ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Meade's paper seems reasonable, in terms of an academic squabble. What I struggle more with is turning it into a coherent critique at the current moment, especially trying to reconcile it with your other statements and your other link. For example, you focused on quality adjustments, which as I mentioned, I understand there are some difficulties there... but Meade basically didn't talk about those at all. American Compass seemed to embrace something like real value added with their first two "grounding factors", while their third seems to me to be irrelevant. It also sort of randomly shifted to focusing solely on output, but included some bollocks claims like, "...BEA significantly overstates the growth of the computer sector (NIACS 334) because it assumes that when a computer doubles in speed due to Moore’s law that actual production doubled..." when their citations for this claim do absolutely no such thing. I'm just really struggling to scrap together a specific, coherent complaint that I can just go look at and see, "Yes, right here is where the actually-claimed numbers actually go bollocks, and now I can see that I should be interpreting this entirely differently."
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Ah, Kenji's still got your back. I imagine you could make some adjustments to make it a bit easier or to vary the flavor profile.
FWIW, I'm not super convinced that there are all that many health risks of eating meat, and it wasn't part of the initial assignment. I'd still suggest giving something like this a shot to at least get a sense for the range of flavors that are possible. I also get the sense that choices on sodium are a bit orthogonal here, too. One can choose low/high sodium versions of both meat and tofu.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
ControlsFreak
4d ago
Yeah, funniest case scenario, I'm sure each of those three hypothetical characters could successfully be told how to hit the Cat III autoland button.
The term "supply chain attack" has been applied to the world of software (not just pagers in Lebanon) to describe a modern phenomenon that arises because of the way modern software development works. Very little code today is written by an individual (or small group of individuals who are all working for the same company or whatever) in a way that relies only on their efforts to run it all the way down to the bare metal. Dependencies are essentially omnipresent. That is, someone else, somewhere, wrote some other code that the main characters in our story think could be helpful for making their own code work, so they just import it and use it. They often have to trust that it just does what it says it does on the tin. They may have to hope that if something goes wrong with it, that someone else (or their successors) will update it and keep it running correctly. This phenomenon is probably most famously summed up in this XKCD.
As such, it is sometimes possible for someone to get into one of these dependencies, find or insert a flaw, and then exploit it in order to get at some higher-level software package. There have been tons of examples, some very high profile, of this happening. The funniest version that I had heard of to date was "typosquatting". The idea is that, sometimes, just by random chance, some programmer somewhere will misspell a package that they want to import. Typosquatting is used for websites, too, where there is just some chance that some number of people will misspell a website and happen to go to a site controlled by a bad guy (famous example was goggle(dot)com). The idea for package dependencies is the same; some percentage of the time, some programmer may just accidentally type "hugingface" instead of "huggingface"; if the bad guys published a malicious version by that typo-d name and the programmer in question somehow doesn't catch it, big oof.
There is now a funnier version. Of course it would be LLMs that give us a funnier version. "Slopsquatting", they call it. They even created a wikipedia article already for the paper. The idea is that so many coders (and "vibe coders") are now using LLMs to create mountains of new code, some who barely understand what's going on in their newly-created code. The LLM just creates it, and it works! It's magic! Of course, anyone who has spent much time with LLMs know that they do occasionally hallucinate. And, well, hallucinating is close enough to typo-ing that it'll get the job done.
It turns out that LLMs will, some percentage of the time, just randomly hallucinate a package that doesn't exist (or at least, doesn't exist yet). They'll "imagine" that maybe such a package, if it existed, might be helpful to the task they were given to accomplish. And they'll just write code as if it existed and did the thing that they'd kinda like it to do. Of course, just like with typosquatting, if you have an attentive and knowledgeable human watching closely, there's no reason why they couldn't catch it. But again, we're entering the world of "vibe coders"; at least some percentage of them are simply not going to have a clue. "The magic inscrutable matrices gave me this code. I'll try to run it."
So now, what if the bad guys have already figured this out? The bad guys create a package that they think is likely to be hallucinated, and they turn it into a very bad package, indeed. To the "vibe coder", it might even look like it's running correctly! The magic inscrutable matrices came through again; let's ship some product! Utterly brilliant... and utterly devilish.
