coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Different months of conception have different genetic effects on a future child. It does not have different effects on willpower. One large group in month A has the same willpower as one large group in month B. There is no reason to think otherwise. So we assume the same willpower. But the genetic effects are correlated with different adult obesity rates. Did you read the study? If you think that the month of conception can alter even willpower, then we are essentially redefining willpower and are all the way back to where we started — in needing cultural / societal changes which genetically change people’s willpower.
one might say that it would require a significant modification to the hypothetical religious/social identity
A cooking change is a one time change. You’re asking for half the humans on earth to fundamentally rewire their identity so that their primary value in life is their body; and this is implying that bodybuilders aren’t preselected for the epigenetic expressions not associated with obesity. This is an insane proposal.
Does that mean that knowledge about cooking is "useless"?
Bodybuilders — the sliver of successful ones who actually succeed in modifying their body longterm without drugs, so 0.01% of the population or less — maintain their social identity through, essentially, thousands of hours of identity maintenance a year, changing what they think about, who they look up to, what they value. A world of bodybuilders would destruct, as no one would care about civic or institutional participation. So this proposal is not serious. We could make everyone become Buddhist ascetics whose new overriding value in life is not eating. This is is similarly possible, but not a serious proposal.
Anyway, please see my weight-cycling studying x3.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
You control for willpower by looking at a cohort conceived in colder months and comparing to a cohort conceived in warmer months. This is simple. As we know that the month of conception has no bearing on willpower, and the study did not find a correlation in regards to temperature of month at birth, which I suppose may somehow change one’s willpower (if you squint), the populations are controlled for willpower.
athletes and bodybuilders 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?
A minority successfully do this, only in the short-term, and only by significantly modifying their social identity. It comes at an impractical expenditure of willpower for the population-level. You can probably get someone to not eat for three days with the offer of $100,000; you can get a competitive wrestler to stop eating when it’s required for his social reputation; and a particularly vain bodybuilder can probably bulk and cut when he has made his appearance his entire social value. But 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). In fact, even those selected for willpower and who practice willpower in regards to weight during their athletic career are not protected against obesity. Studies show that weight cycling athletes are either at the same level of obesity risk as other athletes, or even a worse level of obesity risk than the general population. We also know that the yearly Ramadan practice of willpower does not affect longterm obesity. If willpower were a longterm determinant, we would see (1) Ramadan practitioners become less obese, (2) weight-cycling athletes are particularly protected against obesity compared to other athletes. Yet we don’t find this.
You can find people who have terrible willpower in regards to substances, energy drinks, candy, and yet don’t gain weight. Then you can find people who exhibit amazing willpower in all facets of life, and yet are fat.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
You are wrong in one way, but only because you made a single assertion. Humans are not machines as they have particular evolutionary forces at play that need to grasped to make sense of their behavior.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
There are determinants unrelated to willpower and unrelated to personal lifestyle changes which cause obesity. This is one factor and there may be many others. Everyone who uses “CICO” in obesity discourse means that, by everyone attempting to modify one of these variables, we can sizably reduce waist sizes. What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.
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”, “insomniacs need to sleep”, and “a thirsty sailor adrift at sea must never drink salt water”. It acts as a brainworm that just derails actual discourse around obesity.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.
So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory
That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.
conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy
The significance is in the extrapolation. The takeaway is to not have babies in winter in Japan (that would be silly), but that we may be able to modify obesity significantly through pre-conception cold exposure, the limit cases of which are explored in the study. Japan is probably not even a top 100 place in the world where residents experience genuine cold for prolonged periods, due to their urban living and wealth to buy clothes.
You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.
Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
A blow to the CICO theory of obesity: Pre-fertilization-origin preservation of brown fat-mediated energy expenditure in humans
In mice, cold environments before pregnancy can "pre-program" fat-burning traits in offspring. Could the same be true for humans?
People conceived in colder months consistently had more active brown fat in adulthood
Cohort 4 explored energy use after eating (DIT). Again, those from the cold-fertilization group burned more calories post-meal. In Cohort 5, the DLW method showed these individuals had higher Total Energy Expenditure in daily life, even after adjusting for physical activity and body composition.
