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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   2769 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 17, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think it’s fairly popular to think about evolutionary biology in these parts. Here’s a few things about food that come to my mind.

  1. The most fulfilling meals (to me but I think it’s common) are some combination of carb and meat. Hamburger, tacos, pasta, rice with various dishes. Why do humans have such a preference for mixed foods? Basically why do we cook instead of being equally satisfied with having a piece of meat and then some carbs later. All of human taste seems to be far more complex than what is necessary for encouraging me to eat the foods I need to be healthy.

  2. Why does my body have such a desire to store fat but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one. It seems like those preferences should be the same. Fatter mates would have more survivability in a famine. What’s good for my health should be good for the health of the person I want to have sex with. (Obviously being fat isn’t health maximizing in modern days but it was health maximizing in other environments).

I think the excessive fat storage is because your metabolism has been broken by industrialized food. If you were to repair it, your experience would be different.

No, it's because he eats too much.

Getting used to eating huge portions isn't the same as 'having your metabolism broken'.

Why do humans have such a preference for mixed foods?

Mixing different foods ensures a more balanced diet, providing essential nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants, fiber and minerals. Certain food combinations can enhance the nutritional value or bioavailability of individual ingredients. For example, pairing vitamin C-rich foods with iron-rich foods can increase iron absorption.

Also, there's probably a connection between salty/sweet/spicy foods and the abilities of (pure) sugar, salt and capsaicin to slow food spoilage by inhibiting bacterial growth.

Most carbs require some kind of processing for it to be edible. For grains, you have to grind it or boil it. Cooking can soften really tough pieces of meat to the point where you can chew and digest it. Cooking is probably what allowed humans to obtain enough calories to become, well humans instead of becoming just another low-intelligence primate. Things like salt and sugar are vital for biological function so we evolved to find those tastes pleasant, especially because they were so rare to find. So we evolved to find things that helped us survive taste better. Nowadays, we've gotten so good at extracting resources that many of these things that taste good are bad for us because we get way more than the body needs.

There really wouldn't be much, if any, "fat" people for our ancestors because our ancestors were much more active and food much more difficult to come by. Not only is procuring food labor intensive, but even basic home tasks such as making and washing clothes took a tremendous amount of energy. Bodies store fat because food was not something that was constantly available, especially during winter, but it wouldn't mean people were being fat to the level they are today. There is a theory that the reason Native Americans have such a high obesity rate is that since native Americans were not as reliant on agriculture, their bodies are better at storing fat for times of food scarcity compared to Europeans, where agriculture has been a part of their way of life for thousands of years.

There is also a social-cultural element of beauty, and there is a theory that plump women were considered beautiful by middle age Europeans. It could do with finding the upper class more attractive because it signals a higher social class rather than something that is purely physical based. It's like how more tanned skin is considered attractive in the West (because it's the rich that have time to go out to the beach and get a tan and the poor work low-level office or service jobs) while in the east lighter skin are considered more attractive (because much more of the poor work out in the field in the sun).

For 1, I'm skeptical about that. I think it's very common in the US at least due to the scientific and social influence of the I think 70s-era belief in the "food pyramid", that lots of carbs and some meat were the height of healthiness and all fats were bad. The perception and trend wears on even as we've discovered that that isn't really true and nutrition is far more complex. I think any feeling of fulfillment is more due to some combination of it being what people are used to and perception of social approval.

For 2, I think it's about the overall state of society, which means that perceptions of what is attractive are more malleable than most people think. If getting any food at all is expensive and hard work, then being fat signals that you are a high-status person who has access to plenty of food, therefore you are attractive, for both men and women. In our current society where food is incredibly plentiful and much of it is not great for your health, being fat is nothing special as far as status in society, and instead being thin is a better signal that you have plenty of resources and status, in the form of time and energy to find and purchase higher-quality food and eat it in measured quantities. It also tends to signal that you have the free time and energy to exercise for fun.

I feel like food and these questions are sort of like Pre-Keynes in economics. We did not have good explanations for the Depression at the time. And while Keynes I think got a lot wrong (I’ve read his books) he was also origional and got some conversations started on how to manage a modern nation state economy. Now after Bernanke’s central bank we can basically achieve the end of recessions (and inflation though woke got in the way of good policy in 2020-2022).

Nutrition feels like it’s in a place where we don’t even have great models or great explanatory text. It’s probably almost as important as economics.

