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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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A Look at Shame in Modern Society

Shame is in an interesting place in modern society. On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc. This understanding has come from recognizing that a lot of the time, these feelings can make their conditions worse, thereby leading to increased suffering.

At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other. This is not a new concept, as Emily Post pointed out in her etiquette books. She talked about how the point of manners is to consider and focus on how the other person is feeling, and not to focus exclusively on your own desires.

I think the absence of this benefit of shame is why so much of modern society is characterized by vitriol and name-calling, etc. These are often symptoms of a deeper issue. A lot of this has to do with the norms of acceptable discourse online, where anonymity can sometimes contribute to a lack of empathy and understanding. It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way, even though there is a lot of social utility there.


How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?

Do we need to return to aristocratic training and virtues, making sure the elite at least have a legible, shared set of manners they can use to discuss fraught topics with each other?

Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.

Where do you, dear reader, think that our society should go with regards to how we incorporate shame into our culture?

We have a lot of shame today. There’s a lot of shame involving conformity to fashion, hairstyle, mannerisms, schooling, slang, and so on. Shaming is not wagging your finger and yelling “shame”, shaming is the negative side of every social judgment. You cannot be on the losing side of a social judgment without risking shame, that’s just what the emotion is. When a student does badly in school or gets a bad hairstyle, they are negatively socially evaluated by peers, and then they feel shame.

What we should obviously be doing, if we want to evolve as a people, is only shame people for moral things. This means we stop socially evaluating people for things that don’t matter in terms of morality, and only evaluate them on things which they have will over.

Yeah I like this one. Good point.

On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc.

I'm not convinced that this is the case. The practice of shaming simply seems to be shifting towards two norms:

(1) Don't punch down. Intersectionality makes this norm very complicated and it may be in decline - I don't hear prople saying it any more, whereas they did say it about 5 years ago when trying to explain why e.g. cruel jokes about white people are ok.

(2) Only shame people for things they choose. So sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia etc. are worthy targets of shaming (at least if someone doesn't check themselves after being "educated") but being fat, gay, transgender, violent (if sufficiently marginalised) etc. are not choices and thus beyond the scope of acceptable shame.

Being fat is a choice, to the point where excluding it is an unprincipled exception.

Indeed: you can shame a redneck for being fat, because they chose to do it.

The laws of physics require that to get fat, you have to eat. If you don't eat enough calories, you won't get fat. No amount of genetics can overcome physics.

Amazing how a simple series of semaglutide injections boosts one's willpower into the stratosphere.

I agree here, and most of the other comments make similar points on this front. I've got to rethink my formulation of shame and how it has changed over time.

This also plays into how what is a 'choice' has changed over time. This framing actually sheds a lot of light on why gay and LGBT activists were so insistent that being homosexual is not a 'choice,' it's determined at birth. That way you couldn't shame gay people under this framework.

Seems like the whole transgender 'identity' thing is similar. Before if someone wanted to crossdress, you just told them that's a bad or wrong choice. But now it's somehow indefinably a quality they can't control.

I have a hypothesis that it's to do with trait agreeableness + openness, which are common traits on the left. Agreeable people are more forgiving and accepting of others. Lovely, except that they are also more likely to do so in a way that infantilises the people they sympathise with. Disageeable and low openness people, on the other hand, are very willing to respect other's agency but also more likely to want a society that is "pure", "clean", "respectable" etc. and hence tend to become social conservatives.

A free society depends on social attitudes finding mediums between these social attitudes, where people are seen as having the right to make bad choices (within limits e.g. shooting or robbing people) and the responsibility to suffer consequences of these (e.g. don't expect society to fund your drug habit with a basic income).

That's partly why, though I haven't thought that homosexuality or transphobia were morally wrong since Limp Bizkit was an important force in popular music, I have always been annoyed at the attitude that these behaviours should be tolerated because they can't help doing it (often conflated with the relevant preference being innate) or because they not really bad anyway (fine, but that's accepting them, not tolerating them).

This infantilisation becomes really dangerous when it's applied to e.g. black criminals ("They can't help it - a racist society made them this way!") both for their victims who are denied justice, and through creating a society where young black men experience the tyranny of low expectations.