At least this one is funny.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Whether or not that is the case, it doesn't seem to be remotely relevant to this study or what it did/did not do. Just try to explain it. Put it into words. Actually connect the two thoughts.
A car mechanic that started lecturing me about physics and the need for fuel would be an asshole and I'd never go to him again.
Consider two possible situations. In Situation A, a customer just had their brand new car towed to the shop, because it stopped working. The mechanic investigates and discovers that it's out of fuel. "Good news!" he thinks. Perhaps the customer just had some minor issue with a new car, not quite seeing how it displays the fuel situation, and there's no need for any expensive repair, just some fuel. But when they tell this to the customer, the customer gets angry. "That's bullshit!" the customer says. Fuel has nothing to do with it. After all, look at the statistics! Cars almost never stop working in the real world because they run out of fuel! Hundreds of millions of hours of operations, and it almost never comes up! There must be something else going on, they swear. Maybe they need a vortex generator or something. That seems more likely to them to help get them going again.
In Situation B, the car shows up, and the mechanic determines that the alternator has gone bad. Nevertheless, they lecture the customer on the need to put fuel in the car.
Yes, in Situation B, the mechanic would be a bloody stupid asshole. But in Situation A, the customer has displayed that they are fundamentally ignorant of scientific reality. You would be shocked as to how many people are legitimately fundamentally ignorant of the scientific reality of body weight dynamics. There is no point in moving to some more refined conversation of different octane levels, different additive packages, fuel filter replacement timelines, etc., or even just a conversation of how they might want to approach planning for when to refuel to accomplish whatever goal they have (saving money, reducing transactions, whatever) until the absolutely extreme lack of basic understanding has been remedied. Your choices are to try to get the customer to understand the basic scientific reality... or just slap some fuel in their tank, charge them some money, let them continue being fundamentally ignorant of the world, send them on their way, and maybe hope they don't come back to your shop. You simply have zero chance of providing them with any sort of good advice that can reliably lead them to achieve desirable outcomes if they have so utterly rejected the fundamental reality of the world.
I read this comment as confirming that you don't actually personally know anyone who has done it. I'm not surprised, because frankly, your previously-stated "expectation" is wildly miscalibrated. Shockingly so for a rationalist-adjacent forum. So incredibly miscalibrated that it's actually more extreme than the first-hand accounts I've heard from literal competitive pro bodybuilders, who are trying to get their body fat percentage deep into the single digits, to a place where it is literally, physically unsustainable over time. People who dedicated years of their life to an extreme competitive pursuit... and your expectation is that just a normal person achieving a normal weight necessitates even more extreme measures?! Rarely in the history of these forums have I ever seen particular views that are this far out from reality.
But again, I'm sort of not surprised. I haven't been banging the drum too loudly, but I've been banging it a little; this is basically the most plausible explanation for why people observe that "diet and exercise doesn't work" - because most people are frankly ignorant of the reality of the world. Worse, they're probably being actively deceived. There's bullshit on TV like The Biggest Loser. There is no show called The Normal Loser. TV is endlessly obsessed by the "extreme". You don't see just a normal person learning how the world works, learning how to take agency over their consumption, taking data and observing over time that, yes, indeed, 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk, and if you remain relatively consistent over long periods of time, you will lose weight. You don't see that it's noisy, that it fluctuates, that people aren't hyper-precise and sometimes have special occasions or whatever... but that in the end, if you just keep doing the damn thing, it works. You don't see that you can eat a normal amount of normal food, living a normal life, and have it just work. And so people try stupid (or obviously unsustainable) stuff instead, it doesn't work (because it was stupid or obviously unsustainable), that gets chalked up in the "statistics", and it reinforces the idea that nothing works.