Cohort 2, which included adults of all ages, showed that cold-conceived individuals had lower body mass index, less visceral fat, and smaller waistlines. These benefits were linked to increased brown fat activity, as confirmed by structural equation modeling. Interestingly, in younger participants (Cohort 1: males aged 18–25), BMI differences were minimal, likely because they had not yet experienced age-related fat gain.
A deep dive into weather data found that lower outdoor temperatures and wider day-night temperature swings during the months before conception were the strongest predictors of adult brown fat activity.
I find this noteworthy for three reasons —
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There’s possibly an easy and natural intervention for obesity. The Japanese neurotically dress for the weather, so how great will the effect be for those who accept the cold? “College woman walking to a party in winter wearing a short dress” was a joke when I went to school, but it was apparently pro-natal. Is it the fluctuation which is most significant? Does it need to be tied with the day-night cycle?
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This is more evidence that humans are shockingly attuned to specific conditions they evolved in, which should be reverse-engineered to find more potentatial interventions for human flourishing. We are much more animal than we like to admit.
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How many other “willpower problems” have less to do with willpower and more to do with 2nd and 3rd order effects which are hidden from us, or which compound invisibly? There are probably many more for obesity alone.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
I like the idea of the Tree in Genesis being an endangered species; it is not in the consuming of the fruit of “knowing good & evil” that we damned ourselves, but in preventing its flourishing and multiplication; that our consuming it halted the spread of the knowledge of good and evil, which required the tree to remain in a virginal state carefully tended by God. The tree itself was, in a sense, monogenes — one of a kind, only-begotten. This then has environmental implications: the very first sin which doomed us was our harm to endangered nature in its virginal state. And we see how the Gospel factors into the story of salvation: the monogenes of God (and endangered Messiah of man) must perish on a dead tree, after spreading the seed of Moral Wisdom involving good fruit from good trees, to resurrect in the appearance of a gardener (to Magdalene).
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
What do we think of Severance? I only just started watching it because I figured it was normieslop, but I find the theme pretty intelligent. I love that all the ambient media and conversations in the show are tangential to the topic of memory. The show is thoughtfully made imo, but I’m only on episode 3.
The idea of your “laboring identity” being totally cut off from your holistic identity, and what that means for the You in workmode, is fascinating as a thought experiment in how humans construe motivation. If you were really in severance, in the show, of course you would have no motivation to work, because you don’t have the experience of reaping what you sowing, only the annoying sowing. It’s like the Homer Simpson quote, when he does something stupid for short term gratification he says “that’s a problem for future Homer”; he doesn’t know who future Homer is, and future Homer doesn’t know who past Homer is. If your identity between sowing and reaping, future and past is severed, morale / motivation suffers; the greater memory we have of joy when we work, the greater we are able to bear the annoyances of working.
So I find severance vs integration interesting because its at play in a lot of human dysfunction: delayed gratification, procrastination, low vs high time preference, work-life balance, counterfactual thinking about future events. Probably every human requires the practice of greater integration in order to increase their wellbeing, because we are imperfect forecasters and rememberers. You can even see how drug culture worsens quality of life, because so much joy is just not remembered.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
The most chaotic amalgamation of ideology I have seen in the wild is someone named Abba Alabanza, who appears to combine reggae with tradwife homesteading, Christian fundamentalism, obesity awareness and critiques of black nationalism.
New data from Pew on the Israel-Palestinian topic
the public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip
Negative views of Israel have increased, but in a unique way according to demographics. 50% of Republican-leaning Americans under 50yo have a negative view, up from 35% in 2022. For the Dem-leaning in this age bracket, there’s been only a 3% shift toward negative views. For 50yo+ Republicans, negative views have increased by just 3% to sit at 23%; but for Dems in this age bracket, there’s been a 13% increase to 66%. Most of the shift in the public’s dislike of Israel has occurred among younger Republicans and older Democrats. This is interesting data, because there’s been an idea circulating that the shift in public perception of Israel is driven by younger minority progressives. And while that’s a big part, the data really tells us that Americans have changed their view in recent years in ways unaccounted for by demographic change, but which can be explained by the war. Because in just three years, from 2022 to 2025, we’re seeing huge shifts in regards to views on Israel while demographics have only changed slightly.