But now it's somehow indefinably a quality they can't control.

Same as what happened for homosexuality. They just made it up1. No one bothers arguing for it anymore, now that the political victories have been won solidly enough that there appears to be no chance of it ever going back. In fact, various trans/queer movements are going back to chip away at this claim, so when it "somehow" becomes a choice again, don't be too confused.

1 - For potentially the clearest example of this, go to their own words. Check out the APA's brief in Obergefell, where they had the opportunity, on the nation's highest stage (for the political result they desperately wanted), to lay out the absolute best scientific case with the absolute best evidence available on the matter. They cited an opinion poll.

The recent huge increase in the percentage of people who are LGBT suggests that at least bisexuality is a choice for 1 in 5 women. The number of gays is up 4x, and lesbians 11x since the silent generation.

The new narrative is that orientation is a spectrum. Perhaps this is true. Male homosexual acts were commonplace in Ancient Greece and Rome and I think this suggests that at least 50% of men would engage in homosexual acts if it were fully normalized. This seems very high bit I can't explain the ancient world without people being quite flexible.

At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other.

We have completely different view of the situation, shame is routinely used now to the extent that it was probably not used for decades before - to enforce progressive values. The progressives developed shame into an art, they deployed the heavy philosophical weapons and they even have special name for it - problematization which is very much also part of the Critical tradition (as in Critical Theory). Look at something or somebody and try to find out what is wrong with them. Shame them until you take control of it.

James Lindsey described this tactics as a three-pronged ad hominem attack:

  1. Attack on your intellectual legitimacy: Are you an expert on the topic? Did you read all the relevant books? What is your H index, do you have PHD or do you use authoritative sources such as New York Times?

  2. Attack on your emotional legitimacy: Who hurt you that you are saying this? Are you feeling well today, you do not seem like yourself, It is okay to accept that you are depressed, no shame in that.

  3. Attack on your moral legitimacy: You know that only fascists say what are you saying? Why did you like a tweet from known transphobe?

In short, people are constantly pressured that they are either stupid, crazy or evil if they do not conform - sometimes all three things at once. We are living in one of the most stifling times in history of humanity. Just today there is a news that one Noah Gragson was suspended from NASCAR for liking a twitter meme making joke of George Floyd. Liking a tweet in your home on your private time possibly while drunk is fireable offense now. Talk about losing the utility of shaming. Utility of shaming is all there on the display stronger than ever, it shows its power and utility of creating illusion of conformity all around us.

Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.

I attempted that here for a while. It was hit or miss. Maybe I didn't spend enough time trying to really hammer out the kinks. But I felt like half the time the AI completely missed the thrust of my point, often omitting it entirely.

Maybe that just means there is no polite way to say what I was trying to say. A shame.

I think the main problem is the AI systems we have now are crude, and right at the beginning of their potential. I would be shocked if we didn't have this capability in, say, 3 to 5 years. Hell it's probably possible now with the right plugins/training set.

I’m not sure I agree that stopping shaming for depression and anxiety was a wise decision. More generally, it seems that “society” is incapable of transitioning from “shaming a behavior” to “tolerating a behavior”, without the pendulum swinging way too far the other way and outright celebrating various forms of antisocial behavior. I might just be too internet-culture-war-brained, but the big examples of formerly shamed behaviors like homosexuality, transgender, various mental illnesses, to older culture war fights about how women should dress or whether people should have sex before marriage tend to immediately flip from general intolerance, to encouragement and celebration, without much of a “tolerate but don’t encourage” phase. It seems like you basically can’t get rid of shame, you can only change the polarity of it. Now you are shamed for being a *phobe, or for not having the “basic human decency” to accommodate people’s questionable self-diagnosed mental illnesses. Are there any examples of this not being the case, maybe for more banal, less politically charged behaviors? The only thing I can think of maybe is obesity, where most people agree it’s rude to outright shame people for being fat, but the “celebrating fatness” movement hasn’t really taken off

Maybe there's no "celebrating fatness" movement per se, but the last time I was in the US (over a year ago) I was struck with the girth of the women used as models in the women's clothing section--I feel the need to point out I noticed this peripehrally; I was not myself shopping for a brassiere. I should have taken photos of the posters. Maybe it's because I live in an Asian country where women (and men) are generally more relatively petite and thus the models here are more lithe and reflect the populace, but it was jarring to see women I would consider overweight modeling lingerie in six-foot posters.

