ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
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.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
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.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.
That is not what this study shows. I'm not even sure how you would "control for willpower".
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”...
This depends on what you're trying to do. For example, there are tons of athletes and bodybuilders who 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?
This community loves Science (TM) and Rationalism (TM). Suppose you lived in a religious woo world, and everyone believed that the gods wanted you to eat raw meat and they determined whether or not you got sick. You discovered that, actually, the cooking process can improve digestion and kill pathogens. But you just couldn't convince other people to do it, for whatever reasons. Maybe there are folks out there claiming that it's just because they "lack willpower" to do it. Is your knowledge suddenly "useless" in the case where a bunch of people don't do it... but it would somehow magically become "useful" if a bunch of people started doing it?
Food wise, the advice, in my view is to eat Whole Foods, unprocessed foods, favoring plants and protein, and limiting carbs especially simple carbs. Then you add in some exercise especially muscle building exercises though even walking has benefits.
Do you expect that following your advice will cause people to consume fewer calories than they expend? Otherwise, I would find that this
advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does [not] tell people how to actually stop using the drugs
This is really the rub. People want to claim that there is a "problem [they] see with CICO", but it's not actually a problem with CICO. It's a problem with advice for behavioral modification. That advice needs to be linked to a realistic approach to achieving the desired objective, given the reality of the underlying facts.
Imagine saying that the problem with math is that telling people that math is correct doesn't tell them how to actually learn math. ...that's a problem with math?!? That means that math should be viewed as useless or something? No, man. That's not a problem with math at all. Math is just fine. Math is correct, actually. People can, and do, learn math. Obviously, simply saying "math is correct" will not immediately and instantaneously result in someone learning math. Work still needs to be done. But people wayyyy overcorrect and want to imply that there's something wrong with math if they can't just easily, instantaneously, learn math with zero effort and nothing but an incantation of math being correct.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
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!
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
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.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Which part of CICO do you think this is a blow to? There has always been some noise level of individual variability. This is inherent in basically all biology research. Sometimes, folks are able to probe a bit deeper into it, and we already have a variety of different ways to do so. Many of them are just too complicated to do most of the time for most people... and they're often usually relatively small effect sizes, anyway. Like, yes, can we slightly refine our estimate of one component of your CO if we take precise measurements of your individual organ sizes; is that a "blow" to CICO?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Sure, "co-equal" is definitely not often defined extremely precisely. They're obviously not, like, mathematically "equal" or "identical" or anything. They don't have exactly equal tools or powers. They might even have different numbers on their Articles. But they all get Articles. They're all equally established by the Constitution. They all derive a sense of legitimacy as institutions from that establishment by an adopted Constitutional text. They all exercise powers and authorities given to them directly from the primary document, not some lesser establishment or delegation. No branch can simply eliminate another wholesale.1 (Though they obviously each have tools that can greatly impact the operations of the others.) And moving back a bit toward the discussion at hand, I think there is little sense in saying that national sovereignty is located purely within a strict subset of branches. They all have some component or part to play in the exercise of national sovereignty that no other bodies or institutions apart from them have.
1 - Congress comes the closest here, but even they must appeal to the judgment of the fifty separately sovereign states.
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.
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