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Scott's most recent post had someone linking to an article in the Atlantic about debunking a study, I went and read it and got sucked into the Atlantic rabbit hole.
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Link two: The Ozempic Flip Flop as someone who gets full very quickly and doesn't have a very strong appetite, I've never really had good mental image of what it's like for normal people with normal appetites let alone obese people with obese appetites. This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating? I'm trying to match it to my own points of reference for "willpower" struggles but failing. I force myself to go to the gym despite not enjoying exercise, but that's forcing myself to do something, not forcing myself not to do something, so generally speaking once I overcome the activation barrier of inertia the hard part is over. I intermittently (deliberately, as opposed to non-deliberately) fast and can be hungry and craving food but to a pretty easily overcome extent. But what makes someone — who for months now has been eating much less — be unable to maintain the amount they've been eating for months but instead be compelled to keep eating more even though it's actively physically hurting them (and costing them in other ways, like socially). How much stronger incentive can you get? It makes me feel like at some level for some people food is an addictive substance like drugs. (And also still trying to understand how this gets spread — is it really hyperpalatable foods? Something else? We can watch countries become more obese... Whatever the underlying thing that makes someone susceptible to this is, it does appear to be something a country can acquire)
I’m not overweight, but I have an average appetite and need to put effort into not overeating. I would describe it like this:
You have a strong itch. If you are on autopilot, your body will scratch it.With willpower, you might stop yourself from scratching it in the short term. But it doesn’t go away. It’s there every second of every hour of every day, and it is impossible to ignore, constantly demanding your attention.
You might not scratch it for a day. You might not scratch for a month, or even a year. But the thought of never scratching it for the rest of your life makes you want to cry. It feels cruel or unfair. But you know absolute discipline is required or scratching it will quickly become habit again.
But wait! It gets worse. You routinely attend social events where you are expected to scratch it. Everyone around you encourages you to return to your scratching ways.
The itch is unbearable. You decide to introduce “cheat days” where you are allowed to scratch the itch, while giving your body a week to recover. But it only makes it worse. It’s a weekly reminder of the relief that you ate denying yourself.
Eventually, you give in and allow yourself to scratch the itch. Your skin may be ruined but at least you are not subjected to the 24/7 torture if having a powerful itch that you can’t scratch.
Dieting is not scratching. Ozempic removes the itch (for many, at least).
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Yes.
The mechanism via which the body "hungers" is somewhat complex, but can be usefully simplified down to the action of ghrelin, a hormone produced in the stomach which makes you hungrier, and leptin, which does the opposite.
Surprisingly, obese people have more adipose tissue, which produces leptin. However, it ceases to have the usual satiety inducing effect, as the body becomes resistant to its action. The way this is perceived is the body interpreting the lack of signal for being full as a sign of starvation.
And starvation sucks. Other than disease, it's probably what's killed the most humans in all of history, and you can imagine that it's a very unpleasant state that the individual feels compelled to rectify. The easiest solution being to eat more, till the pain goes away.
They're also being struck with a double-whammy. In lean people, eating causes suppression of the levels of ghrelin, in obese people, it doesn't. So they feel less full, with the same amount of food, as compared to those at a healthy weight. Hence they feel compelled to not just eat, but eat excessive amounts for the sake of relief.
I can only reiterate that starving sucks, and the body will drive you crazy in order to avoid that feeling. It's too dumb to know or care that you are, objectively, perfectly well fed. Waterboarding feels just as bad as actual drowning despite the ~nil risk of death.
While doctors usually feel compelled to tell their patients to watch their weight and diet, this almost never actually works. I consider myself a pragmatic one, and advice that isn't actioned in practise is about as useless as advice that doesn't work at all. I was on the Ozempic hype-train well before it was cool.
My mother is very obese, and has been for over half her life now. She's diabetic, and has developed fatty liver with hepatic fibrosis. Her own commitments to working out and dieting never held. She's a doctor herself, so she knows, on an intellectual level, what the risks are. She's been driven to tears by the scolding she gets from my grandpa or my dad who genuinely care for her and want her to lose weight, and after gentle suggestions failed, were driven to tough love.
None of it worked. She loved to eat, and reducing her caloric intake was pure agony. For a long time, I was resigned to the seeming inevitability that she'd head into cirrhosis, and I'd have to steel myself up for a liver donation. It's a nasty, nasty surgery, nothing like giving away a kidney. It leaves a grossly disfiguring scar, leaving aside the significant risk of death during and after the procedure. I'd do it for my mom, because I do love her.
Eventually, when Ozempic, or oral formulations of semaglutide, became available in the Indian market, I badgered her into seeing her endocrinologist and getting it prescribed. Despite the initial nausea and diarrhea, she eventually adapted, and lost the lost weight she's ever managed, and kept it that way. Right now, my priority is hounding her into going to that gent again and getting that dose upped, it's well overdue.
Exhortations to exercise failed. Asking her to watch her portion size and not snack failed. Driving her to tears failed.
The pill didn't.
When people get on their high horse and claim that using drugs to solve your problems is a crutch, it takes everything I have to not tell them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pole. It saved my mom, fuck you. Nothing you have to offer, including your empty words, comes close.
To hell with willpower. A world where we can power through our problems with pills is a better one as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work. Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity. Claiming the moral high ground and virtue signaling? Doesn't beat adding years of healthy lifespan.
that's what people don't understand about "well let's just shame fat people into not over-eating".
If you really make me feel bad, what happens? I feel bad, I cry, I hate myself. There's no quick fix, because even immediately going on a starvation diet will not shift significant amounts of weight in time for all the "good job, you are now not a disgusting lard bucket" to make up for the shaming.
You know what does make me feel better in the short term? Eating.
Congratulations, now you've driven me to eat even more.
(Yes, I'm on Ozempic now. I haven't lost weight, but it'd doing good for my blood sugar. Weirdly, I'm eating both less and more, since I don't eat as much at one sitting, but now I'm constantly eating small snacks and meals. No idea what the hell is going on there).
I do not necessarily claim that fat-shaming doesn't work. I just think that it's cruel, and the efficacy is far less than ideal.
There are societies, like China or Korea, where the social opprobrium for gaining weight is so strong that most people will do just about anything to avoid it. It likely also drives people into depression, eating disorders, while also sucking.
Locking people in a fat camp and beating them with sticks for eating will, I strongly believe, reduce the obesity rate. I don't endorse such tactics, even if they work.
(You don't see no fatties coming out of Auschwitz, do you?)
I'm not an endocrinologist, but it might be worth asking them to increase the dose. More Ozempic is, very roughly speaking, more weight lost. There are also alternative drugs that work even better, but they're harder to get.
Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.
Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.
Congratulations, ceasing nail-biting is very difficult. This makes me think you have a better shot at fixing your diet than a random obese person off the street, since you've already achieved one lifestyle change from willpower alone. I hope that you have greater success now that you have chemical assistance. Good luck.
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Well obviously.
But when I broke my leg I got a crutch.
What the fuck I was supposed to do? Crawl? Walk on leg with broken bone, injure it further and howl in agony?
Crutches exist for a reason! There are stupid way to use them, I guess, but typical use of crutches is extremely useful in an obvious way!
I do not have problems solved by Ozempic as far as I know, but if I could pop a safe pill to solve procrastination issues I would do it!
When people call something "a crutch" they refer to the specific chronic problems they cause in long term use, and in particular that you can get habituated to them in a way that stops you from taking the harder steps required to get back to walking normally.