The heyday of body-positivity on social media was a couple of years back, it's said (I'm not observing it -relating what others have said) The things those fools were promoting - such as 'listening to your body' for when to eat lead to pretty much uncontrolled weight gain in the long run. In the end even the crowd figures that out.

Maybe there's no "celebrating fatness" movement per se

Some ad agencies definitely went on that bandwagon and are staying there, however, once popular support ceases it'll probably go away. This sexual harassment lawsuit against Lizzo won't help the cause either.

I had no idea there was a 'BBC Pidgin ' Fascinating.

How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

Why should we not bury people under negative emotion? That seems like the purpose of shaming no?

If the idea is that it shouldn't be too bad, then you've probably already lost . Shaming involves both a general (hopefully internalized) taboo and serious consequences when they're broken. My family doesn't have a lot of bastards because there is a general taboo that people internalize but also they know there'll be social consequences.

Not "scarlet letter" level but serious enough, especially factoring in that people depend on each other much more*. Without that people will eventually do as they like.

As for "productive social discourse": that might also be part of the problem. Part of the value of shame is that, if society sticks to it, people can't argue themselves out of it. It doesn't matter what Lizzo feels; a strong society will simply make it clear it's futile to complain and she should and will continue to feel bad about being fat until she changes. That's not necessarily something that's inculcated in a calm, reasoned debate.

This all leads to: You need to have a stable community and norms to have strong taboos. But Americans/Westerners can't seem to decide what norms or even basic beliefs they have and so much of the debate is about how to talk about talking about norms.

* Another probably insurmountable obstacle in the West. When I needed to find something or someone back home I had to call someone. The West has all sorts of impersonal systems that reduce the need to care about the opinions of others.

Why should we not bury people under negative emotion? That seems like the purpose of shaming no?

If the idea is that it shouldn't be too bad, then you've probably already lost . Shaming involves both a general (hopefully internalized) taboo and serious consequences when they're broken. My family doesn't have a lot of bastards because there is a general taboo that people internalize but also they know there'll be social consequences.

The general idea here is that we should not shame people into things that they cannot change. Unfortunately this devolves into which framing you want - as I mentioned in a comment above, some people think that being gay is a choice, others don't.

Unfortunately we just don't know at this point how much of our personality is a 'choice' and how much it's baked into our genetic makeup, or 'identity' as progressives would call it.

There are some meta-analyses in the psychology literature that suggest that environment does actually have a strong effect on personality, even well into adulthood, but not that strong in early childhood or old age.

Perhaps based off of this analysis at least, we should shame people from the age of say, 5-40 or so, then leave folks alone after they reach a certain age since their personalities are more set.

Now with that being said, we know for a fact that psychedelic substances dramatically increase openness to experience as a trait, so if we truly want to have 'diversity training' with older executives that works well, we might need to slip them some mushrooms. I don't think this would be a good outcome of course, but I do think that as we developed our technology and understanding of personality, as well as study psycho-active substances more, we will realize we can do a lot more to change our minds than we previously thought.

@self_made_human, I'm actually curious if you know much about the development of personality changing medicine right now?

@self_made_human, I'm actually curious if you know much about the development of personality changing medicine right now?

Uh, the closest thing that comes to mind is psychiatry meds for things like anxiety, ADHD, depression and the like. To the extent that they're part of one's personality, that's the closest you can get. Certainly a schizophrenic who desists on the drugs has had a rather large shift in personality.

There's preliminary evidence that Ozempic is a "good habits" drug, since not only does it reduce weight and food cravings, it also seems to reduce the urge to use nicotine and alcohol too, and maybe gambling, but don't quote me on that.

On the less legit side of the spectrum, you can make a nerd do coke, or make someone try LSD. The latter does lead to longterm personality changes like openness to experience and so on.

Ahh gotcha. Yeah Ozempic is pretty amazing at least in preliminary results. I'm fascinated to see if AI will drive faster drug discovery.

Alas, the psych meds we have right now are pretty terrible. Adderall can be fun, but not great for long term health or stability IMO.

