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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  11mo ago (npr.org)   2337 thread views

Eli Lilly releases data for a new weight-loss drug to tackle obesity : Shots - Health News : NPR

npr.org

This drug is a true gamechanger

In the SURMOUNT-1 study, people who took the highest dose of tirzepatide, most of whom had a BMI of about 30 or higher but did not have diabetes, lost about 21% of their body weight during the 72 week study. As researchers point out, for people who have bariatric surgery, typical weight loss is about 25% to 30% of their weight, one or two years after the surgery. In the tirzepatide study, 36% of people taking the highest dose lost 25% or more of their body weight.

this is comparable to bariatric surgery

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As NPR has reported, when patients can't afford to stay on obesity medications, they are likely to gain much of the weight back.

If I were Eli Lilly and Company, I would invest into food science, trying to make as many different hyperpalatable foods aimed at teenagers and young adults as possible. The more people have BMI of 30 by the time they are 30, the bigger the market for their drug is. Imagine the government first handing out food stamps to poor Americans, then paying for their obesity treatment via Medicaid.

I'd guess that if the drugs are really effective and the collective societal BMI starts going down, it eventually creates a feedback cycle where obesity generally becomes less and less acceptable and thus there's going to be less people having BMI 30 by 30.

Alternatively people are going to start pigging out even more because now calories are consequence-free until, miracle drug or no, something gives.

As I understand, the miracle drug in question is an appetite suppressant, not something that supercharges your metabolism like the drug in Doctorow's Makers.

Maybe one day, we'll get that crazy food pill thing like in Naruto where it instantly burns all your fat for a rush of energy.

Can't decide if I'm relieved or disappointed.

i doubt it. type 2 diabetes can be attenuated with diet modification yet society tolerates it. Down Syndrome is tolerated even though it can be prevented with prenatal screening.

Neither of those is a particularly good comparison. Down Syndrome is not something you can "fix" anyway, there's never going to be a miracle drug for it. Type 2 diabetes is not immediately visible (conditions like obesity that are visible make it more likely, but being obese does not guarantee you have diabetes and having diabetes does not necessarily mean you are obese).

What I mean here is that I suspect that simply having more obese people all around us has made us more tolerant of obesity in general (personally or in others) than we would be otherwise, or society would have been some decades past when obesity was less common, and having actually effective weight loss drugs available would then mean less obese people around us and the pre-00s greater-than-current disdain for obese persons returning.

I don't think this will change anything. Trans people, for example, are just 1% of population yet trans rights/inclusion has exploded

What do you mean by Down syndrome is tolerated? We do screen all pregnancies for Down syndrome and terminate pregnancy in case of positive test. Sometimes the screening test is not done or the test fails but those are exceptions and not the norm.

who is we? where? this is not true in the US. that is the decision of the mother.

It always should be. But the idea is that almost always the decision is made to terminate the pregnancy. That's the point of making the test. Maybe in some countries that percentage is still not sufficiently high due to poorly understood information and we should think how to improve that.

Who do you mean by "we"? My understanding is that the rate of abortions after testing for Down Syndrome vary pretty heavily from country to country (googling around, seeing USA around 67%, France around 77% and Denmark around 98%, though that's from 2011).

Though I guess the real issue here is referring to "society" tolerating something when of course what "society" tolerates varies a great deal from one part of the world to the other (for now, at least).

Down Syndrome is tolerated even though it can be prevented with prenatal screening.

Statements like this really make you appreciate how hard AI alignment will be. We can't even get humans to reliably differentiate between "prevent illness" and "kill sick people and replace them with healthy people".

Down Syndrome people aren't 'sick'. Having Down Syndrome is their default state. It's not a sickness, it's congenital.

Now, why are we equivocating between abortion and murder?

Alignment is easy. Agreement is hard. The Bailey is «aligning the AI to the generic mode of operation where it makes sure the user's intent is understood correctly and does not go all monkey's paw». The Motte is «having the AI align the future to your preference, very much not obliging the user when the instruction is against my preferences».

This is the general problem of politics.

Body-positive cultural genocide.

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