In this case it seems particularly evident that the issue with drugs that trick you into not feeling hunger at your normal rate is that it becomes that much harder to operate normally without them.
Unlike OP, I think a world where people can only solve their problems by becoming addicted to complex and expensive drugs is a bad one.
Now of course the effects of obesity are so bad that it's probably better to take the drug if you can't muster the willpower, but it's like taking opiates for back pain. Weening yourself off of the drug should be the ultimate goal, otherwise you're just embracing a different kind of slavery.
You simply regain your appetite, and around half the weight back in a year if you stop Ozempic. I don't see how that's not strictly better than not taking it.
The hell is a "complex" drug? Does it have a hard to pronounce name? Does it have a large molecular weight? Does it act on more than one signaling pathway?
Ozempic isn't particularly expensive. Most middle class people in the West can afford it, if it's not covered by insurance. There are legal or grey market sources that are significantly cheaper. And as more alternatives arise, including generics, it'll only get cheaper.
Gym memberships cost money too.
And Ozempic isn't "addictive". Do people not know what that word means?
Is insulin addictive to a diabetic, because they'd fall sick or even die if they stopped?
I would like to see you wean yourself off oxygen and water. Perhaps, to be less challenging or immediately lethal, clothing or shelter. Otherwise what are you but a slave to biological necessity?
This is all such immensely confused thinking that I don't know how such beliefs can even arised. At the very least, it is factually incorrect.
I'm not making the argument against taking the drug, I'm making the argument against being stuck in a local maximum.
One that relies on an international supply chain for its industrial production and the existence of a large enough empire to secure sea lanes. A type-2 technology.
Apparently they don't anymore.
From The Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 1:
From The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
Saying diabetics are addicted to insulin because they would die without it is a tautology.
So is saying men are slaves to biological necessity. These are realities well understood since antiquity.
Such addictions may well be natural, but they are cumbersome, and one of the common criticisms of modernity is that it has tricked people into novel addictions under the guise of liberating them from natural ones. I would have thought this line of reasoning to be popular enough as to not demand explanation. But here we are.
I could throw it all back in your direction, but I'm afraid I know too well the source of your confusion, and it is that you think American Psychologists among other colleges of experts have dominion over the English language and its conceptual space. As if they can declare the valence of things by fiat.
It is an all too common sort of delusion that leads people to demand pronouncements from these priests as to whether certain lifestyles are or are not illnesses.
But as we are now in a place that is open to people who are not adherents of this religion, I therefore enjoin you to consider that such authority is not self-evident.
You probably mean minima.
Now, you define a "complex" drug as one that relies on international supply chains and "the existence of a large enough empire to secure sea lanes". I have to admit, this is a.. novel definition. Are you typing this on a "simple" device? The phone or computer you are using relies on a supply chain of such staggering, globe-spanning complexity that it makes Ozempic's look trivial. If you have taken a Tylenol in the past decade, there is an excellent chance it was manufactured in India or China and shipped across those same sea lanes. Unless you are a primitivist writing on handmade parchment, you are a beneficiary of these "complex" systems. It seems strange to draw the line here, at a medication that saves lives.
Oh, not all diabetics would die. They could, in an ideal world, live short but tortured lives! Is that a tautology?
So? Care to reproduce such arguments in full instead of waving at them?
You will not literally die without electricity or information technology. You seem to conveniently enjoy that particular fruit of modernity, while crying about this one.
Once again, the number of people who eschew electricity or computers seems awfully small. Modernity is, on the whole, quite nice. It could still do with improving.
I am not an American Psychologist, nor do I think they have "dominion over the English language". I also happen to think you're twisting that poor thing to your own ends, with willful ignorance of your actions.
Spare me your sophistry. If you Google "definition of addiction", one of the first hits is the Wikipedia article for the same, which says that:
Ozempic doesn't cause "substantial harm". Any negative consequences are grossly outweighed by the upsides of not being obese, let alone diabetic.
Your definition is ridiculously archaic, and by that definition, one could be addicted to collecting stamps, to morning walks, or to breathing. You have diluted the word to uselessness.
I have no "authority" over you, and never claimed to. Short of mod-abuse by banning you, which I've never done and have little inclination to do. I still have little patience for such clearly confused, utterly sloppy thinking, with the added temerity of trying to take the moral high ground through word-play.
No.
I suppose Jacques Ellul only died 30 years ago. But I would have expected everyone here to be long familiar with this ancient history given we discuss the philosophical implications of AI on the daily.
Of course.
The section on medicine as a human technique is of course most relevant to this conversation, but I don't recommend skipping around if you are unfamiliar with philosophy of technology and the associated jargon.
No. Semiconductors are arguably the most complex things mankind has ever made. Especially using this definition.
No, it's a non sequitur.
I'm not sure what part of my writing evoked any kind of detectable emotion. I assure you it is purely analytic. I'm critical of modernity whilst living in it. What else could be reasonable?
Call me an ungrateful atheist for living in creation if you must. I can't help but look at what I'm doing.
So I was indeed right to believe you take the DSM-V to have the power to decide the meaning of a word that has existed since the 1500s.
I think the fact that you'd take Wikipedia's word over that of Oxford reflects poorly on your conception of the world, frankly. But this is a silly semantics exercise anyways. I have clarified what I meant beyond doubt. If my vocabulary irks you, so be it.
No, I've used in in a way you don't like, which is common and in accord with its historical usage. There is a difference.
You misunderstand. It is the expert authority on your own language and thinking I recommend you remedy, not your authority on me.
No. A local maximum is a peak. You seem to be arguing that people on Ozempic are stuck in a state that is better than the alternative (obesity), but not the absolute best possible state (some imagined ideal of pure willpower). If we're torturing a metaphor, that's a local minimum of negative outcomes. But why let basic logic or the meaning of words get in the way of your grand philosophical pronouncements?
And? Darwin died 140 years ago, but we don't treat his theories as gospel just because he's dead. Age doesn't make an argument correct, and name-dropping French philosophers doesn't make your position any less incoherent.
Ah, an appeal to an obscure academic to justify your terror of the modern world. I don't need to have read him to recognize the staggering hypocrisy of your position. You lament the "complex drug" that relies on global supply chains while typing your screed on a device whose complexity makes a vial of semaglutide look like a sharpened stick. This isn't a coherent critique of "technique"; it's just selective, convenient moralizing.
What would be reasonable is to apply your critique consistently, instead of drawing an arbitrary line at a medication that saves people from suffering. You enjoy the fruits of modernity that allow for your comfort and your intellectual hobbies, but you condemn the fruits that rescue others from a life of pain and metabolic disease. It's the pinnacle of entitled, ivory-tower thinking.
Spare me. I didn't cite the DSM-V; I cited the common, modern, functional understanding of a word as it is used by virtually everyone who isn't deliberately trying to be obtuse. You're clinging to an archaic definition from a historical dictionary as if it's a sacred text, precisely because it allows you to dilute the word "addiction" into meaninglessness. By your logic, a marathon runner is "addicted" to running and I am "addicted" to washing my hands between patients. It's a semantic game to avoid confronting the vacuity of your argument. Context matters. If we're talking about cars, I don't define "transmission" as "the act of sending a message" just because that's what it meant in 1400.
This isn't about Oxford vs. Wikipedia. This is about clarity vs. deliberate obfuscation. You are using language as a weapon to feel intellectually superior, not as a tool to understand the world.