On (2) it feels correct to me that attraction is more malleable. While people are saying men are more attracted to hourglasses and it does seem like the middle tier pin-up girl fits this; I would argue for the very rich/high status the preference would be for the 5’10 super model look. If the choice is between Giselle or peak Britney Spears the high status person will prefer Giselle. Though Bezos seems to have gone with the Spears type.

Now after Bernanke’s central bank we can basically achieve the end of recessions (and inflation

What? how?

The Fed learned how to operate at the 0 lower bound. The only thing that ended the 2008 expansion was Covid and that was a choice by policymakers to cause a recession. Without getting super long winded because the subject matter is a PhD thesis the evidence seems strong as we have gone thru a 14 year expansion which also included planning a short recession and rapid recovery.

Don't know much about economics (had to google "0 lower bound"). Got any reading suggestions for understanding what you mean by operating under that condition?

Maybe I worded it wrong. 0 as in the end of humanity so you can no longer rebuild. It’s a complete loss.

Even if you took a bet where 30 humans survived in probably 10-20k years they would have restarted civilization. Which is a small amount of time compared to the useful life of earth. SBF was willing to take bets of complete loss which means things can’t regrow.

I think you thought I was asking about a different comment of yours? I was referring to this comment:

The Fed learned how to operate at the 0 lower bound. The only thing that ended the 2008 expansion was Covid and that was a choice by policymakers to cause a recession. Without getting super long winded because the subject matter is a PhD thesis the evidence seems strong as we have gone thru a 14 year expansion which also included planning a short recession and rapid recovery.

The 0 lower bound is when interest rates hit zero. The Fed has traditionally eased or tightened monetary policy by changing interest rates.

They now have policy frameworks to use when they can no longer ease by cutting rates lower since rates are already 0.

but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one

Not the thin one. The curvy one..

Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.

Wow, the statistics about penis length just straight up destroyed me mentally. I had gone my whole life thinking "14-15cm is average, I'm a bit above average so I don't have to worry about this nonsense."
Seeing women expect 20-22cm though... Wow, that is just brutal.

“Why are women so bad at judging distance?”

Gesture with thumb and forefinger.

“They’ve spent half their lives being told that this is six inches.”

One of the funnier episodes of my life where the funniest outcome didn't happen was when the class bully - well, he wasn't really bullying anyone as far as I know, he was just swaggering and an asshole - tried to make me insecure about my dick size. I had no idea and probably said as much. If only had I cared then. If only. That'd have been extremely funny.

Seeing women expect 20-22cm though... Wow, that is just brutal.

They really don't. They might say it but actually 20 cm, which is 8 inches is vanishingly rare.

20 cm is 99th percentile. Or 98th. They rarely see it unless they're extra promiscuous.

Also, that long a dick size can actually hurt a typical woman bc the guy might hit her cervix during athletic sex. And even tear it, requiring a visit to ER.

The horror stories of guys getting really insecure usually involve 4 inches and under.

The relevant tiktok video..

The message I took out of that was more like "no one can be truly completely satisfied", which just feels like common sense unless you're too stuck in a romantic's mentality.

I got into a debate with some fat acceptance types on Substack, who were arguing that dating fat people is "stigmatised" i.e. there are lots of people who find fat people very attractive and would very much like to date them, but choose not to because dating fat people is seen as low-status.

I thought this was, frankly, a load of hogwash: fat people have a harder time getting a date because, all things being equal, people find fat people less attractive. I was trying to find this exact article to illustrate my point - the body types that RealDolls are manufactured in are practically the ultimate revealed preference. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what the article was called.

There's some men who find fat people attractive - I mean, genuinely fat, not the fat but 'built like a brick shithouse' body type that is attractive to maybe half men even if the BMI is firmly in the 'overweight' range. (the girl in picture is actually obese, BMI wise, weighing 90 kg at 1.68m).

But it's a small amount of men, very small. Impossible to gauge how small really, as none of the porn databases are well marked. I believe it's even smaller than the % of homosexual men. Nevertheless, they exist.

I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.

/images/1716038666871458.webp

It cracks me up how chicks nowadays just instinctively turn to tilt their ass at the camera when one comes out.

Not sure if we can judge by her - she's been selling erotic, non nude photos for pocket money for years.

I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.

/images/1716038666871458.webp

She's very lucky not to have a fat face (or at least her makeup is extremely flattering).

She started out with a narrow face, though make up is doing some work. Although, it's possible she had fat remove from under the jaw. Women do that these days.

They're also apparently getting fat transfers into boobs, though that's very expensive compared to implants, and a bit riskier.