The problem is a combination of it being hard to market "generics" and woke takeover of government public health and messaging. First, I joke about "generics" in terms of drugs, but yeah, it's bloody hard to monetize the bog standard advice that is scientific reality. People see the signs at the gym they drive by that promise "Lose 20lbs in 30 days!" or whatever. They're inundated by huge promises, and those folks need to either bait-and-switch you... or have you do something that is obviously unsustainable. Both cases are likely to contribute to the statistics and beliefs that science-based diet and exercise "don't work". A while ago, I covered here what I viewed as an arbitrage attempt, trying to package the basic scientifically-proven advice into a package that might attract customers in a market flooded by deception and which had a funny scheme to accomplish monetization. (Of course, it involved straightforwardly lying and deceiving their potential customers.) It's just bloody hard to make money telling people that, yes, we know how science works, that no, you're not magic or special, that yes, you can do this if you know what you're getting into and do it over a long time, that no, you don't have to go to extremes like a bodybuilder or like move to Alaska or anything, etc. Probably the only people who can monetize this are a small number of honest personal trainers, who can have a no shit, come to Jesus personal conversation with their client, assess their willingness to believe and/or the degree to which they have been deceived, etc. That doesn't currently scale in a world full of lying liars.
Second, the woke takeover of government public health and messaging. It probably would take a gov't funded, like documentary series or something. There's an obvious profit-related reason why you see shit like The Biggest Loser and not The Normal Loser. How many years would you have to dedicate to filming that? How would you possibly fund it? If you want to retain credibility, only provide scientifically-validated information, and not have to take a bunch of money from this commercial weight-loss program or that commercial weight-loss program or this app or that app or whatever, where would you get the money for such a significant endeavor? I guess maybe some other nonprofit, but those have been taken over by the lefties, too. There's just no appetite with them to show normal people, living normal lives, taking agency and controlling their weight in accordance with scientific reality. In a former time, with old governments, who didn't reject scientific reality of something as simple as biology in favor of wokeness, and which acknowledged that this is a significant matter of importance on which public education is seriously needed and seriously lacking, perhaps you might have gotten such a thing.
Frankly, without something like that to point you to, it's going to be hard for you to realize just how insanely miscalibrated you are. You're probably not going to, like, go randomly meet some people in real life who know the scientific reality, have personally used it, continue to live normal lives using it, and are willing to talk to you about it. To be honest, we are often pretty careful in real life to not be too blunt about our knowledge of the scientific reality. We sometimes nibble around the edges with folks in conversation, but most people don't want to hear it in full. It's weird. We worry that they will think that we're judging them if we even talk about our knowledge of how reality works. So, we kinda don't talk about it much. So people don't have exposure to know that you can live a normal life, doing normal things, and be perfectly fine.
They just don't know. You just don't know. You're extremely miscalibrated. None of this is surprising, because very few people have an incentive to tell you the truth and many many people have an incentive to lie to you and intentionally cause you to be wildly miscalibrated.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
The evidence is in our obesity rate and the studies showing that dieting usually fails longterm.
That is not evidence of the thing you claimed.
You have to read more carefully: “direct precious mental energy to real solutions.”
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years.
Awesome. So, we're not dealing with, like, a biological inability or anything. Not in the same class as we might be dealing with if there was just, like, a clear IQ cutoff, such that a big percentage of people were literally just cognitively incapable of learning calculus or something.
Instead, we're in the fuzzy land of what incentives "should be" enough or how much "effort" people might have to put in. It's fuzzy, yes, but we're far from the land of, "People can't do this." We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"
But I expect the required measures to be extreme...
Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation? Yes, as your cut gets deeper, you feel physical and mental effects. I've felt them. Intelligent strategies allow for a period of maintenance (a "diet break") to help alleviate these symptoms before continuing. They're annoying, but not that bad. When you return to maintenance, it's not all that bad in the long term.
Right now, we go the gym probably 3-4 days a week. Work has been weird for us lately, so not as often as we like, and not as much time as we'd like. Often just main lifts; basically no cardio. Almost negligible caloric impact, TBH. We eat good, tasty food. Literally just had Sichuan for dinner. We know about how many calories are in the recipe, and we portion it out accordingly in a way that we know approximately fits our maintenance calorie needs. Not a drop of Soylent or a crumb of a MealSquare in sight. Special occasions are nothing. Literally just had two of those this week. That is an outlier. But yeah, even if I blow my maintenance by 500cal on a special occasion, it's pretty trivial to make up for it long-term. We live in a city, four minutes away from multiple grocery stores (including a wonderful Asian market with excellently flavorful foods).