And let's be clear about what you're really arguing for when you strip away the philosophical fluff. You say weaning off the drug should be the goal to avoid "slavery." For many, the alternative isn't freedom; it's a return to the biological slavery of a body screaming for food, a slavery that leads to diabetes, liver failure, and an early grave.
You can sit there and pontificate about "novel addictions" and the failings of modernity. I have to look my mother in the eye. I've seen the "natural" state you seem to prefer, and it's ugly and it's brutal. So frankly, you can keep your dusty dictionary and your non-sequitur arguments. They are useless. The pill works.
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Well it's interesting because that connotation actually is a lot more recent than the word and came about alongside new discoveries in neuropsychology and the concept of "productive struggle" through the work of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky (of "zone of proximal development" fame). The latter actually did inspire the use of that analogy in Bernstein's work on motor development.
To my mind, it's probably more of an artifact of the developing supremacy of Trancendentalism in American culture, and all its ideas of "self-reliance", but you can't quite say the analogy has no scientific backing since it sort of came out of scientific discoveries in the first place.
Crutches don't (that I know of) have anything special to them except that they're an easy to visualize example of the neuropsy phenomenon in question.
Of course, I'm not saying we ought to ban morphine on the sole grounds it is addictive. Simply that the tendency to medicate people for life is a danger and that one should want natural health to be the outcome, even if some of the steps on that path are sticky.
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Precisely. I'm not sure why that terminology even came into the picture, given that it's not a reference to malingering, which is the only other remotely plausible way to misuse a crutch.
May I introduce you to our lord and savior, prescription stimulants? Not sure how I'd have become a doctor without them.
How do I get prescription stimulants without a prescription?
(If I had enough conscientiousness to be able to get a prescription, I wouldn't need the stimulants.)
You need to know a guy who knows a guy. Or peruse the Dark Net, I suppose. If you were in college or uni, you'd probably know someone pawning off their pills.
I managed to get a prescription, and I certainly need the stimulants dawg. If you're in the States, then there's probably an online pill-mill that makes it easy, if you can't make yourself physically go see a shrink.
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I am very happy that these drugs helped your mother. I do not disparage anything about these drugs or anyone who chooses to take them.
...however.
You, like many others, go too far. Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it. There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay. They may be perfectly fine using a drug. Nothing wrong with that. But don't tell people that changing their lifestyle doesn't work, because it does.
Let's take something like, I don't know, becoming a doctor. I've heard that this process sucks. I've heard that plenty of folks burn out or fail at some point. I'm sure someone's mother somewhere failed in trying to become a doctor, regardless of how much her family tried to make her do it. Nevertheless, I think there are still fine reasons to say, "Here are the objective things you need to accomplish to become a doctor, and here are a variety of subjective tips to help you pattern your life in a way that is conducive to achieving that goal, if you so choose." Some people won't do it, and that's okay (in fact, the vast majority of people right now don't become doctors). We don't have a pill yet that magically gives people all the required knowledge of a doctor. But even if we did, it wouldn't be a reason to say that the other (true, good) information "doesn't work".
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
If anything would drive me to be a biological determinist, it's this. Oh, you find it easy to cut down eating, take more exercise, make necessary changes and stick to them?
Do you want a medal for that? Because it's not on you, it's not you making up your mind and applying willpower that does it. It's the genetic luck of the draw of having the fortunate combination of heredity and environment that gave you the physiological and psychological phenotype that means you can eat less, exercise more, and stick to changes.
Both my parents smoked. My father was able to give up smoking and never go back. My mother tried and failed, many times, to give it up and eventually she died of the lung cancer it gave her.
That was not a question of willpower, because my mother was not less strong-willed than my father, or more resistant to change. I don't know why she couldn't stop. She didn't know why she couldn't stop. She wanted to stop, she tried, she failed over and over.
Tell me "all that's needed is just some willpower" about that, and I will spit in your smug face.
Ah, the good old strawman. Actually, very very bad old strawman.
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As much as I hate to intrude on another's discussion, I'm simply going to point at my own experience in terms of weight loss and shrug helplessly.
Like you, I was of a similar attitude. Like you, I felt the majority of weight-gain and weight-loss issues was a matter of people simply not wanting to put in the effort. I still do, to a point - too many people think a diet is like an on-off switch, when I've found it really boils down to actively changing how and what you eat - it's a lifestyle shift, not something you do for a month to fit into your summer bikini. And why not? I did exactly that. I lost 70 pounds from strict CICO and modifying my diet.
However.
I'm not going to go more indepth into my own history of weight loss and weight gain. Instead, I'm going to point to my brother, who has also done the entire weight-loss via keto. And while he was able to lose the weight, there was a plateau, a wall in terms of weight loss he was unable to get past before he simply gave up - the juice wasn't worth the squeeze in terms of the effort he was putting in.
Full disclaimer, he's never been an obese-looking butterball or as heavy as I am, though I'm sure if you put in his BMI stats he'd be labeled as obese.
On semaglutide, he blew through that wall in a few short months and is still loosing weight. He's currently at the weight he was in high school, and hasn't hit a plateau. If things continue as is, both he and I will be at weights we've never been before, ever, and have no idea what we will look like.
I'm no doctor, no medical expert or scientist. I am but a dabbling amateur, stumbling around and trying to piece together a picture of the world. And as time has gone by, I'm becoming more and more convinced that our modern diet has done extreme damage to our bodies, damage that some can adapt to and overcome, and others can't. That we are subject to the cruel tyranny of the flesh that our minds are unable to overcome, even when we fervently wish otherwise. We've learned our lesson, burned our fingers and become wise, but we still carry the scars that we can't fix by ourselves no matter how we wish otherwise.
So we use drugs. Problem solved.
...now, on the gripping hand, I also have experience similar to self_made_human where getting people to loose weight forces you to do the equivalent of making a recalcitrant dog take their medicine, no matter how much they hate it, cause, y'know, they'll die otherwise, but such is life.
I don't think you have accurately captured my attitude. In fact, I think you have gotten it completely wrong.
Perhaps so. Biological processes in general do not seem to be fully-reversible, especially when you include the effects of aging. Nevertheless, that is not an argument against the measurable physiological benefits of certain lifestyle changes.
So educate me, then. Because the phrase 'Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.' falls pretty well in line with what my attitude would have been a year or more ago.
It isn't meant to be. My point isn't 'lifestyle changes don't work' it's that 'lifestyle changes can sometimes only work to a point'.
You went wrong a single sentence later:
Possibly so. I'd need to see some high quality research on this question to know much either way, where those points might be, whether they can be predicted, etc.
...do you not equate the phrase 'it's just that many people don't do it.' to 'not wanting to put in the effort'? I would think them rather similar.
Compare what I wrote:
I don't know to what extent a clustering can be identified that can be simply labeled "not wanting to put in the effort".
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I'm not denying that lifestyle changes work! If they didn't, why would doctors feel obligated to recommend them?
What I'm saying is that advising lifestyle changes rarely works. I don't have firm figures at hand, but I suspect that the number of people I've recommended such eminently sensible things like losing weight, stopping smoking and going to gym grossly outweigh (pun not intended) the number who actually did anything about it.
If there was a magic pill that did nothing else but make people go to the gym, it would be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine of all time! It would be Nobel Prize worthy. We now, thankfully, have a pill that, if not literally magical, meets the "sufficiently advanced technology" threshold when it comes to obesity. It certainly beats even the most sage advice in terms of practical utility.