No argument here. I'm not saying that men who like big girls don't exist (the BBW category on PornHub exists for a reason), I just doubt that they exist in sufficient numbers to significantly move the needle on the rate of loneliness/singledom/inceldom among fat women. Even if dating fat women was effectively "destigmatized", I can't imagine this would have any more than a marginal impact.

Yeah… although I’m sure there’s a non-zero amount of men into the BBW or feeder fetish, most of men claiming they’re into “thicc” girls is just euphemistic cope for them being unable to pull slim chicks.

Lot of people are lying now, especially in the US, but if you look at the original link "slim" isn't what you'd describe the typical sexy ancient sculpture, nor the most popular images in large databases.

0HP is still doing his "she could lose weight" gag?

What's the gag?

He replies "she could lose some weight" or "you could lose some weight" to any picture of a woman he comes across, with the exception of actually anorexic or very thin ones where he'll say "you should gain some weight".

I'd say the only constant is that it makes women mad.

That link just highly autistically presents what any socially adjusted woman already knows, which is that men like big tits on a ‘slim thick’ hourglass shape with long hair.

I don’t think any straight women are unaware of this fact. That high fashion involves rail thin, very tall (for women) models doesn’t mean that the average woman believes that’s most attractive to men; they’re used because using women with more curves makes those curves, not the clothes, the immediate impression of the model on the runway, which defeats the point and distracts from the art, and because a substantial percentage of men involved in fashion are gay and so not looking to maximize sexiness. No woman buys a $4000 Saint Laurent dress over something slutty from fashion nova or shein because she thinks the former is going to make her more attractive to men.

When normal women are dressing to be attractive to men, say for a college Halloween party, they naturally employ almost all of the tools that the article’s author claims modern women don’t understand. The author also appears to believe that there’s a widespread issue with women who have a perfect body dieting to become unnecessarily skinny at the expense of their curves; there isn’t lol. Most women focused on staying rail thin for looks have square/plank/apple shaped bodies which he acknowledges only look good at very low body fat because accumulated weight goes to the belly rather than thighs, breasts or ass.

I have shared this exact article with my girlfriend years ago when she was having a bit of a crisis about her body and it was quite a revelation to her. Sample of one of course

I don’t think any straight women are unaware of this fact

It's not aimed at men.

Yeah it seems to be aimed at women which is why it’s strange, because most women know all this.

Yeah it seems to be aimed at women which is why it’s strange, because most women know all this.

I dunno how to tell you this without offending you but I think you're wrong and possibly living inside a bubble. There are a huge number of women around me who seem to legitimately have no idea what men actually want. I base this on their clothes, their makeup and their idea of what "fit/fat" means.
Their behaviour seems to be very much based on social/cultural cues rather than objective truth. And I've even had experiences where I very gently suggested something along the lines of "nono, you should do X instead" and got a very harsh lecture or hate-filled glare in return.

I think your mistake here is conflating straight women's goal of "trying to attract men" with "trying to maximally arouse men."

While I have various issues with that Aella Good At Sex/what-women-want blog series, one useful concept she established was the idea of "werewolfing" as a state of goal-driven, uncontrolled male arousal that many women find a little scary and unpleasant. A woman would have to live under a rock not to realize that men want big tits in the sense that they'll werewolf and pant and slaver over them; this is a literal cartoon meme. But most women are not sure how to channel that kind of raw animal attention to produce the social and romantic benefits they themselves might actually want, like having the guy attend to their needs, listen to their ideas, praise and admire them, stay intimate even after orgasm, etc. In some cases arousal actually seems to work against romance, in that men seem disproportionately likely to demean the intellectual capacity of extremely voluptuous women, something I'd love to see properly explained from the male end.

I suspect that when young women try to appear sexy in ways that seem puzzlingly suboptimal to straight dudes, a big part of this may be trying to refine or control the type and level of sexual attention they receive, trying to keep men interested enough to be solicitous and respectful, but not fully pushing them over into werewolf mode. If what you did was helpfully point out that they could evoke a bigger boner if they just [X], my guess is it was interpreted as "Since respectful and moderate male attention isn't a thing and women are only good for werewolfing over, here's what my inner werewolf would want." Frankly, I'd respond with a hate-filled glare too.

Is there any paper where women opine on male preferences ? I'm sure there is.

Yes, but no men take them seriously (and that is fair).

So we agree women are just clueless about male preferences, and likely to believe stuff such as that men find women like Kate Moss on average as sexually attractive as women of the type of say, Bellucci or Hayek ?