I think this shift is clear when looking at the media young people consume. Theo Von inconspicuously doing an “early life check” on the Sackler family in his interview with JD Vance; Shane Gillis on KillTony a few days ago; the popular youth streamer “iShowSpeed” refusing to talk to people if they mention they are Israeli. Pro-Israel Americans need a feasible game plan for dealing with this shift which doesn’t fall victim to the Streisand Effect. The current strategy of deporting foreign national students is bad, because the negative publicity far outweighs the tiny changes on university campuses. Zone of Interest came out in 2023, and our media reported on October 7th crimes well enough, yet these clearly didn’t move the needle on public favorability. There doesn’t appear to be any youth figure who can shift perceptions.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Slaves are not a productivity boost(they usually perform worse than free labor)
Not sure how this passes the intuition test. If I force you to labor in a mine and beat you if you don’t, the mines will be productive, and I don’t have to pay you much. Or, if I have to pay a cook $30 an hour to come to my house, it is more productive if I pay you in $4 beans and beat you if I don’t comply. All of the extra “resources” saved could be taxed to raise armies.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
My notes are disorganized, spread out over my app and screenshots, so I’ll give you topics to plug into google scholar. When you learn something, that information goes through a reconsolidation window <8 hours, which is the memory cementing into your brain. Now, when you remember something (from the cues that point to the old memory), the old memory is “reactivated” and then shortly afterward re-enters the “reconsolidation” window. During this window, an old memory can be updated and changed, including its emotional aspects, but only if it goes through reactivation before the attempted manipulation.
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memory reactivation reconsolidation craving / addiction [for its use in drug addiction and alcoholism, which can be extended outside its scope because addiction can be construed as a really strong desire or a thing just having very high positive valence]
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memory reconsolidation music / affect [one study found that, after reactivating a memory, if you remember it with music then the memory takes on the vibe of whatever music you listen to. In other words, when you remember things under the influence of music, your memories may become more like the music emotionally]
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Tetris effect PTSD [car accident patients at a hospital, when brought in during the reconsolidation phase of the memory, if you have them play Tetris their rate of PTSD decreases; similarly, if you have people reactivate a car accident memory and then play Tetris right after, their rate of negative flashbacks decrease]
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eyewitness misinformation effect test reconsolidation [if you have eyewitnesses take a test where they relay everything they saw, and then you introduce “misinformation” afterward eg by an interviewer just telling them false information, then they are likely to revise their true information into false information. This is stronger than if they didn’t take the test. The act of taking a test actually increases the amount of misinformation grafted and updated into the old, true information]
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reactivation reconsolidation fear / phobia [the new paradigm of treating phobias is that reactivation must occur for the memory to have longterm change through exposure. For instance, if you’re afraid of mice, you would briefly recall past fearful memories for 8 minutes, wait a few minutes, then “exposure” yourself to the mice. This updates previous memories, whereas an exposure session without the memory reactivation has less longterm extinction (or none at all)]
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a recent study trending online, “improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts”. https://x.com/AdamMGrant/status/1888968823929471032 . In this study, the Cue of an unwanted thought is focused on for a couple minutes, and then a person “trains” himself to ignore any thoughts that come afterward. This is reactivating (focusing on cue intensely), and then updating the old memory through reconsolidation manipulation (focusing on quieting the mind).
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There’s a case I read of a child who saw a snake at a park and had no emotional reaction, but injured her hand on a car door an hour afterward. She became phobic of snakes. This is because the memory of the snake was meshed with the injury during the snake’s reconsolidation window, amplified by the evolutionary “potency” of snakes which make them particularly sensitive to this phenomenon (speculated).
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Alcohol after learning can help retain information, and thus is speculated to occur because it blocks out the learning of “new” information which can cause interference with the pre-alcohol information; in other words, the pre-alcohol reconsolidation is protected against any post-alcohol memory interference because we learn less when drunk.
