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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?
Do you believe the person online who says that it's scientifically impossible to not be racist? (This one definitely personally criticizes you.) The one who says that lizardmen secretly rule the government? The one who has "119 scientific proofs" for why the earth is flat?
How are you supposed to know? Basic epistemic hygiene will get you a long way. Or, ya know, you can throw your hands up and decide that it's impossible to know anything.
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.
It's an individual practice with community effects, like any other hygiene. You seem to have been inoculated against actually engaging with the research by focusing on some random people that you think are stupid. Reversed stupidity (if it does exist out there somewhere) is not intelligence. If you're finding such people, engaging with them, and responding by becoming strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to saying that you can't possibly know anything about how the world works, you're descending to the lowest of the lows that you imagine your enemies to be.
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.
Check your hyperbole. Think seriously about whether this is a remotely reasonable thing to suggest. Perhaps think about the example of someone trying to make their own semiconductors. If their project fails, and they decide that being told that semiconductor physics works and that semiconductor technology is possible disagrees with their lying eyes, would you suggest that they check into an insane asylum? If not, what might you suggest instead?
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.
I mean, no? It's pretty consistent in the literature that in lab-controlled settings, calorie tracking always works, but 'out in the wild', it's far more mixed.
Not impossible. Everyone knows the legend of Michael Phelps, and I'm pretty confident I could come up with a variety of other examples of folks who are in that domain.
Not as difficult. I had said that that analogy was pushing various factors to the extreme to make a conceptual point. If you're accepting the conceptual point and want agreement that counting calories is less difficult/complex than building semiconductors, I think we're fully in agreement! Success!
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