This is much more circumspect than your original comment. The problem of advice-giving is significantly different in nature, and it has significant dependency on a wide variety of external, contingent factors that are not-necessarily related to the typical time-independent, mechanistic processes that the biological and medical sciences study. If you would please kindly continue to be this circumspect in future comments, that would be appreciated.
I'm not being circumspect. I am merely elaborating on a point I've made, which was interpreted in a sense I didn't intend (I'm not accusing you of an intentional, bad faith claim, misinterpretations happen). I don't see any additional hedging, or caveats at play.
I would like to think I'm usually quite clear in what I mean via what I say, not that this is any guarantee of people interpreting it exactly as intended. Even legal documents and contracts, intended to maximize clarity and leave no room for error, often end up in the courts. They also make for riveting reading.
Then by all means, please elaborate on how you intended the following sentence to be interpreted:
That telling people to make lifestyle changes is highly ineffective? That implies nothing about whether or not the changes themselves don't work. I consider it clear enough, in the context of the comment. In fact, the very next sentence is:
The only reason we even bother trying is that telling people to do things is rather cheap and low-effort. In rare cases, they might even listen. It also makes us feel good, and ticks boxes.
So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?
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Sorry, what? You're just off the mark. Aside from the inherent differences between adversarial processes and other dynamic processes.
I don't know how this analogy is supposed to work. The point of the development of military doctrine is to build up a body of professional knowledge, generally to the purpose of, indeed, destroying the enemy (though there are sometimes tweaks for political constraints or other political objectives). This is, indeed, intended to be "what works".
Is the point of your analogy that the endeavor of developing military doctrine is simply fallacious from the get-go? This has other implications that I can think of. For example, rather than moving TRADOC, as Trump did, I think this point of view says that he should have simply eliminated it altogether. Of course, I think you can tell that I don't think that this is the point of the analogy, but I'm kind of struggling to see what the point is.
Maybe, on the other end, it's something along the lines of, "It's not terribly helpful to be a 400lb guy in a bed who just writes somewhere on the internet, 'Hurr durr, have you tried killing the bad guys?'"? I mean, sure? Yeah, I just don't get what you're going for, and I don't get how it's relevant to what I've said.
Mathematically speaking, I would distinguish the two. This may be a complicated and difficult environment, but it is not an adversarial one. There are deep mathematical differences between the two.
Oh, well then this is just the standard, all-too-common, strawman. You're responding to a figment of your imagination, not anything I've written.
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Thank you!
(If it wasn't clear in my original post, I'm a willpower skeptic, I think it's profoundly stupid to assume obesity is a willpower problem, even if I don't know how to imagine the experience of what it feels like to fight the urge to eat without using willpower as a proxy for the challenge)
Many things about basic biology aren't common knowledge! I don't see a specific reason for why this isn't better known.
There's a single drug called metraleptin, which was once considered immensely promising for treating leptin resistance. Didn't work, failed miserably in trials.
It does, however, work excellently in a rare genetic condition called congenital leptin deficiency, and is occasionally used for lipodystrophy. The difference is that CLD patients lack leptin in the first place, which is giving them the recombinant version helps, whereas obese people have bodies that ignore leptin levels, regardless of how much more we can throw in.
GLP-1 drugs sidestep the whole problem by using an entirely different pathway (I did say I was simplifying! Keeping my head straight about how exactly Ozempic works gives me a headache)
We don't really know how bariatric surgery works.
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
Yes, these do help a little bit, but nowhere near as much as Ozempic does.
Hunger is surprisingly complicated, and has multiple mechanisms behind it.
The act of chewing and tasting sends signals to the brain that prepare the body for food (this is the "cephalic phase response"). This can satisfy the "oral fixation" component of hunger, the simple desire to be chewing on something.
The stomach wall contains mechanoreceptors that sense stretch. When you eat a large volume of food (like a huge salad or a bowl of broth), these receptors are activated, regardless of the calorie content. Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories. The ancestral environment definitely had water, and didn't have diet coke (citation hopefully not needed). If starving people tried to keep themselves content by going to a pond, it was probably weeded out quick.
My apologies for giving you the impression that was targeted at you. It was meant entirely for the people who think the usage of Ozempic is some kind of moral failing, and they're not an imaginary strawman, at least not on Twitter. I don't seem to recall much in the way of pushback against Ozempic here, barring people who still have reservations about its safety profile (it's remarkably safe, we have evidence for that claim, and loads of it).
I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.
Oh, I've tried the fibre tablets thing - eat this tablet before a meal, drink water, it'll swell up inside your stomach and make you feel full and you'll eat less. Never worked for me because I never got the "feeling full" bit even after taking more than the recommended dose (luckily, I think/hope eating too much fibre is not a bad thing as such).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18586571/
In other words, it doesn't really matter if you're a good boy/girl and listen to your doctors after you've had most of your stomach removed. Of course, bariatric surgery isn't a truly permanent solution, weight tends to come back after several years, but it was a good option before Ozempic made it somewhat obsolete.
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Is it safe in the two senses of:
Doesn’t cause any appreciable loss of strength, at least not beyond what losing that amount of weight would normally do via not eating (exercise held constant)
One can stop taking it without any negative consequences beyond just the loss of the benefits?
I’m interested in taking it but haven’t done a deep-dive into the subject yet. Any resources you’d recommend?
If you're exercising/working out while taking it, you should be fine. I'm on 21 weeks of semaglutide and haven't noticed any lack of physical capability while training martial arts. If anything, I seem more capable, and I'm beginning to wonder if semaglutide has a side-effect of blocking soreness, but this might just be psychosomatic on my part.
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You will lose muscle along with the weight, if you solely use it for weight loss without additional exercise. But the degree of muscle loss is about the same as going on a diet, fasting, or, if memory serves, bariatric surgery. If you exercise alongside, you can stave most of this off.
Indeed. You will regain roughly half the weight you lost in a year of use after a year of disuse. But no other negative effects, to the best of my knowledge.
(I take oral semaglutide, so I'm putting
moneypills where my mouth is.)Scott, as always, has an excellent write up:
Why does Ozempic cure all disease?
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Yes. Countries which make a big deal about only eating their traditional foods have lower calorie consumption.
That doesn't prove anything. It could just be that traditional foods have less of the orange soda, whatever it is, and if you made terrible tasting food with the secret ingredient everyone would still get fat.
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I’ve long suspected that early daycare and full day preschool is at least partially driving the change in attachment. Thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective, in the very early stages of development, a baby needs to fully attach to his parents. The baby needs to know that his needs will be consistently met by parents who are always close by and who care about him/her. Modern parents basically have kids that they only see after work and on weekends (after the 8 weeks of maternity leave). Most actual child care is done by low paid hourly workers who might have 7-10 other kids in their care. The child thus often finds that he needs or wants attention and to attach but the adults around him don’t have the ability to give one kid their undivided attention. So the kid can’t learn to fully trust an adult and fully attach to them.
Is a kid at daycare really getting any less attention than the twelfth kid on the farm? At least in my experience, parents give up on providing much individualized attention after kid three.
Older siblings give lots of attention, though.
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I worked at a daycare for one glorious year. Kids a little less than a year old were dropped off at 7 and picked up at 5. One kid screamed for the entire duration, every day, for months. The other kids just screamed for a week. The attendants cuddled the babies, but they mostly left them on the floor to crawl around. By the time they graduated to the 2-year-old room, the kids were merely supervised, rather than attended to. This was a budget daycare, but not unusually so. The 12th kid on a farm would get a lot more attention than these babies, certainly until age 2 or so, and it would be maternal or sororal attention, rather than "minimum wage demands that I hold you for 10 minutes every hour). Furthermore, even a baby left alone in the corner of the kitchen while the mother makes johnny cakes (or whatever 12-child farm families eat) is still in its mother's presence. Daycare babies are not.
