then shortly afterward re-enters the “reconsolidation” window. During this window, an old memory can be updated and changed, including its emotional aspects, but only if it goes through reactivation before the attempted manipulation.

memory reactivation reconsolidation craving / addiction [for its use in drug addiction and alcoholism, which can be extended outside its scope because addiction can be construed as a really strong desire or a thing just having very high positive valence]
memory reconsolidation music / affect [one study found that, after reactivating a memory, if you remember it with music then the memory takes on the vibe of whatever music you listen to. In other words, when you remember things under the influence of music, your memories may become more like the music emotionally]
Tetris effect PTSD [car accident patients at a hospital, when brought in during the reconsolidation phase of the memory, if you have them play Tetris their rate of PTSD decreases; similarly, if you have people reactivate a car accident memory and then play Tetris right after, their rate of negative flashbacks decrease]
eyewitness misinformation effect test reconsolidation [if you have eyewitnesses take a test where they relay everything they saw, and then you introduce “misinformation” afterward eg by an interviewer just telling them false information, then they are likely to revise their true information into false information. This is stronger than if they didn’t take the test. The act of taking a test actually increases the amount of misinformation grafted and updated into the old, true information]
reactivation reconsolidation fear / phobia [the new paradigm of treating phobias is that reactivation must occur for the memory to have longterm change through exposure. For instance, if you’re afraid of mice, you would briefly recall past fearful memories for 8 minutes, wait a few minutes, then “exposure” yourself to the mice. This updates previous memories, whereas an exposure session without the memory reactivation has less longterm extinction (or none at all)]
a recent study trending online, “improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts”. https://x.com/AdamMGrant/status/1888968823929471032 . In this study, the Cue of an unwanted thought is focused on for a couple minutes, and then a person “trains” himself to ignore any thoughts that come afterward. This is reactivating (focusing on cue intensely), and then updating the old memory through reconsolidation manipulation (focusing on quieting the mind).
There’s a case I read of a child who saw a snake at a park and had no emotional reaction, but injured her hand on a car door an hour afterward. She became phobic of snakes. This is because the memory of the snake was meshed with the injury during the snake’s reconsolidation window, amplified by the evolutionary “potency” of snakes which make them particularly sensitive to this phenomenon (speculated).
Alcohol after learning can help retain information, and thus is speculated to occur because it blocks out the learning of “new” information which can cause interference with the pre-alcohol information; in other words, the pre-alcohol reconsolidation is protected against any post-alcohol memory interference because we learn less when drunk.
Perhaps one more tangential topic: giving yourself a test is often better for learning than reading / elaborating, but when you know very little of the material, it’s actually worse because you could “train” yourself to provide the wrong answer when seeing the cue. When studying, if you don’t know the answer, it’s better to not answer the question than guess, it would seem

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 15d ago

Rolex may not produce many watches but the watches are expensive and this is why it results in ~ 2-3 billion in annual sales in America. Tariff it. I know a family who imports them, they live lavishly. Now consider there are hundreds of other brands that the wealthy obsessed over, and we ought to tariff them all, and give proceeds to middle class. Same with wine. Okay, a 30% increase on $7 wine doesn’t matter, but it begins to matter in the fine wine market and in clubs and so on.

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