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Perhaps one more tangential topic: giving yourself a test is often better for learning than reading / elaborating, but when you know very little of the material, it’s actually worse because you could “train” yourself to provide the wrong answer when seeing the cue. When studying, if you don’t know the answer, it’s better to not answer the question than guess, it would seem
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Rolex may not produce many watches but the watches are expensive and this is why it results in ~ 2-3 billion in annual sales in America. Tariff it. I know a family who imports them, they live lavishly. Now consider there are hundreds of other brands that the wealthy obsessed over, and we ought to tariff them all, and give proceeds to middle class. Same with wine. Okay, a 30% increase on $7 wine doesn’t matter, but it begins to matter in the fine wine market and in clubs and so on.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Do you think the Muslim world’s proximity to Africa and use of Slavic slaves gave them a big advantage in warring against Europeans? They had a constant supply of slaves in their economy. I wonder how they would have done in war if they had no slaves supplying them constant boosts in productivity.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
deciles spend a very similar proportion of their income on imported goods
“Proportion” being key here, because 134,000 households are sitting on 44 trillion dollars in wealth.
the lower deciles which can't afford to take the hit
This depends on where the tariff proceeds go. Your link is broken on my end so I can’t see the figures.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
There’s an idea I keep reading that “lower/middle income buy most of their goods overseas and so will be hit harder by tariffs”, but I bet that if you look at actual dollar amount of imported goods, the wealthiest 10% eat up 99% of the dollar amount of imported goods. The Rolexes, foreign cars, lululemons, Canada goose, the multiple consumer electronics, the French fashion, the French wine, the obscure ingredients and cutlery at their restaurants, and so on. I hate all of this. So if Trump really does replace the income tax in the lower/middle class with the tariff proceeds, this may be incredible for redistribution. (Not that I think this will happen; who knows what he is going to do).
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
True but he’s gone down the Chesterton rabbit hole, which is a gateway drug to apologia and finally authentic religious interest
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Scott is clearly very interested in Christian thought judging by his substack — does anyone know the extent of this interest?
Anyone have thoughts on Colors of her Coat? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Do we know how early male children gravitate toward weapons of war?
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Before we go without roofs, roofing companies will increase the wages they offer employees, and roofing companies will increase the quality of life they offer employees (fewer days a week, shorter hours). This is exactly what we want: greater quality of life for lower income and middle income Americans, at the direct expense of the upper class who waste our precious resources on ugly cars, biohazardous laws and Peloton machines. Contrary to popular belief, it has always been a zero-sum game.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
It seems so, and I asked Grok about the last decade and he agreed. Although there have apparently been some referred “channel cases” related to incel stuff, but I’m not familiar with how that works and if convictions are public and I’m too lazy to look. That appears to be a terrorism prevention program, but the UK of course jails people just for material.
It must also be noted, just as a fun thought experiment, that if there are 100 murders a decade related to unrequited love, and if incels occupy 1% of the population, then we should expect 1 murder a decade which involves an incel, and involves unrequited love, and yet which was not actually caused by the ideology. Because men sometimes do kill unrequited crushes, all over the world, and have for all of history — without any accompanying ideological motive.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
He was engaged in Reddit communities dedicated to disproving and dunking on incels: IncelsInAction and IncelTears, 39 posts altogether. In the community IncelExit, specifically dedicated to ensuring people do not become incels and instead find “healthy ways to cope”, he had 148 posts. He was a contributor to the Virgin subreddit, but that community actually has nothing to do with incels (obviously not every guy concerned about his virginity is an incel, otherwise literally every boy before his first experience is an incel).
He wrote,
”I’m not clarifying [sic, classifying] myself as an incel but people like similar to me they have had nothing but themselves and they socially had it tough. Like how can you have drive and will power?”