We live a normal life. This is normal life. We just know how many calories we need, because we tracked it for a while. We know about how many calories are in most of our foods, and we don't even track it anymore. Our portions aren't super exactly precise; they're in the right ballpark. It's normal life, and it's been about five years now since my wife got in on it, too. I honestly think you just don't know anyone who lives a normal life, but has the knowledge and experience.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
it’s not practical in a population-level discussion
Facts not in evidence.
There’s a lot that should be studied.
Look, I have no concerns with studying any of those things. You promised me "real solutions". That means that you should be able to demonstrate, with evidence, that some set of your "real solutions" meet the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam
Let's go further. I posited this one on reddit a while back. Let's suppose an eccentric billionaire credibly offered a literal billion dollars to a somewhat-randomly-selected obese person, on the condition that they lose a certain, reasonable amount of weight for their height/gender/etc. and keep it off for, say, five years (this is often a cited duration). Let's say they take drugs/surgery/whatever off the table and it's agreed (perhaps monitored) that it's going to be only "diet and exercise", "CICO", or whatever descriptor. They could plausibly take out loans against the future payout to the extent that lenders think they're likely to collect, which they could use to pay for professional advice (let's say it's highly likely that the person will accept the billionaire's recommendation for a professional who deeply understands caloric balance, macro/micronutrients, sports science, personal training, etc.) or even, say, quitting their job in the meantime or whatever if the numbers allow it. What do you think their chance of success would be?
I've got some other great hypotheticals along opposite lines, but let's just do a direct hyper variant of yours first.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Yes, and I think the usefulness of this has to do with how often people don't seem to consciously understand this tautology. Which seems very often in my experience, with how much talk there is about "healthy foods"...
I heard an incredible story about a person who got mad at her doctor after she asked, "What food can I eat to offset the fact that I'm eating this other thing?" and, unsurprisingly, her doctor did not seem to answer the question that she had posed in the way she posed it.
I've heard all sorts of other misinformation and bad fundamental beliefs from people. If anyone has a better strategy besides, "Ok, so let's talk about the fundamental basics of how calories and macro/micronutrients work, and how they might have different considerations," I'd be all ears. But it's genuinely difficult to progress if they literally just do not have any concept of the "tautology", what I would perhaps word as the "descriptive fact of the matter". It really feels like trying to teach someone how to play baseball, and they just keep saying, "Where's my racket? I need a racket. When are we going to get to how to use the racket? I just want to know how to use the racket; I'll figure out the rest of it later."
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I will take that as a concession that you do not disagree with my claim that the usefulness of knowledge about the biology, chemistry, physics, and dynamics of body weight probably doesn't depend on whether some group of people seems to actually "use" it or not.
What do you think an example of a "real solution" would be?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
with no follow-up to help people actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it
I mean, frankly, I don't believe you? I think what you're seeing is that most online discussion is not between a person who acknowledges physical reality and is looking for strategies to actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it and a person who has been through it and has even a quarter of a millisecond to start describing follow-up advice. Instead, within a tenth of a millisecond, the discussion is just totally swamped with people claiming that the entire framework is bogus, unhelpful, or not paired with follow-up.
What you're probably missing is not-online discussions that don't get bombed in this way. Where people actually have a serious conversation about goals and strategies to accomplish it. Again, I think the biggest reason you don't see this online is that any such discussion doesn't have a chance to even get off the ground.
Yes, any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less, much like various budgeting plans still generally result in spending less money, and study tips generally result in people spending more time reviewing for tests.
Correct. You don't see those other discussions getting bombed and derailed by hoards of people saying that it's totally bogus to even think about trying to spend less money or to study more.
Perhaps test the thesis? Maybe post in the Small-Scale Questions Sunday Thread? Unlike this one, which started immediately out the gate just saying that the entire conceptual schema was bogus, perhaps start by saying that you think that "any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less", and you'd like some follow-on advice on how to accomplish it. See what response you get. I would predict that you'll get some realistic advice, probably with some variation, because different things have "worked" for different people. You may also get bombed by folks saying that your entire premise is bogus.