I like this sentiment. Overly caring about people's feelings seems to be a particular failure mode of modern discourse. Oftentimes your feelings are simply incorrect, and you should literally just go for a jog instead of caring about them.

The best example of this, to me, is found in the term "fat shaming". The first time I heard it, I genuinely couldn't make sense of it, I was sincerely puzzled by what was meant. To me, being fat is plainly a bad thing to be, is a thing that people become due to their own actions, and therefore it is shameful to be fat. If someone engaged in self-control or exercise, they wouldn't be fat, but they are fat, so that is shameful. What an unsophisticated fool I was! If we can't even apply shame to something so straightforwardly negative, I don't see much hope for shaming behavior that's more equivocal.

A lot of the discussion about shame in the US revolves around fat-shaming, but I think we would be better served to directly shame unhealthy eating and unnecessary lethargy. As far as I see it, the difference between culture in the US and Asia is threefold: (1) It's acceptable in Asia to tell someone if they gained/lost weight. (2) People in Asia don't drive everywhere, but walk / bike / public transport more. (3) People in Asia eat a lot more vegetables and a lot less carbs / refined sugars.

Outside of elementary school, just what level of fat shaming (or maybe it's more accurate to talk about fat bullying) has ever existed in any Western society? I wonder. Also, how much of objectively existing fat shaming was/is directed at fat men specifically?

If you look at ads from the 30s/40s/50s fat shaming was rife.

Are you referring to media depictions such as this? Because I'd say that maybe falls into the category of benevolent sexism, or whatever it's called.

Problem is "self-control or exercise" is not a solution to fatness in modern food environment like it maybe was for some king or rich merchant in the past. General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus, not without semaglutide at least. Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.

General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus

You could teach them to not buy that shit. Just ignore it. Never buy any of it. I used to buy junk food but I stopped because I'd sometimes eat too much of it and then feel bad.

Self control is a perfectly good solution to fatness. It won't solve the obesity epidemic because people refuse to apply it, not because it doesn't work

And why do they refuse? Do you think that people want to be fat and unhealthy? They can't apply it like how average person can't just "learn to code" despite the existence of freely available courses and free time.

average person can't just "learn to code" despite the existence of freely available courses and free time.

The average person doesn't understand that he needs to know how to program, and that if he is a white collar worker, there is a very real chance that his boss might say "You have two weeks to complete this coding assignment. You should know how to do this"...and if he doesn't, he may well get fired or at least start circling the drain.

If you're at all interested in research? You learned to code in high school, maybe even middle school. Same for if you were at all interested in any kind of white-collar career.

Dieting isn't fun so they choose the easy option. It's not impossible for them to eat less. If you put a gun to their head they'd do it but they just don't want it bad enough to go through the discomfort

Do you think that people want to be fat and unhealthy?

They prefer being fat and unhealthy to eschewing the pleasures of eating whatever the fuck they want.

Doc note I dissent, a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

What about Japan? Obesity rate there is lower than Ethiopia!

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country

I keep hearing people I presume to be Americans bemoaning obesity like it's an otherwise incurable curse that needs a technical fix. It really isn't impossible to have a healthy country if you have a healthy diet. Japan is fairly wealthy. Japan has access to American-style food, they just have their own cuisine which is healthier than the stuff we eat in the West. And I've never heard complaints that Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Hyperstimulus is just a description of problems localized to Western diet. And it is also possible to be healthy with a Western diet, if people put in a little effort cooking at home and buying food with proper ingredients that our ancestors would recognize. Cooking is not an advanced skill like programming, every household could do it a century ago.

HFCS-enriched chemical food is a choice. Like with its drugs problem, the US chooses to be fat and sick. It is possible for rich countries to be healthy and thin. It is possible for countries to build HSR. There are examples of it happening all around us.

In my opinion what matters is the trend not current value, Japan's obesity rate only risen through out the last decades, like in almost any other country on Earth. Problem isn't limited to westerners, much poorer and culturally distinct Middle East has rates similar to European ones. Western hyperstimulus is no longer western it is global.

The Japanese eat plenty of fast food or processed food on the go. I doubt it possesses any quality that ramen in America lacks.

