site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21416 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

The naive version of CICO compares your meal plan to your gym time. The normal version compares all the food (including drinks!) you consume vs. all your planned or incidental physical activity. The true version compares the bioavailability of all the nutrients you consume vs. all of your metabolic activity, whether that's moving your muscles, thinking, growth, healing, generating heat, or anything else.

I have yet to see any diet plan that uses the true model of CICO. The closest I've seen is a single number for "base metabolism" that you back-calculate from your weight trends.

I think you're pushing a strawman, but I'm open to seeing a diet plan that uses the "true CICO" model I described. Anything less precise can't follow from raw thermodynamics.

As we are mere mortals, generally we can estimate a CO number that's within 5-10% of the appropriate one (regardless of hormonal and compositional differences) and then ensure a CI number that's a decent margin less than that. This whole thing seems to be trying to invoke the Zenos paradox of weight loss in which 'I cannot lose weight since I cannot know my exact expenditure and the only thing stopping me from adjusting my consumption is not knowing to 8 decimal places how many twinkies I can consume to achieve an exact 200 calorie deficit'.

CICO is not a diet plan, it is a description of the fundamental physics that govern bodyweight. My comment is not an endorsement of any diet plan, but a reaction against the, as demonstrated by the storm of replies, substantial contingent of people who will do absolutely anything other than admit you must create a net gradient in a body's energy flux to achieve change.

The strawman is comments about "willpower" or "different basal metabolic rates"- these are simply inputs to be considered but not a reason to pretend the fundamental equation is not what it is.

You don't need official diets for CICO it's self evident. Reduce food consumption and/or increase activity until you lose weight. Still haven't lost weight? Decrease/increase.

Problems:

  1. People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

  2. People tend to over-weight the activity part. So really just forget about CO and reduce CI until you start to lose weight. See problem one.

Expand to why you're poor and struggle with addiction.

"you're poor because you don't earn enough" A lot of dieting advice is similarly circular or unhelpful. Thankfully we now have GLP-1 drugs, which seem to work for many people

There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:

To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.

To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.

GLP-1 drugs

Be careful with that poison, I'm reading some horror stories about people going blind on that shit. And the media is staying as silent as possible for that one.

No, you're poor because you don't do relatively simple things. And yes, hopefully GLP-1s help a ton.

the SS was written a long time ago when a HS degree was good enough. now you need college

So it's down from 97% to what?

People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

Its well known that certain medications lead to weight gain: do you believe they do so because they reduce the self control of those who take them? Does hyperthyroidism cause significant increases in self-control, and does hypothyroidism erode self-control? Do GLPs work because they increase the individual's self-control?

If not, then factors other than self-control are at play.

Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.

Hypothyroidism typically reduces appetite, yet you still gain weight despite eating less. Similarly, hyperthyroidism typically increases appetite, yet you lose weight even though you're eating more. Thyroid hormones are needed to make a lot of metabolic processes run, and if you don't have enough (hypothyroidism) then your temperature goes down and a dozen other processes don't work well and stop using up calories, so most of what you eat ends up in fat storage. If you have too much (hyperthyroidism) then your body temperature goes up, a dozen metabolic processes go into overdrive, and you lose weight despite eating more.

You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.

You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.

Where this hypothetical is from?

I know it wouldn't be The Motte if it wasn't 10,000 words of caveats. Yes, these are exceptions that apply to a minuscule number of people, yet a bunch of people use them to make excuses for why they're fat.

It would not surprise me one bit that certain drugs and conditions reduce self-control and other's increase it. Some things make desired outcomes easier and some things make them harder. If you've got lots of self-control and you get some condition or start some drugs that make it harder to keep weight off, reduce CI until you stop gaining weight.

I would bet you think I have some normie conception of self-control: "self-control is easy! Just don't eat." Nope, self-control is really hard, and you're probably mostly born with it, like IQ. Can a midwit get a PhD in math from Harvard...? Well, are they black? No? Very unlikely.

Additionally hilarious when the majority of people making these arguments, if confronted with a similar 'transness is valid since super rare hormonal dysfunction that impacts 1-in-2-million people' would instantly side on the yes but side whilst since it's about their own bodyweights are suddenly reality relatavists.

I'm reminded of a twitter thread from Big Yud ages ago on similar lines about why he was unable to lose weight. Can't find it on a quick search but it was a similar matter of 'rationalist attempts to rebut CICO when it's fairly obvious he just likes eating and doesn't like exercising'. A post meming on him from back then https://x.com/MorlockP/status/1657098074139811876

I've personally struggled with my weight depending on a bunch of factors, swinging 20-30kgs either direction depending on circumstances but ultimately CICO's the only way I've ever been able to lose weight and generally I gain when I'm distracted by other things to the point of letting go of either moderation or exercise.

One CICO diet plan I know of is The Hacker's Diet. You don't need impossible precision because instead you borrow a page from control theory. You measure your change in weight, and if it's not as desired, you reduce CI to compensate. Closed-loop feedback.

That's exactly what I'm talking about: It's a Calories In, Calories Out, Body Weight system and that third variable is essential.