I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I think he would agree with you. He put the obligatory "...and services" in several places, but did happen to omit it in that one blockquote. I don't think it was intentional.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
It seems like the same arguments would apply there to American retirees holding US treasury bonds with the expectation that the treasury can make good by taxing (presumed: future citizens, not the retired bondholders)
I believe he would agree. This is something that came up with him a lot when he was focusing on promoting his book on the fiscal theory of the price level. The getting is good when debt-holders expect that the government will make good on their debts; things start to go south when they start thinking there's a chance of default or the gov't deciding to inflate it away. Basically what a claim on USG debt is is an expectation that it will tax future citizens in order to repay you.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
John Cochrane opines on deficits (trade and budgetary) and tariffs
I'll start where he describes what is perhaps the most fundamental driver of cross-border investment:
For various reasons, many countries around the world including China wanted to save. For various reasons, additional domestic investment did not seem like a good idea. Chinese savers did not want even more Chinese factories. One of many reasons for this saving (more later, but it helps to make the story) is that China is aging and has little safety net, so its middle age workers want to put money aside, to withdraw when they get old. So, those savers chose to invest in the US.
This seems like a perfectly fine thing. If there are reasons that make investing in China look less attractive to retirement savers, they should look elsewhere. It would actually be a promising thing for the US if they found that investing in US businesses was comparatively attractive. He then highlights "three bedrock principles of economics":
- The capital and current account must add up. If the US imports more than it exports, it has to give foreigners something valuable in return. Even China doesn’t send us stuff for free. We give dollars, treasury securities, or stocks and bonds in return. And if other countries like China want to accumulate US securities, they must send us more goods and services then we send them, to get dollars they can use to buy securities.
- Money is a veil. Understand the underlying movement of goods and services. To understand economics, look beyond money and watch the underlying flow of real stuff. To invest in the US, other countries must put things on boats and send it here (or sell us services). One Chinese person can buy a stock from another Chinese person, but China as a whole cannot accumulate US assets without putting goods on boats (proverbially).
...
- The overall trade (goods and services) deficit equals the difference between savings and investment plus the government deficit [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]
Put these ideas together. What happens if other countries decide they want to save more, and invest in the US? They buy US assets, which sends up the real exchange rate.
He then squarely aims at the G term in that equation:
The US reacted to the offer by other countries to borrow from them (sell them assets) at very low interest rates, not by building factories, but going on a consumption binge. Just as Greece had done. Most of that is due to the actions of the federal government. The total trade deficit is about $1 trillion. The US budget deficit is about $1.3 trillion. All of that extra saving is going to the federal government. And the federal government is not building a trillion dollars a year of productive investment with the money. The federal government is, by and large, sending checks to its citizens to support current consumption. The federal government saw an amazing opportunity to borrow cheaply, sometimes even at negative real rates of interest. Borrow it did, and sent checks to happy voters.
The Chinese are not, it turns out, financing their retirement from the profits of a new generation of factories. They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process and put stuff back on boats to send to China.
...
The foreigners in the US don’t know or really care where the resources to pay them back come from. A promise to fund Chinese retirements with US taxes is just as good to them as a promise to fund them from profitable factories.
...
We have all sorts of contrary policies against saving, against investment, and for consumption. Huge budget deficits, absorbing our and foreigners savings, are sent as checks to people likely to consume. We subsidize home mortgages. We tax savings and rates of return pretty heavily, including corporate taxes, taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains. Food stamps and agricultural subsidies encourage consumption. Our Keynesian policy establishment spent twenty years pushing extra consumption, via fiscal “stimulus,” fears of “secular stagnation,” and under multiple banners that government debt never has to be repaid.
How do tariffs play in?
Tariffs are not likely to fix any of this. If we cut off all net trade, as the current tariffs seem to aim to do, this process will have to come to an end.
But how? The US will no longer be able to finance $1.3 trillion budget deficits from foreigners, and will have to do it from domestic savings. Or, it will have to cut $1.3 trillion of spending, or raise $1.3 trillion of durable tax revenue.