This is horrible. Putting any child younger than 3 years into such a facility is equivalent to putting them part-time into orphanage. Infants and toddlers do not have emotional regulation to handle that and they need regular skin-to-skin contact with mothers and to lesser degree with fathers. Otherwise they can develop similar symptoms to those of institutionalized children with all the baggage - learned helplessness, closing into their internal world as they know outside help is not coming even after hours of crying etc.
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage? A lot of parents, starting from month 6, try to ignore their kids crying, so that they cry less and become less of a burden (they are far more coddled now than they used to be). And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.
Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.
Hey, I come from a time and place when teething remedies were "some whiskey in the milk". But when you have eight kids, the older kids are doing a lot of the work minding the younger ones. It's the first one or two need the most attention. And it was not commonplace for everyone not wealthy/high status to put their babies into an entire separate room on their own (and the people who did do that, also employed nursemaids and/or nannies to attend to them during the night):
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They also turned some of them into flippered mutants, so let us not act like Science has ever batted 1.000 here. Not the physical sciences, and certainly not the social sciences.
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I’m not sure what precisely this is referring to (global reduction in mortality rate?), but I think if we can take anything away from the last 100 years it’s that progress in the physical sciences doesn’t necessarily (or at all) translate to progress in the social sciences.
I agree that women’s intuition is perhaps not everything it’s ginned up to be, but I would want something pretty good before I discount that intuition to nothing. Especially for the most visceral stuff like ‘do I need to hug the crying baby?’ Which is pretty much directly the result of millions of years of evolution optimising for healthy children and functional families.
More complex stuff may be downstream of bad socialisation and I would put less weight on it.
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Prima facie, this sounds absurd. Does not matter much for what?
Raising a good, happy, productive human. People have been looking for this magical parenting style that explains why Joe is good and Jack Y is bad for centuries, and they haven't found it. It's genetics or it's random.
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Yeah, take any study for results of children in orphanages vs children in intact families. Putting infants and toddlers into daycare is nothing short of part-time orphanage.
This is only partly true, limited to rationalists trying to raise some supergeniuses. Parenting obviously matters especially in negative way - malnutrition, abuse and other negative effects matter very, very much and can have huge consequences. I'd argue that daycare for infants and toddlers is such a case.
I don't think those underfed, diseased romanian orphans can tell us much about the effect of letting your kids cry. I do agree that extreme malnutrition, physical trauma, lack of hygiene do matter to kids' outcome. I don't think modern daycares are anywhere near that level.
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Tangential, but: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life
My dad was born into a peasant family in East Pakistan, better known today as Bangladesh, one of the youngest in 9 siblings. He had a loving family, with immensely strong kin bonds with his older siblings doing their best to look out for the rest, including after they were dispossesed and chased out of their homeland during a genocide.
These Russian peasants sound uniquely dysfunctional. I can assure you that that's probably not representative of child rearing and familial roles for most agricultural communities. I suppose I have to blame vodka for that, or the usual Slavic predisposition towards melancholy.
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Oh that Ivan; such a kidder.
You get families like that, and they're not confined to Russia. They're trash, dysfunctional, and the kids have little chance to grow up not to be dysfunctional trash themselves given how they're raised, unless someone intervenes at a very young age and takes them out of that environment.
They'll probably still have a ton of problems, but at least they're not being raised like feral dogs.
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Around here (Slovakia), I'm not sure if @georgioz will back me up on this, putting children into daycare before age 4 is seen as wrong and harming the child, as the child needs stability and security, not be taken care of by strangers.
Communists briefly promoted it but it later came to be seen as unwholesome and wrong. I have a relative who was put into daycare from age.. 1.5 I think, or maybe 2 years and it seems she (and rest of family) think it was not a good idea.
Agreed, there is moderate social stigma around putting children younger than 3 years into any facility (as it should be in my opinion). During socialism, there was a program for daycare for children 1-3 years old called jasle - and they still exist, but are generally frown upon. There is also incentive structure put in place where the government provides assistance to stay-at-home mothers up until the child is three years old, which gets cut if the mother returns to work or the child is put into daycare. Preschool is generally accessible only for children three years old or older with some rare exceptions.
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I've lost about 160 lbs on semaglutide and have been able to mostly maintain the lower weight for a number of reasons, but I can speak to the difficulty of "not doing something" and the different experience of the sensation hunger that I have now vs in the past.
Before describing my experiences with the sensation of hunger, I think its worth noting that I was relatively healthy and active as a child through my 20s and early 30s, so I always remembered what it felt like to not be fat and I think actually being healthy before I started gaining weight made it somewhat easier to ignore at first. I think people that are fat their entire lives have it harder. I began overeating after surviving cancer and the depression I experienced from the lifelong nerve damage I have now.
On the sensation of hunger and the specific wording I'm using "the sensation of hunger" and not simply the term hunger, this is part of the meditative practice that I think has allowed me to maintain the weight loss. In Buddhism we talk about dependent phenomena and conditional arising, and the fundamental emptiness of all such things. In this understanding, hunger is not an indication of needing to eat, or at all even related to the nutritional state of my organism, its a sensation like the temperature of the air, or ambient sounds. It never, ever, ever goes away. If I am awake, I am hungry. Starving. Even now that I'm "better", I'm hungry from the moment I awake until I return to sleep. No amount of eating of any type of food has any effect whatsoever on my sensation of hunger. In fact, eating generally makes me even hungrier, as well as exhausted. I could eat so much food that I had trouble walking, I would feel like I was on the verge of vomiting from how stuffed I was, and I was still starving. I think something like this drives the behaviors of many, if not all, obese people to some extent. I am fortunate that the same techniques I use to manage chronic pain work pretty well with chronic, inescapable hunger.
Until semaglutide. I knew once it started to work that there was probably always going to be an end date. The normal American medical system was a failure from the very beginning for me here, I've always had to obtain it on the 'gray' market so to speak. (Its actually much cheaper too, about 20% what my clinic's pharmacy would charge w/o insurance, which always refused to pay for it) So, while I still am able to maintain access to a "maintenance dose" now, I knew from the outset that I needed to use the possibly very limited time I had access to retrain my body and my mind to a new relationship with eating. I spend about 30-45 minutes per day meditating, and have for over 20 years now. One of these daily sessions is focused entirely on internalizing the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena, but specifically the sensation of hunger, to mentally sever the relationship between feeling the sensation of hunger and the arising desire to eat. Its now simply another flavor of physical pain. Its been largely successful; I've been able to sign a peace treaty, so to speak, with hunger. I do not attempt to fight it, or suppress it, but simply experience and observe the sensation without it conditioning my behavior. Without the previous experience with meditation for coping with chronic pain I don't think I could have done this. Using meditation to "short circuit" the connection between physical pain and mental suffering was much more difficult than addressing hunger, though the two are similar in many ways, the primary similarity for me being the absolute unavoidability of both. The pain my body produces is just as omnipresent as the hunger, and is likewise a false signal. The depression that I used to feel from chronic pain contributed to my overeating. In a way both of these issues had to be processed together to address either of them individually.