We agree that some women give bad and self-serving advice to men just like some men give bad and self-serving advice to women. Nevertheless, just like most men know implicitly that women prefer tall, handsome, successful men, most women know implicitly that men prefer slim thick women with big naturals. I’m unsure about the confusion.

I think you're typical minding. You're not a median woman, very far from it, furthermore you're old enough to have used your vastly superior mental tools to get a whole lot of experience.

What does a median 18-22 woman know about these things? Women are conformist, they 'read the room'. If media and society keep putting out a message "being chubby is bad etc" a young woman might have spent years as deluded about male preferences as some guys are deluded about female ones (the so called 'nice guy' ). Sure that's not very applicable now with the obesity epidemic, nevertheless..

Also, there's a whole bunch of research that found women don't really know what men want, body shape wise.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, yes.

And on the internets!!!

My attempts at intervention for eating-disordered girls high on thinspiration leads me to observe that being attractive to men doesn't even register on why they are deadset on seeing their wristbones. Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces or attaining self control over ones body were the biggest root reasons, nothing to do with trying to get dudes.

Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces

Something like this?

"Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following: 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group; 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question 'is this peer group worth impressing?'"

Young men, like most young people, are self centered idiots. The train of thought is 'I am impressed by people who are good at X so if I am good at X people will be impressed by me'. That other people are in fact individuals with their own preferences takes time to learn: kids still insist that I love cocomelon as much as they do, despite repeated attempts to convince them of the contrary.

It's worth noting that while some of the impetus for anorexia may come from social and cultural expectations and so on, it is very, very much a mental illness and has dysmorphic components. You can't easily reason your way out of it especially if people "feel" fat (while objectively being thin, it's somewhat of a psychotic process). "Yeah yeah if I was really skinny you might be right but I just have to shed these last few pounds to be normal" is a bizarre sounding but reasonable in their own mind response.

The only two anorexics I ever knew in real life were my grandmother in her final years and a boy I went to school with. The meme when I was growing up was that teenage girls caught anorexia from reading fashion magazines. It jarred so much with my own experience that I always figured there must be more to to disease than 'I wanna be skinny so boys will like me'.

Having had more than one close friend who struggled with anorexia, this jibes with my experience. At no point did "slimming down in order to become more attractive to men" ever enter into it.

Yeah, it’s mainly about intra-gender competition which may have at its root some relationship to what men find attractive but which has long since transcended that basis. Same is true for ‘bigorexia’ / body dysmorphia among gym bros, they don’t really think that looking like a roided out human pit bull is attractive to women, they just want to be the biggest guy in the powerlifting gym.

One of the observations about anorexia is that before modernity it also existed but those women claimed they were fasting for religious reasons. There might even be a saint who starved herself to death rather than suffer some indignity like forced marriage. (not sure)-

It looks more like something broken and the sufferers confabulating reasons for wanting to be that way.

And the same with makeup. Women keep hearing from men that the best-looking makeup is "NMM", but intra-gender competition pushes them towards heavier and more explicit warpaints to show off their proficiency.

As the old saying goes, "Remove one piece of jewelry". Unfortunately, that's hard to do with makeup.

Back in my Peace Corps days, I was in Southern Africa. One curious compliment to a woman there (crude, to my way of thinking)° was O morago o motona which means "You have a big ass." Generally I believe the anthropological thinking is when a culture is in lean times, the big folks are attractive because that signals access to the eats. In the bountiful era, a slender frame rather suggests you have the resources to push away from the plate of Twinkies because you know there will be more if you want them, whenever.

°I also once heard a man say to a colleague of mine, a young woman new to the school: O mabele o montle, tla ke anye which means "You have nice tits, let me suck them." Of course this was a big dude and he could and did say whatever the hell he wanted most of the time in that world where brute strength ruled pretty much everything.

I don't know how accurate any of this is in terms of human psychology but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.

Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..

Black Americans have a distinct sexual dimorphism around weight that isn’t found in other racial groups. The men have approximately the same obesity rate as men of other races (black men actually have very slightly lower obesity rates than white men on some charts, but the difference is negligible), but black women are much more obese than women of other races.

For example white men and white women have an obesity rate of 38%. Black men have an obesity rate of 37%, while black women have an obesity rate of 55%. This also likely explains why black American men date interracially more than black American women.