BMI of Japanese men is 137. Highest out of 190 countries, in 53 states are the men thinner. BMI of Japanese women is 183., women of 7 states (Vietnam, Burundi, Madagascar, Bangladesh, East Timor, Ethiopia, Eritrea) are less chubby.

If one looks at Japanese BMI (x axis is time, left graph is of men (男), right of women (女), click the radio button in the top right to isolate an age group) throughout the latter half of 20th century, separated by age and sex, some things stand out.

Men of Japan keep getting fatter, be they 20 or 60. Only 17 year old boys buck the trend. Nothing to talk about here.

The BMI of members of the gentler gender of Japan meanwhile, doesn't such a uniform trend by age group. 20 and 30 year old Japanese women are thinner today then when the pipe smoking general led the Land of the Rising Sun(!), still, they are fatter than they were 1995 or 2005. 40 year olds have slightly higher BMI, but it peaked in 1970. The BMI of 50 year olds peaked in 1980, of 60 yo's in 1995, and of 70 yo's in 2000.

The stereotype does checkout.

People in thin places like Japan, Ethiopia, or the 1970s don't need to exercise self-control to stay thin. They just stay thin naturally.

On the other hand, we have a word for people who need to constantly employ self-control to try to lose weight. We call them fat people.

The solution is not for people to employ heroic amounts of self control. Instead the solution is for the natural environment to be reshaped such that self-control is not necessary. Sadly, there are no practical suggestions for how to do this on a large scale. We're not going to turn the U.S. into Japan. Also, we don't truly understand the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

I also think the suggestions for people to "just eat less" are equally bad. If you tell someone to do something 1000 times and they never do it, the advice isn't bad necessarily, but its certainly not effective.

I don't have any great suggestions for the interventions that will work. I just know that the ones which have been repeated ad nauseum for the last 30 years definitely don't work. It's time to try something different.

Semalglutide and its successors seem the most likely to actually make a difference.

People in thin places like Japan, Ethiopia, or the 1970s don't need to exercise self-control to stay thin. They just stay thin naturally.

People in Ethiopia don't need self control because they have external control; they can't get enough food. I don't know that people in Japan don't exercise self-control.

On the other hand, we have a word for people who need to constantly employ self-control to try to lose weight. We call them fat people

Those who employ self-control to not gain weight we call "people of normal weight".

The solution is not for people to employ heroic amounts of self control.

It doesn't take "heroic amounts". Mostly it means strict attention to avoiding self-delusion, which is perhaps one place where fat-shaming helps. If every time a fat person complained they weren't eating much but still gaining weight, they were told that maybe they should put down the snack they're eating while they're complaining, it might have an effect. But that's considered rude.

Hmm.

  1. Make things like McDonald's, junk food, etc. low-status. Like smoking cigarettes.

  2. Stop subsidizing HFCS and other junkfood. Start subsidizing healthier options.

  3. A bit harsher - different tax rates, potentially different jail sentences and traffic fines, etc for heavy people.

  4. Morbidly obese people also are expected to be celibate: it's considered disgusting for them to present themselves as anything other than more or less asexual, and it's transgressive and considered in extremely poor taste for them to be in relationships.

  5. Intensive shaming. Weight loss of the Hock. If you're morbidly obese you are expected to train and have yourself dumped into the Alaskan wilderness in late winter with no rescue beacon. If you don't make it out, you're too fat to be a good citizen; if you survive, you're presumably leaner and fitter after having spent a couple weeks in absolutely frigid conditions hauling your gear through the Alaskan wilderness. If you're still big? You get dumped again and again 'till you're either fit or dead. This is...strictly voluntary, but you're seen as cowardly and dishonorable for not doing it.

Mostly it means strict attention to avoiding self-delusion, which is perhaps one place where fat-shaming helps. If every time a fat person complained they weren't eating much but still gaining weight, they were told that maybe they should put down the snack they're eating while they're complaining, it might have an effect.

It might be mostly an American phenomenon. All fat people I know(and there are many of them with 20% obesity rate and majority of population overweight) are honest about their eating habits and often make related self-deprecating jokes. And of course they relentlessly try many different things to lose weight from brand new diets, to calorie counting, to all kinds of exercising and it doesn't help because they can't maintain them.