The second set of changes: I had to train my body to accept, and then expect, a completely different relationship with eating. I had to build enduring lifestyle habits that were unique to my situation. I mentioned earlier that actually eating offers no relief to the sensation of hunger and usually just makes it more severe. For me what worked is not eating at all, most of the time. Three meals a day, or even two, is entirely unworkable. Given the very low number of calories I can consume before I start to gain weight again, three meals would all have to be the size of snacks for most people. As I was able to cope with the hunger with the medication, I began to reduce my calorie intake, settling at what my doctor said it appropriate for a 6'3'' man, about 2400cal per day. This is way too much. I'm not sure exactly how people's metabolisms differ, and how much being sedentary due to my disability contributes, but at 2400 calories a day my weight will stabilize at about 330lbs. Even 2000 only gets me to about 290-300lbs. So I stopped counting daily calories for the most part and now account per weekly intake: 8000-9000 calories per week stabilizes my weight at about 235lbs. This generally takes the form of one 1000-1500 calorie meal per day in the evening with one 0 calorie day per week. I buy food once per week based on these limits. If I somehow eat everything before its time to shop again I'm looking at more than one 0 calorie day. I have to eat in the evening as it exhausts me and causes varying levels of brain fog eventually driving me to bed. After about 2 years of this my body is acclimated and I will actually become nauseous if I eat more, though I'm still starving the entire time I'm nauseous. It never goes away.
I think the people that gain the weight right back are largely letting the medication "do all the work" as it were. So, at least while they are on it they have the metabolism and habits of a normal person. Sort of. I suppose its possible to stay on it for life if the supply and price gouging issues can be resolved, but right now most people can't or don't. If you don't use the opportunity provided by the medication to reestablish a new relationship with eating and retrain your body and mind then its likely to only be temporary. In a way I'm fortunate to have already had the toolbox for dealing with chronic pain.
Could you recommend books on this kind of Buddhism instead of the typical pop-Buddhism?
Maybe, but I've never really used books very much as part of my practice. I find books about Buddhism and meditation interesting intellectually but not always useful for progressing actual practice. The ones I enjoyed the best are probably the more semi-biographical ones were other people share their experiences and details of their practice. There are certain predictable milestones as well as potential stumbling blocks that almost all life-long meditators eventually encounter. Some of these I would also categorize as real dangers. An experienced teacher is indispensable for navigating this and I don't find books or writing to be a functional ersatz. I imagine you could probably do ok with instruction over the internet though. Still, there a few books I've enjoyed that stick out. Anything by DT Suzuki is pretty good, though he is a major figure in modern pop-Buddhism that's not really his fault; the hippies became somewhat obsessed with him in the 60s. Alan Watts is also quite good, though I prefer his more academic audio lectures where he explains the basics of Indian philosophy. His other stuff in general is quite syncretic and personally idiosyncratic to his own practice and not really what I'd call standard or traditional, and the hippies got ahold of him too. Another author I enjoy is Taitetsu Unno who writes in English about, and is a minister in, Jodo Shinshu Pure Land Buddhism. There is much less interest in the west for Pure Land, despite it being the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in China and Japan. I learned to meditate at a Jodo Shinshu temple when I was young. Meditation is actually not a core practice of Shin Buddhists at all, most never do it at all, though it does exist in the tradition and is more common in the clergy. The underlying philosophy of Pure Land doesn't really require it as part of the practice, they are mostly chanters; their path to liberation is entirely different from the more well known types like Zen or Tibetan traditions. However this temple shared a facility with a Rinzai Zen sensei who held twice weekly sessions. Shin and Zen have a good and fairly long relationship in Japan so this wasn't that strange to the natives at the temple. I feel like speaking or writing about the experience of meditation is always something of a farce. Its a category of experience I find often beyond my ability to communicate about. At its core is meditation practice. I do a mixture of sitting and walking/working meditation as well as chanting, mostly the nembutsu. I think I understand the aversion to pop-Buddhism though. I learned at a temple of Japanese immigrants and their decedents. They were extremely sensitive to the idea of their religion being a caricature and their non-Japanese visitors being any sort of cultural/religious "tourists". Many of them were quite militant about resisting anything that felt like being exoticized and were very clear that they'd prefer that no non-Japanese were allowed in the services at all, ever. One thing the Shinshu in the USA does that I really like is translate the majority of their teachings into plain English, borrowing many terms from Christianity. Their organization is even called the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of these changes were made post WWII in an effort to integrate more fully into American culture. The temple I attended was founded by former internment camp prisoners who left their old communities en masse after the war and founded entirely new communities in American cities that had little or no Japanese presence before the war. I think that my introduction to the practice coming from this group was very helpful for avoiding a common trend I often see in western Buddhists of what I can only really describe unkindly as LARPing. I have over the years learned a great deal of Japanese and Sanskrit/Pali terminology out of academic interest and as part of deepening the practice. Some of these terms are very useful for describing concepts that sometimes require an entire sentence in English to convey, but I don't think a successful meditation practice requires learning any foreign languages at all, nor adopting the cultural practices of a different people.
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You are a mental titan, I am in awe of you
Well fucking done
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My experience in weight loss is quite different from yours, but this portion sort of speaks to me. I became fat as a child and was obese in my low-20s (around 31 BMI) before dieting down to normal weight levels over the course of about a year (around 22 BMI) and have maintained it for a couple decades now. Before I started dieting in my low 20s, I felt like a slave to my hunger, completely helpless but to eat until I was sated. Then when I started following CICO, I realized that hunger was just a sensation that I could choose to follow or not.
I think that one insight was the one key to helping me to lose weight after I'd failed so much in my teenage/low-20s years. Instead of focusing on strategies to keep me from being hungry, it was just learning to see hunger as just a sensation that can be ignored. I wish there was a way to transfer this to people who constantly complain about how being hungry makes them unfocused, angry, distracted, etc. but it seems to me that, sadly, not everyone is capable of this.
How does it work elsewhere in the world - say Japan, Korea, or Vietnam?
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I guess I have some experience here. Starting back in 2021 I was the heaviest I had ever been (260 lbs) and decided I wanted to lose weight. I saw a nutritionist, we worked on a meal plan and routine. I changed a whole bunch of my habits and about 18 months later I was down to 185 lbs. Over the two-ish years since then I've gained most of it back and am about 220 lbs as of this morning.
Losing weight this way required changing a lot of daily habits. Counting calories. Keeping regular track of my weight. Paying attention to portion sizes. I would venture to say most people don't do any of this. They eat in a very intuitive way that likely matches the way they grew up eating or their social environment. I think likening it to drug addiction makes sense. Not necessarily because people become physically addicted to food, but because the scope of changes to one's life can be similar. I'd liken it to mild alcoholism, which is also something I struggle with. Losing weight was much harder than controlling that!
In terms of why I gained the weight back, the habits necessary to maintain that lower weight require active upkeep, at least for me. If I fall out of the habit of counting my calories or macros, of weighing myself every day, it's easy to get back in bad habits that involve eating a lot more.
This part is weird, to me. I was significantly weaker at my primary form of exercise (powerlifting) after my weight loss. And no one I had ever interacted with had commented on my weight in a negative way socially. The reasons I started losing weight were definitely internal to me, not anything I felt pushed on by anyone else.
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Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
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Yep. I'm obviously biased because I work in the system, but court is open to the public. Anyone can go hang out in misdemeanor court sometime and watch the DV cases flow through. They can watch some misdemeanor DV trials (where the defendant often does not get a jury trial, only a bench trial) where a conviction can result in all kinds of direct and collateral consequences and see what they think of the accusations and evidence. Also, they'd need to keep in mind that the trial might be many months down the road after an allegation was made, a temporary restraining order was granted on little-to-no evidence, and the man could already have been forced out of his house and kept away from his kids the whole time.
Watching in family court can also be instructive to see how many divorces have an opening salvo of vague claims of abuse and getting a temporary restraining order. 100%? Not even close, but it doesn't take long watching family court or talking to attorneys who handle divorces to Notice there's a trend there.
I have friends and family working in law enforcement and the general legal system so they talk about this stuff somewhat regularly.
Pretty unsettling, but on the other hand I don't know of anyone, at all, for whom this has happened IRL. It's like some sort of parallel horror world where people act like monsters as soon as there is a disagreement.
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
That's the one. Its a class thing AND you've also filtered out crazies.
I worked as a public defender specifically on a domestic violence docket for about six months. EVERY single horror story you can think of, both in terms of loved ones beating on each other (not just spouses, mind!) and false accusations ruining lives are true, and indeed are happening daily.
Yet... I know of literally nobody in my personal circle of immediate friends and family who has had to deal with that situation.
The level of dysfunction required for someone to actually physically beat someone they care about, or to falsely accuse someone of same, is actually QUITE high. But, there's the bottom, lets call it quartile of the population in terms of impulse control who will absolutely pass that threshold at times.
So if you're drawing most of your social circle from the top two quartiles, with some dipping into the third quartile, then by sheer selection effects, you probably won't know anybody who actually ended up arrested and in court for DV-related reasons.
And be happy for that, in Florida at least the Court system is NOT optimized for helping ensure domestic tranquility, it is there to throw down barriers and inflict punishments and it is very heavy-handed when applying both, so it is a very unpleasant system to interact with whether or not you're guilty of what you've been accused of.
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This is weird, because now the link you sent doesn't show me the full article. It's been a while since I've used webarchive and maybe they've gotten worse at archiving?
You know, it might have been a fluke. I think whatever script they have to block part of the article failed to load on me one time from that snapshot of archive.org. Sometimes it's weird like that I guess.
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PMC Brit. Nobody in my social circle has been arrested for anything connected with a messy breakup, and I think this is typical for PMC Brits. There is one guy who should have been, if what his wife says is true. (I am sceptical, but she is the blood relative, so I believe her in public)
DV is pretty trashy, and taking malicious DV allegations to the police (rather than the civil courts where they are generally more lucrative) is trashier.
I repeat
So someone in your social circle has had that happen, despite your claims that nobody has.
You appear to have misinterpreted "should have been" as "was".
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I was gonna say "surely that's exaggerating" but then I remembered that I know someone who literally went through this kek
Right?! It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count".
This is an amazing "one movie two screens" moment because, TTBOMK, nobody in my circles has ever been jailed.
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I suspect a lot of people here are a third case: they don't pay a ton of attention to the private lives of other people outside of a small circle of family and friends. I could tell 5-10 stories of this type (of varying degrees, not literal jail) just from college, and plenty more from being involved in an art scene with lots of gossip. Suspect that small towns can be similar, but I'd have to hear from a ruralposter on that one.
That depends a lot on the small town. I can only remember one set of divorced parents among my childhood classmates, and still today, the town is mostly populated with functional, intact families. Most people are either middle class or have the values and traits associated with the middle class.
A friend of mine teaches third grade in a different rural community. Most years, only one or two of her students have married parents. The bulk of the parents divorced when the kids were younger, though an increasing number never married at all. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, trailer trash behavior has long since spread outside the park, and the kids pretty much all suffer from emotional and behavioral issues, which then also negatively impacts their academic performance.
I don’t think I personally know anyone who went to jail on DV charges, real or fake. She could probably list two dozen off the top of her head.
I don't mean to call small towns dysfunctional, just that one assumes people in smaller communities hear more of what the folks around are getting up to.
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I've seen in plenty in body cam videos, but the closest I have in my personal life is a great uncle who got screwed over by his ex wife. This was like 30 years ago and I hardly know this great uncle. He and his wife owned a business, she was cooking the books and ran off to a country with no extradition treaty while leaving him to face any consequences. You'd think his wife fleeing the country would be evidence that she was the one cooking the books but the cops wanted their scalp.
He spent a few years in jail, and obviously he divorced her over it.
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I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it. So your dichotomy isn't accurate, because I don't fall into either group.
I know lawyers who have been to jail (and I don't mean they were visiting clients). They did not go around broadcasting it. You might be surprised who has gotten to spend a night or weekend in jail without you ever knowing.
Sure, I'm not trying to say it's impossible that anyone I know has been to jail. My point is merely that if they never told me about it, then I can't possibly be classified as having mental blinders about the topic. Nor can I be classified as someone who knows someone who has been to jail on trumped-up charges, because there isn't evidence to say that. Thus, it's a false dichotomy.
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I've never seen it.
I have. My sister did this to her ex-husband, before she settled into the life of a childless lesbian.
We can't live like this.
We literally can't; we are empirically failing to reproduce.
Define "we"
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As someone who's taking semaglutide, been on both sides of the fence of loosing alot of weight(in terms of using straight CICO and now using drugs) - yes, it's different. Radically so - it's very much given me a shift in attitude of what's necessary to loose weight nowadays, and the disturbing and sad revelation that people's bodies are infuriatingly different on a multitude of fundamental levels.
You ever hear stories about people whom can literally ignore hunger while focusing until they get near to pass out? Yeah. I can do that, now. Couldn't before. Or about that typical loosing weight advise about drinking water to stifle hunger? That never worked before - it does now. Hell, I was always confused about those strict dieting plans that called for snacks, as I've never had the urge to snack between meals. Guess what? I've begun to get dizzy and lightheaded at certain points during the day, because I lack fuel, and a small snack clears that right up.
But - and this is the part that drives me up the wall and makes me want to chew the scenery - despite eating less, I have so much more goddamn energy now. I'm able to push myself further and harder in training, and I'm alot more active in getting tasks done without even tiring. It's as if I can finally, finally use all the fuel in the tank for the first time in my life.
The frustrating element is that there is no diet, no food plan, nothing that I could feasibly do that could replicate that. I don't know whether it's genetic, developmental, or a side-effect of having your body fried growing up sucking down sugars and carbohydrates - even after pushing myself to eat healthy and exercise for years by this point, I still wouldn't be able to get that amount of energy without taking semaglutide. It's to the point that even if I wasn't loosing weight, I'd still be taking it because I want that level of energy.
Having been on the drug for a few months, now, I've begun to describe it as if I've been issued a new body and now have to re-adjust all my prior expectations. It's that much of a radical change.
From my experience, you can't compare exercise to dieting. It's two different things, two different categories of discipline. Despite training in martial arts for years, no amount of willpower was going to fix and/or change the damage my body has experienced over years of bad dieting - or maybe I'm trying to blame an external source, and maybe the fault was my body itself, a flawed meat-machine that needs drugs to perform at it's optimum. I don't know.
What I do know is, if you want to fix the issue, take drugs. They're fucking awesome, and will cure what ails you.
Just want to echo your experiences.
It has other knock on effects, as well. I used to smoke... Well, too much. I had tried to quit multiple times and failed. A few months ago, I realized I hadn't smoked in over a week. This was despite putting zero conscious effort into it.
It's an insanely powerful drug, and it makes me worry about other things it's doing to my nervous system. At the least, the fact that effects apparently disappear when you go off it is reassuring. Regardless, the positive health effects absolutely must outweigh any negatives.