Skimming through the paper, it appears that the difference between cold and hot is about 100 Calories per cold day, or about one pound per month. A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

Body weight is not an independent variable. But it is easily observable the way CI and CO are not.

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

"Ostensibly".

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

h-What? My understanding of the claim is that those two people have slightly different COs. Therefore, a "pure CICO system" would explain it perfectly fine if we're able to quantize this component to individual variability. There are tons of different components to individual variability, and most of the time, we just don't bother quantizing them because they're often hard to measure and are small effect sizes anyway.

Show me the table entry for "brown adipose tissue heating" on a CO calculation and I'll believe it. Otherwise it's just part of the fudge factor.

Quantizing that component (and every other one) to individual variability is the weakness of CICO, as they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables.

These things are usually buried in textbooks. Often in the world of, "Yeah, it can kinda be done, but it's expensive and time-consuming and doesn't really change much."

they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables

I mean, not really? We have a pretty good handle on individual variability. It's not nothing, but it's not insane. And it doesn't generally change much from a practical standpoint. You can just use direct observation and measure your own point in that range of individual variability.

Its not every winter, they measured when exposed to 19 C. Which is basically room temp. So it would be every month about 3k calories (1 lb) for the warm conceived groud vs the cold. Just because they were born when its on average 10 C outside instead of 18 C.

Its ridiculous lol

Who are these 100% blank slatist CICO advocates? Especially around here in the land of "IQ is real and probably has a large genetic component."

Here.

CICO by the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds for force feeding and starvation. Everything between those extremes is confounded by biology.

Should I believe my lying eyes? When my wife and I tracked our weight and caloric intake for a couple years, we had a range of different intakes, and the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. It was noisy, yes, but probably about as noisy as any measurement we have for any biological research.1 Taking another look at the data now, it would be kinda dumb to think about modeling it as a step function, S-curve, or deadzone or whatever. Generally, one needs some justification for moving to some other weird modeling assumption.

1 - Moreover, it is utterly unsurprising that it is so noisy, due to the mathematical realities of numerical analysis and differentiation. If anything, it was extremely surprising that it worked so well!

the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk

It's very strange to me this is controversial. You don't have to rely on an small sample studies or individual anecdotes. Thousands of serious bodybuilders track year round. To the point of using an activity tracker to track general physical activity, having a detailed log for total resistance training volume, and eating & measuring common foods to the gram. Essentially universally they find that an offset of 500 kcal/day from maintenance is good for a pound a week, with maybe a variability of 100 kcal.

Now tracking everything too the gram is annoying. Peoples sense of hunger and motivation differ, etc. As hunger develops it's supper easy to spray that cooking spray for 1 second instead of 0.2. It says 0 Cals on the back, but it's not it's 9 kcal per gram. For two items per meal, four meals per day, and 1 gram per spray that's 7.5 pounds of body weight per year. Additionally, in a deep deficit, if you don't use an activity tracker, it's easy to go down to 5k steps a day from 10k steps a day.

So if your eating and activity are driven by intuition or satiation knowing about CICO does not make you lose weight. Particularly the longer and deeper the deficit the easier it is to deceive yourself. You can bypass this problem in approximately two ways. One, is to exercise extreme levels of detail and self-corrective feedback in tracking. The other is to suppress appetite, which is the obvious mechanism by which GLP1s and gastric work.

Did you calculate your base metabolic rate (or whatever the fudge factor is called in your system) so that it all worked out? If not, you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time. If you have adjusted it, then that means your calculations are on target, and adjusting the inputs so that 3500 kcal = 1 lb resulted in a trendline at 3500 kcal per lb.

This study gives some people a 20% headstart on your dieting goals (admittedly they didn't measure "CI"), which is a pretty notable difference.

you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time.

I don't know what you mean by this. I didn't need something to happen to be correct. I gathered data, I looked at that data, and I saw that the trend line (across a range of inputs) was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. I didn't have to adjust for anything. That was just what the data said.

This is certainly what I do - weigh myself every couple of weeks, if my weight's gone up stop eating lunch for a few days, if it's gone down start eating dessert for a few days. Hadn't heard the name "Hacker's Diet", though; it seems kind of too obvious to need a name and I kind of thought anyone who's actually at target weight would be doing it.

It's pretty much what I do as well. Also anticipating excess calories, "Gonna get drinks and have a big dinner so going light on lunch.". Bonus, less booze to get tipsy.

Also knowing your indulgences and where calories sneak in. For most I think that's liquids and snacking. I have a huge sweet tooth. I keep snacking to a minimum and cut out sugary drinks over 20 years ago so I can have an extra slice of cake every now and then. Over the last 5 years I've started "light" intermittent fasting so it's even easier to keep tabs on things. Also I think being comfortable with the feeling of being hungery is a good thing.

To be clear; I'm anorexic (in the proper sense); I don't get hungry*. Obviously, this largely negates the "ate too much" side of the coin.

*I recently discovered that I can get cravings for specific foods; when I started training with my bow, I started getting meat cravings, presumably because I needed protein to add muscle.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats