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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. So either we are now alleging domain-specific willpower, or the concept of willpower is nonsensical altogether. 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?
So neither intensive physical regimens nor intensive fasting regimens affect weight loss in large scale populations. We are left with motivation, but as I’ve written, 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. Now you note —
but fat people are already shamed explicitly and implicitly. They are shamed more today implicitly than in the past, with social media giving them a peer ranking of their popularity and male interest where it is plainly obvious that their weight is a deciding factor. If you are fat in school you will get comments. Re: China, China’s obesity is increasing. But Chinese Americans also have genetically lower obesity rates.
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. That’s why this topic is important actually. If the willpower theory is unevidenced then we want to focus our efforts somewhere else — not on hating fat people but perhaps hating the ultrawealthy who sell poison in stores. Perhaps it is the department of education for making schools too sedentary. Perhaps it is neighborhood designers. Perhaps it is feminism. Perhaps these are damned and the fats are the victims?
Apart from microbiome, some other hypotheses I wonder about are —
Poor or insufficient breastfeeding, already associated with obesity
accidentally reinforcement of food at an early age through conversation, snacking, social / comfort associations
the de-reinforcement of physical activity due to a loss in communal dancing, physical play in kids, and destinations which can only be reached by long walks
A divine curse placed on our stock because of the way we treat livestock, taking the form of metabolic and DNA changes we aren’t familiar with yet
Are you alleging that sustained work on any goal is equally easy as any other goal for every single person?
Based on my experience I am much better at being focused on some tasks, much worse on some other and my willpower as far as not eating myself to death seems to be a bit above average.
There is also no experience that will reliably make people honest, reliable, punctual, less rude, not wasting their life on computer games etc.
Nevertheless, keeping asshole tendencies in church and not being habitually late is partially function of willpower.
Keeping yourself away from drugs and slot machines is also function of willpower, complete destruction of regulation here for some people does not change it is function of willpower.
People are complicated, influencing them reliably is hard. It is hardly novel.
And yes, consistently eating less will make you less fat.
If willpower as a behavioral control mechanism can apply to very sophisticated longterm social goals (like running Amazon, being George Foreman) then we should expect that it would be applied where the costs and benefits are especially salient, your weight. Their ability to control their will should apply to food, even if that is a “skill” that must be practiced. Musk and Foreman are good at practicing skills, right? And common sense tells us they have noticed their obesity. Or how about the recent photo of Bronze Age Pervert, the one who praises self control and a beautiful body? Yet all these people are fat. This needs to be explained and not “it’s Just So stories all the way down”ed.
I disagree with that. I think social environment and social learning can improve upon that
Sure. We should also imprison for life the satanists who make money off of online phone-based gambling. Then send their children and grandchildren to a remote island. Where they can —
And therein lies the 250kcal BBQ dry rub. Yes, they eat. Why are they compelled to eat more than their expenditure when others are not?
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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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
I'd personally bite that bullet and say that libertarian free will does not exist. I'm not sure what you think I should do differently, or in my framing must do differently, given that belief.
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).
But this system of laws and punishment clearly does influence outcomes, like a slope guides water downhill. And criminals are to blame in the same way as tsunami is to blame for its victims, I can get angry at both. Also our whole society does stand on the assumption of free will so you just learn to put up with thism
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Yes, responsibility isn't a function of free will. In a cosmic sense they were always going to rear end me and we've built up systems around responsibility to handle this that provide incentives that influence behavior ect. ect. I'm entitled to insurance whether or not it could have actually ever been different. You can built up all of society without the need for free will and I don't really see why anyone would act differently depending on whether they believe in it.
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.
We're a razors edge away from arguing about definitions but at the risk of that. My air conditioner is responsible for keeping my house cool in the summer, a responsibility it failed at recently, and yet as far as I know it possesses no free will. The person who rear ended me has a responsibility to not rear end me and has failed much like my air conditioner. It's not as if the person chose with anything like free will to rear end me, very few people would ever choose to do such a thing.
Yeah, it does appear we are in definitions territory. I understand your point, but I think mine is obviously true.
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How not believing in free will should change your day to day life? I don't see it.
See my reply here: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/228825?context=8#context
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Why? Some people want some things more than they want other things.
Because temporarily restricting your caloric intake does not permanently change your weight. This is well known. Everyone knows a fat person who dieted for a month and lost 20 pounds. What happens when they go back to eating the way they were before? They regain the weight. Permanent weight loss requires permanently changing your CICO equation.
Believing that people have agency and that losing weight is mostly a matter of finding the will to do it does not require hating fat people. Sure, a lot of people do hate fat people, and justify it with variations on "They could just put the fork down," but you can recognize that losing weight is very hard without either shaming those who fail or inventing ways in which fat manifests out of the aether.
The bulk of fat people do not want to be fat. Being fat is a #1 deterrent in a relationship, it reduces respect between peers, it harms health and reduces activity levels. And this is well-known. So the willpower theory doesn’t make sense in light of just how many fat people there are who otherwise practice willpower throughout their life.
Implying willpower, it would. It’s a 30-day intensive practice of delaying gratification according to an external timeline with serious feedback. That’s practice. So we can deduct another point off the scale of willpower theory. At a population level, a month of serious willpower practice every year does not affect weight. But we should expect it would, given that most fat people do want to lose weight, and they just practiced that skill for a month.
Fat people are aware that they need to eat less to lose weight. This cannot be accomplished for the reason we are trying to determine.
I agree.
But I don't think the bulk of fat people actually want to lose weight. To be a little more charitable and specific; they don't want to do what is required to lose the weight. That's because what is required is a radical and permanent change to dietary habits and exercise patterns. You don't go on a diet to get off a diet you change how you eat forever. You don't start an exercise regimen to stop it you make daily or near daily exercise a non-negotiable part of your existence. And this is all very not easy to do. Is it asking too much? I'd say it's relevant to what you actually want (see my first sentence here). Where are your relative values and how strong are they in their ranked order?
Most people (myself definitely included) prioritize stability, loss aversion, and generalized "comfort" in life. If you're not yet fat / obese you can have those things (and stay in ok shape for at least a while) by simply watching what you eat and staying generally active. If you're already fat/obese - you have to actively chose to value a difficult to achieve future state over immediate comfort, stability, familiarity. Wha'ts more, getting to that future state requires and incredible amount of intermediate DIScomfort. So you're not only changing your relative value preferences (which is in itself difficult) you're also committing to objective ow this hurts pain for at least some amount of time. That's quite a bit to ask (side note: this is, I think, the same mechanism by which people stay in jobs they don't like even though it's often fairly easy to move to a better job if you aren't time pressured).
But this doesn't mean fat people are ethically lazy or something. Not at all. I view it as self-knowledge problem. If you love basketball, but are 5'3", you're never going to the NBA no matter how hard you practice. If you have a certain genetic profile, you need to be aware that should you cross that threshold into actually fat/obese you might be there forever unless you make some pretty herculean life alterations. Prevention is key and, even then, not perfect.
As I write this, I realize it would be easy to take my argument all the way to "fat acceptance" which I am utterly opposed to for a whole host of reasons. Yet, here I am. Huh. I'll have to keep thinking on that.
Would an average obese person agree to the deal that goes like this "you lose enough weight to return to healthy bmi but from now on my magic will force you to eat within your calorie maintenance limit". I think answer is an obvious "yes", as we see with Ozempic or stomach reduction surgery. They do want to change their eating habits for benifit of being healthy they just can't force themselves to do it.
Yep. I'd say it's actually nearly the same as a diabetic who wants their insulin levels to be more stable but simply can't willpower their way to it.
But we also have to understand the very obvious future reality that many folks will gobble ozempic and similar drugs while making zero lifestyle changes. Perhaps they lose weight, perhaps not.
Except you can't regrow the islets of Langerhans but you can avoid putting food in your mouth.
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Your arguments are completely irrational.
People make poor, counterproductive decisions they know will hurt them all the time. People stay in bad situations they know they should leave despite ongoing misery and self awareness. That fat people don't want to be fat and yet it's not enough to get them to sufficiently change their lifestyle is entirely explainable by human failings that affect all other areas of life.
As for fasting, most people can fast for a limited time. They can also do a vigorous exercise program for a limited time (the "New Year's resolution" phenomenon). Usually they'll lose weight. The weight doesn't stay off because the lifestyle changes don't stick.
Yes, fat people are aware they need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight. The problem is twofold: (1) They don't. (2) If they do, they become discouraged when they realize they have to keep doing it, and they stop.
If studies found that adults were making continually poorer decisions year after year, and that by 2030 half of all adults chronically made poor decisions, and this was ever-increasing, then I would look for non-volitional factors at play. Lead poisoning? Something involving early life? Something involving complex social-environmental reinforcement mechanisms? That’s what I would begin to look at. Do Americans today lack willpower relative to Americans in 1980 or did other things change? You could have bought lots of pastries and sugar and candy as early as the 1920s, when few were obese. Milk was cheap and highly caloric, alcohol plentiful.
Hunger is different from a typical rational decision. When people are very hungry they will resort to cannibalism and murder, which proves this. Alright, so somewhere between “quite famished” and “eating my crewmate” we may have the polyphagia of the obese. I agree with your (1) and (2), my disagreement is: (A) the problem stems from how their body non-willfully reacts to the cues of food, with enhanced hunger and decreased inhibitory control, versus (B) they really ought to want to be skinny more. We already have evidence of (A) in other cases, like certain drug treatments reliably increasing appetite and increasing weight gain despite not affecting their willpower.
Why? Why is it so hard to believe that humans are flawed creatures who, by and large, are not good decision makers? Why is it so unlikely that faced with unlimited temptation, most people will fail to resist?
Food is delicious. Exercise is unpleasant. That's a sufficient explanation.
Sugary food existed in the 1920s, but not in such abundance and variety, and not as cheaply. It wasn't so easy to pack HFCS and fat into absolutely everything. Fast food was still a luxury. Prepared meals were very much so. And the ratio of sedentary desk jobs was much lower.
Americans eat many more calories today, on average, and burn much fewer. There are probably cultural factors as well, that made eating fast food and sweets as staples more acceptable, and that caused a decrease in activity levels. But you are looking for some explanation for why people are bad at resisting temptation, and the answer is the question.
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Is this the equivalent of a pride of lions, a murder of crows, etc.?
Fucking epic.
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