That's the part that freaks me out the most - there are no negatives for me.
The first few weeks I was taking it, I felt like I was stumbling around in a daze, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not only was a loosing weight, but I feeling better, less anxiety, better sleep, less brain fog, more energy. And I couldn't help but think 'What the hell? Drugs aren't supposed to be like this. Where's the negatives here? Where are the downsides!?'
I haven't run into any yet. I know people who are very much high-energy, driven people, whom I've known for a very long time, seen thier eating habits, seen what they do in day to day life, and all of a sudden I find myself thinking 'Wait, I'm doing the exact same thing they are. Huh.'
Now, with caveats - my brother is also taking semaglutide after I nagged him enough, and he went all in down the peptide rabbit hole, and it's entirely possible that both he and I just react very well to them - neither of us have increased our weekly dosage and we haven't hit a plateau yet. Which is a contrast to some of the horror stories he's stumbled across where they're taking 4 to six times our dosage just to see any effects, or much more expensive GLP1 blockers.
Still. Drugs. Man, they're awesome.
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Anecdote, but a regular occurrence for me in college was to finish a bunch of classes/studying/essays/whatever, feel a sudden surge of hunger, and then ask myself "When was the last time I ate?" The answer often being sometime over 24 hours before.
Same. Something about the metabolism or focus at that age that dwindled over time. In grad school I'd still have that sometimes, but now I don't think I could do that absent-mindedly.
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You're really selling it. Are you taking the weekly injection?
Yup. I've been taking it for 21 weeks by this point, still on the same dosage(Most plans slowly increase the dosage over time) and haven't hit a plateau yet. Averaging around 10 pounds of weight loss a month.
Now, as I mentioned elsewhere, a caveat - my brother is also taking semaglutide after I nagged him enough, and he went all in down the peptide rabbit hole, and it's entirely possible that both he and I just react very well to them. Our experience is very much a contrast to some of the horror stories he's stumbled across where they're taking four to six times our dosage just to see any effects, or much more expensive GLP1 blockers.
So I again run into the depressing issue that even when it worked really well for me, there's still an annoying chance it won't work this well for everyone.
I'd still endorse giving it a shot, however. Pun not intended.
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There are a lot of structural/social factors to look at before we zoom into the individual level and start talking about "attachment styles":
We invented a technological solution for boredom. You can entertain yourself infinitely without ever leaving your house. Many people find it easier and more fun to stay at home and watch Netflix than to go out to bars and clubs, talk to people, enter into relationships, etc.
Women's economic independence means that the range of men they find attractive is increasingly restricted, because men have fewer things of value to offer them. ("I have a career, I make more money than a lot of the men I know, I don't particularly want kids, what do I need a man for?")
Dating apps and hookup culture make it so that it's easier for people (well, some people, anyway) to achieve sexual gratification without entering into a committed relationship.
Anecdotally, the majority of men I know are in committed relationships right now. Frankly, none of them fit the "classical" definition of a "high value man". They are perfectly average people, with average looks, average jobs, average levels of social acumen. So in spite of the structural factors I listed above, I really do think that a lot of the "singleness epidemic" is due to a combination of personal choice and unrealistic standards.
Yes but the author of the article is specifically positing that there's been a shift in attachment styles (something I previously mostly encountered as a trait you acquire very young, like, baby to toddler years). Perhaps he is using the term differently, but he does specifically refer to "secure attachment", so he's definitely borrowing the entire set of vocabulary while he's at it. And if he isn't using the term differently, it's really strange how the article is framed around "go against your attachment style, you need to not be avoidant" and not "but why are we experiencing an epidemic of avoidant personalities?"
Again the article has singleness as a symptom of the problem, so addressing other possible causes of singleness interests me less than "if it's true people nowadays are more avoidantly attached — why?"
It could be just be part of a general tendency toward avoidant behavior and low resilience to stress. I'm sure "attachment style" is a useful handle for certain patterns of learned social behavior in intimate relationships, but getting anxious and ghosting after a mildly stressful text interaction doesn't seem meaningfully different from other kinds of maladaptive avoidance, like procrastinating studying with videogames or avoiding opening your bills.
All the literature I've read shows increasing screen use associated with impaired emotional regulation, increased irritability, anxiety and impulsivity, decreased long-term planning and persistence. Any one of those effects could handily account for people becoming less able to weather any stress in a relationship.
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Could it be daycare/preschool? Nowadays even most SAHM’s send their kids to it for some reason or other, I’m not sure why.
My understanding is that this is because studies have been done that show the early socialization outside the home is beneficial for early childhood development in some way. I don’t know the details (not yet quite old enough to be worried about kids beyond a passing interest), and frankly I’m not really convinced about the benefit of getting the kid out of the house earlier than, say, preschool age, but there definitely is some kind of developmental-based backing for why it’s become a Thing.
The ‘developmental based backing’ was something Scott went over and TLDR it was comparing preschool to low-end daycares, then(being a psychology study) it was published as showing kids do better in daycare than with their mothers.
Yeah, I’m not surprised by that. I could imagine early-childhood daycare being better than an actively abusive or neglectful mother but that’s about it, and that’s obviously not the situation under discussion here. Before preschool age the kids aren’t even really capable of socializing as such so what plausible benefit could they get from being apart from their families? But that’s what The Science said, so I guess we’ll do it… it really seems more like a fashionable choice than something strongly thought out. Something you do because the other PMC families in town are doing it.
To be fair neither of the two families I know IRL with young children do actually fit this model. One uses daycare part of the week (3 days iirc) but because the mom works part-time. The other is my cousin, whose wife has put her legal career on hold to be a SAHM while their kids are young. So it’s not like it’s totally dominant in the culture. I do find it a strange trend though, and definitely real. Common sense should be enough to tell you that a very young child would benefit from being around its family, versus being one of 10 or 20 kids overseen by essentially a cut-rate nurse, I’d think.
Over here, there are government regulations about staff-to-children ratios, and you would need more than one staff member to supervise 10-20 kids, depending on age (unless this was a really cut-rate, under the counter, unlicensed operation):
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Unlikely given that preschool has been practically universal in the Nordic countries for like three generations and this only showed up in the past 10 years or so, coincidentally at the same time smartphones really proliferated.
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From my experiences on the apps a couple years ago I also feel like the artifice of dating apps make it way easier to just X somebody on a single awkward interaction or factor that doesn't meet approval. Both since there's a sense of millions of alternatives, but also since you're most likely never ever ever gonna run into that person again.
Back when your perceived options were like tens of people in a geographic area and you'd keep running into people at Church, hobbies, extended friend groups or whatever it paid a lot more to be civil and not ghost at the first turbulence.
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Imagine drinking water made you fat. You can try to dehydrate yourself, but ultimately your thirst will win out.
This analogy doesn't help as much as you (and I) might hope because I often accidentally dehydrate myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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When I did keto for a bit after having a fairly crappy diet, the initial cravings were intense, especially sugar cravings. I felt "alert" all the time and almost uncomfortably energetic. A sort of pre-conscious craving for junk food and carbs would ebb and flow during the day, and when it was at its worst it was hard to do anything else (usually just for <10 minutes). The closest feeling I've had is feeling incredibly horny as a teenager, though even that was only maybe one-quarter the intensity, more of a distraction or nuisance than a debilitating condition. And I wasn't even that fat, my BMI was like 25.5 and I just wanted to lose 5-10 pounds. I imagine it's much worse when you're losing much more and eating much less.
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