This kind of dimorphism is also found in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Yeah I meant in the US, sorry for not clarifying; it’s not uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, although strangely it isn’t universal even there (some Bantu populations seem to have much more even obesity rates). I’d also add that there might be a difference between societies in which women are more obese (perhaps because they’re more sedentary) but in which the ‘beauty ideal’ is still relatively skinny and societies in which men’s preference is actually for overweight women.

From what I know about Azeris, they do prefer dump truck bottoms.

Same is thought to be true in Arab countries. They like large butts at least.

Interestingly, and this is something I'd research if I ever got better executive function, fatness might have been seen as sexually attractive in the eastern med area between at least 1000 to 1900. There's complaints of imams dated to cca 1200 that 'rich Egyptian women eat bread after dinner to get fatter, and some are so fat they pray sitting down, not kneeling'.

Two Czechs went on a car ride in 1932 to Kandahar, through Turkey. It's an interesting book- interior of Turkey was basically middle ages still, they went in a sports, not all-terrain car. However, they mention approvingly, as an aside, that fatness was just coming out of vogue in coastal Turkish cities. ???

Also heard from a friendly jewish extremists that he talks to bedouins in his area and they seem to like the 'mattress' body type - large & soft and less likely to wander around.

  1. It's faster, maybe? Though it's not really that strange for someone to have something like steak and potatoes and eat the steak and then the potatoes or vice versa. Or maybe it's just preferring more flavoring to less. I don't know how you'd measure that though. Is grilled chicken in a tortilla more or less flavorful than fried chicken?

Don’t know. I think it’s a curious question that no one has written a book on. I mean even the food pyramid seems heavily disagreed with and no one really has a solution on a healthy diet.

Why do people myself included strongly prefer a Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich to a pop-eyes chicken sandwich? I don’t see any fairly evident evolutionary advantage to having that strong of preference but people will drive quite far to get Chick-fil-a versus Popeyes.

It does not seem to me that degree of optimization in our genes makes any sense.

A lot of food adds a status or ritualistic element that has some explanatory power. Like Miami is considered a bad food city but their prices are high and they combine a bit of night club in a lot of them.

This is a good example

https://www.thepoke.com/2024/05/17/1000-dollar-steak-crazy-clip/

But that’s showing your date you have such a degree of resources you can pay 20 other humans to present your food to them.

Purely speculative answers:

  1. Most food items don't individually have everything we need for survival, so a preference to have something high in protein/fat with something high in carbs makes sense. Having them at the same time probably has to do with hunger being a relatively non-specific signal (it usually doesn't induce cravings for foods high in specific nutrients), so someone who gorges on carbs in the afternoon without meat won't necessarily achieve the same balance throughout the day as someone who preferred their carbs with meat. There's no easily evolutionarily available mechanism to make the former crave compensatory meat when they're next hungry.

  2. Excess fat simply wasn't a factor, since food scarcity was the natural state. Therefore, there were no pressures affecting our preferences for degree of optional adiposity (no one really had any).

  1. Does feel somewhat explainable. We want them both so eating both at once triggers both sensors. I feel like most will agree we have a preference for carbs and protein in one bite since every street/comfort food I can think of every where does that. Taste for spices and variety of food still seems a bit confusing. Like I get more pleasure out of eating different foods every day but they’re basically the same thing protein, carb, some sauce/seasoning. Like tacos, hamburgers, pizza. All three of those probably even have tomato and onions in them.

  2. Perhaps no one had it is the answer. But why is there a fat girl is bad programming now. Where did that come from.

Again speculative:

  1. I can't seem to remember the source, but very recently I saw a journal article speculating that our desire for spices had to do with anti-microbial properties? For example, I know historically salt and pepper were used for their preservative properties in addition to their flavor profile. Another possible explanation for seeking variety is that before food safety standards, every specific food item had some levels of particular toxins. By varying diet, an organism could avoid building up too much of any one toxin. The fact that we can now make a variety of flavors and textures with the same ingredients using modern culinary knowledge could just be a workaround for what was a crude byproduct of certain organisms never eating enough of the same thing to hit LD50's in the past.

  2. My guess here would be that our ancestors were selected for finding the set [not emaciated] attractive. Since there was no one obese in the past, preferences gradient descended into the most common body type that fell into that set, which would be close to what we might today call a "healthy weight". The reason for finding obesity less attractive would just be its distance from that body type (albeit, in the opposite direction).

Our preference for salt is much easier to explain. Sodium is an essential mineral, and getting enough of it is important for all terrestrial animals that are not obligate carnivores.

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