One could even argue that had he a community of people to commiserate with, that the chance of the attack would decrease; the whole reason for social support is to be heard sympathetically and to relate to someone else. Instead he was participating in subreddits that are absolutely merciless to boys to who exhibit anything approximating inceldom, which winds up including what a teenage boy naturally feels when he doesn’t have a girlfriend. (How many tens of millions once felt the pangs of “tfw no gf”?).
https://voxpol.eu/jake-davison-an-incel-case/
As an aside, I find the case especially sad because he posted in AfricansGoneWild. Look at his beard! His love for guns! My guy could have walked into a mosque and left with a Somali and a shahada.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
Indeed, acid attacks have increased 70% over the year prior, and are disproportionately committed by Africans. The UK has had 500,000 knife offenses since 2014, and yet not a single violent crime has been found to be committed for incel motives over the past decade. (We even have a case of murder, thePlymouth shooting, where the perpetrator was knee deep in anti-incel online communities, and the triggering event was when the girl he was talking to online in America posted about him being a creep leading to the mods to delete his account (quite funny))
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
This series is not designed to be informative about any issue, though, it really seems designed to introduce terror and humiliation when specific cues are presented. These cues are the white child protagonist and a few buzzwords, but the show doesn’t even focus on the buzzwords, so it’s really only the white child. Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation, the directorial choices only make sense when you imagine an evil director who wants to inspire bad feelings about specific cues. Because it lines up too accurately.
For instance —
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the hiding of the boy’s face in the car, so that you don’t relate to him on his isolated journey back
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the emotionless bureaucratic faces of the police that strike down any sympathy to the boy; the bureaucratic language intentionally designed to train the viewer to treat the boy in a dehumanized way
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the white woman chosen for the minimum possible amount of emotional expression on her face, even worse than that Star Wars actress of yore
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the third episode which begins in a way that you could plausibly feel sympathy, and then reconsolidates that into terror and fear at him and some disgust
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the questioning designed to humiliate him, in other words, to demean his status in the eyes of the viewer
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showing a random encounter of a white student bullying a black student (the nephew of the cop or something), and then having a white woman cry over an African girl, for no other reason to instill a sense of a racial villain
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the use of childhood photos to make the viewer think it’s real
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the music (described as “tense and oppressive” in the subtitles)
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you like your friend Joe. I can get you to dislike him a bit more, maybe a lot more, by presenting a series of cues about Joe and then right afterward elaborating upon the ways in which Joe is unlikable. I can show you Joe’s face, and then I can play ominous music and talk about murder — this alone would move the needle if done repeatedly. I can go further, and have a sequence of clips of Joe mentioning why he is likable, and then right after each sequence I can show you someone in a higher status position showing no empathy to him and then talking about him like he is dehumanized. I can show you clips of him dehumanized, for instance him pissing himself, needing his father to put on pants for him, being stripped in front of him, being asked whether he’s gay — intuitively you know, bullies will create rumors like this because bullies are looking for the best way to reduce your status — and if I do this in the right sequence and with right power, everyone will like Joe less, scientifically, it will be measurable. You don’t realize how strong the effect is: there are studies which show it can be used to reduce cravings in alcoholics by reconsolidating the cues of alcohol to cues of disgust. It’s strong.
Someone involved in this movie was specifically interested in psychologically manipulating the viewer, to decrease positive valence associated with white male children and even white males generally, and increase it for minorities and women. Cue by cue, this is really what the movie is about, and the actual incel etc stuff takes up only a small fraction of the screen time, and wasn’t the intended cue manipulation by the director.
To make it worse, the black actor who we are supposed to consider a dignified British person is actually not, and I don’t mean in a physiognomy-enjoyer way, I mean in real life he was jailed for a gun offense and fined for assault, and his own demographic in the UK is disproportionately responsible for stabbings. But consider also that physiognomy reactions are strong: imagine Steve Schirripa playing a math genius, or imagine an aboriginal Australian woman teaching a Chinese guy how to do math — this is the British version of this, someone from a criminal people in a position above a boy who looks like he should be singing Anglican evensongs at King’s College Cambridge. Literally inverting the entire social order of the UK, the best that the UK can produce being put into a humiliation ritual by the worst that the UK still has to deal with.
It might be helpful if you wrote clearly what you’re trying to articulate. I will clarify that I am not interested in quibbling on the literalist definition of CICO that forgets how it is used in discussions. I am simply interested in how can we practically solve the obesity crisis, which is important. I’m asserting that CICO — telling people to focus on their calories and exercise — is not a practical framework, and there’s a study suggesting that a viable framework may be looking at holistic environmental determinants.
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