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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2620 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Ok, so you disagree with the common consensus on smoking (and recognize that it may be wrong on cocaine use). Fair enough, that's your prerogative. But surely you would not disagree that the common consensus exists, no? And that it's because of that, not because they think obesity is tolerable, that people are not using these substances to "cure" themselves?

Like you could make the argument that we have effective cures for obesity but we don't use them because people are misinformed about the risks. But that isn't what was being claimed, rather it was that people apparently prefer to be fat. Which is totally disingenuous and ignores the actual reason people aren't flocking to those "cures".

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2009-03-18-moderate-obesity-takes-years-life-expectancy

It appears that between a BMI of 30 and 45 obesity moves from a third to exactly as fatal as smoking. It seems intuitive to me that the non-fatal health risks probably scale with the fatal health risks. And it seems obvious to me from looking around that I'd rather be a smoker than obese in terms of social and physical downsides that are not health related (or smokers can wear normal clothes and fit into airline seats and get anesthetics).

So I don't know where you're seeing a separable consensus that nicotine will ruin your life "much" faster than obesity. It seems like, depending were you weight fatal vs non fatal tradeoffs, nicotine offers a better solution. So from a harm reduction perspective, we are as a society, ignoring nicotine as a weight loss drug.

Granting all of that is true...

So from a harm reduction perspective, we are as a society, ignoring nicotine as a weight loss drug.

That still isn't what Imaginary_Knowledge was claiming and what I was pushing back on. What you've said is basically summed up as "society is incorrectly valuing the costs of obesity and nicotine". Fine. But what Imaginary_Knowledge said was that people prefer to be fat. That's not what is going on here, at all. They think that nicotine (and cocaine) are going to hurt them more, but that's not the same thing as some glib take of "well I guess people prefer to be fat" and it was disingenuous for him to act like they are the same.

I don't find it disingenuous, just a different interpretation of people vs society/establishment/cathedral/whatever. If you want to say that people themselves have been misinformed or otherwise lack sufficient agency to make that choice individually, it still reflects a society that chooses to value smoking and obesity in the ways it does. We, as a society from media to government to medical orgs, could choose to value things differently.

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