I'd sum this up in going back to the fundamental equation he presented: [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]. If you want to make the left hand side of that equation go to zero, then you must make something on the right hand side change, too. My last sentence was a bit too heavy on "agency of the theoretician", as though one can simply grab one of those variables and turn it up or down. In reality, the complex interaction of transactions will necessarily bring the equation to equality, and you might not get to choose how it gets there. Policy-makers sort of get to directly tweak G and T, but they have less direct tools for I and S. I read him as saying that the LHS is about $1T and that (G-T) is about $1.3T, meaning that (I-S) is presumably about -$0.3T. So, where is that $1T change coming from? Policymakers can cut G or raise T, naturally pissing off every voter who is living high on the deficit, but they obviously don't have to. If they don't, his conclusion is that we're in for a world of change when it comes to I and S. About $1T worth of change.
He does not spell it out, but seems to assume that the natural mechanism that interacts with I and S is the interest rate.
Interest rates will spike, and that’s the point. Higher interest rates encourage domestic saving, and discourage budget deficits and corporate investment, to bring investment plus government spending back in line with savings. But the spike in interest rates require to do this would be huge. And the trade shock will cause a sharp recession, or worse, putting even more stress on the budget. A debt crisis is likely along the way as the US finds it impossible to roll over debt.
If the influx of foreign investment, which was keeping interest rates low, dries up, companies will have to look to domestic savers. But those domestic savers didn't want to save at the current interest rates! If they did, they would be! So companies (and the gov't) will have to offer higher interest rates. That will be necessary to draw American savings. At the same time, having to pay higher interest rates means that companies can't invest as easily in more speculative, longer-timeline opportunities. Note that it doesn't make sense that they're suddenly going to invest more in domestic factories; if those domestic factories were profitable at the current, lower interest rates, they'd already be doing it! Instead, they're going to invest in less. Thus, fewer jobs, less innovation, and thus, recession. That is how I read the predictions. (He also thinks that rising interest rates will hit the federal government, as well, precipitating a debt crisis.)
Cochrane has been a fiscal "hawk" for a while. The fundamental thing to him is that the government has been borrowing tons of money to subsidize American consumption. It's been doing this for a while. At some point, you've gotta find a way to pay the piper. You can try not to, but the equation will balance itself. He just thinks that forcing the LHS to zero by gov't policy creates significant difficulties along the way.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
In the same way, I believe that the usefulness of knowledge about the biology, chemistry, physics, and dynamics of body weight probably doesn't depend on whether some group of people seems to actually "use" it or not.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I'm very clearly trying to articulate that I want to know if you will very clearly state that you think that knowledge about cooking is "useless" if all of those humans on earth don't do it, but magically becomes "useful" if they do.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
So we assume the same willpower.
That is not a control on willpower. It's not saying anything about willpower. I've said nothing about willpower. It is not apparent how willpower is supposed to come into anything or what straw man you think you're arguing against.
A cooking change is a one time change.
No. You have to cook your meat every single time you eat it. Every single meal, every single day, for the rest of your life. You’re asking for half the humans on earth to fundamentally rewire their identity so that their primary value in life is their body; will you very clearly state that you think that this means that knowledge about cooking is "useless" if all of those humans on earth don't do it, but magically becomes "useful" if they do?
this is implying that bodybuilders aren’t preselected for the epigenetic expressions not associated with obesity
I never said any such thing.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
As we know that the month of conception has no bearing on willpower
Right, so that is not a control for willpower.
A minority successfully do this
Please address my food cooking hypothetical.
only in the short-term
This is not true. Many people do it year-round for many years.
only by significantly modifying their social identity
Please address my food cooking hypothetical. One might say that it would require a significant modification to the hypothetical religious/social identity. Does that mean that knowledge about cooking is "useless"?
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)
Please address my food cooking hypothetical. I don't particularly care if everyone "can" change their entire social identity or whether it is "desirable". I am speaking purely descriptively.
I will additionally note that I have not, a single time in this conversation, made any claims about willpower, except that your claimed control for willpower was not, in fact, a control for willpower. I have no idea if there is even such a thing as a "general willpower factor" or, if there was, it would correlate to any particular behaviors. It doesn't seem to factor in to a descriptive account of body weight chemistry, physics, or dynamics.
Eh, from today's Short Circuit:
Reading through the factual background in the opinion, I could see this stuff being a pet project of a teacher (and apparently a substitute teacher), just with the district administration providing cover for them. My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.
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