Sadly, there are no practical suggestions for how to do this on a large scale.

For start, make walking in USA towns and cities possible and stop designing any new urban spaces primarily for cars.

When I see a comment like this, my instinct is to ask "How?" We just traded a personal-level problem for a politics-level solution, which means it will happen approximately never. Not only is the morass of US politics highly illogical, it is supported by a whole ecosystem of bad decisions and incentives which work against change, from zoning laws which benefit existing suburban homeowners to subsidized housing requirements which force new developments to be low-status places to live.

I guess the personal solution is to just buy a home for yourself in a nice urban space. Not only can you become part of a community which walks everywhere, but your neighbors will share your values (Hopefully), and if land values go up, other landlords will be motivated to make more places like your urban space.

Except, again they have the same food environment we do. They have restaurants, including fast food. They have convenience stores full of processed junk, just like we do. The difference between them and us is not the food, it’s food culture. They have much stronger taboos against overeating and being fat. People there have no problem shaming people for eating more than they should, they have no problem pointing out when a close friend or relative gains weight.

Except, again they have the same food environment we do.

Not really. I'll skip HFCS, which is both over-discussed and probably not a key driver of the blubber gap, and point out that America is the only country where bread is routinely sweetened. Notoriously among VAT geeks, Subway is legally candy in Ireland because there is so much added sugar in the bread.

Seriously, the amount of added sugar in mass-market bread in the most European countries (I am only directly familiar with the UK, Ireland and France) is zero. If you want sweet bread, you spread honey on it.

In my experience, all the diets which actually work for large numbers of people involve severely restricting refined sugar (including fruit juice) and somewhat restricting sugar in whole fruit. That is a lot harder if staples like bread have hidden sugar in.

So, in your opinion, the change in obesity in the US and Europe since the 1970s has been due to different shaming norms?

Well, changes in food culture in general, but shaming is a part of that. People used to eat much smaller portions, and they’d discourage snacking between meals “don’t spoil your dinner” was a normal admonishment in the 1970s and 1980s. Kids weren’t allowed to drink soda very often. My family only really had desserts around when we had visitors of some sort. And kids were encouraged to be active and play outdoors and so on. Parents did get concerned when their kids got fat (keep in mind, this was 1980s fat, not obese). It wasn’t explicitly shaming as in “drop the burger fatty” yelled at strangers, but people did see it as weird when someone was having huge servings of something.

That, and the American anti-smoking campaign

TheMotte seems hard hereditarian when talking about intelligence and social status but, somehow, it becomes a blank statist, just lift bro, "cultural factors" social scientist when it comes to obesity

American weights have blown up in the last century. So we can't blame DNA on this one.

TheMotte seems hard hereditarian when talking about intelligence and social status but, somehow, it becomes a blank statist, just lift bro, "cultural factors" social scientist when it comes to obesity, dating and physical appearance.

Heredity provides a ceiling on intelligence. And on musculature (at least without serious drugs) -- some people can indeed lift and not build much muscle. I haven't seen anyone say "cultural factors" about physical appearance beyond that which is (obviously) affected by diet and exercise; nobody's claiming height or nose shape is cultural. Except in some very unusual cases, the floor heredity puts on healthy weight is well below what people call "fat". Does heredity affect propensity to gain weight? You bet. But it doesn't make you fat.

It is quite striking, isn't it! The same person here will literally attribute intelligence and personality, assimilation, etc almost entirely to genetics, then turn around and say attractiveness and weight is a character flaw. It's fascinating.

Yes, it is quite striking that a (probably largely) wrong claim is pointed out as wrong and a (probably largely) correct claim is pointed out as correct. And people around here can simultaneously believe that one claim is true but an unrelated claim is false.

There have been IQ heritability studies. It's a lot more than 50% heritable. Understanding that's gated by childhood nutrition, parasite load, etc; people around here throwing around IQ heritability assertions are largely correct.

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One can be born with ugly features, or a short adult height or otherwise unpleasing proportions. Weight isn't like that. No amount of genetics will make you 300 pounds without putting the requisite calories into your system.

Personality, on the other hand, whether genetic or not is one of the most immutable things there is. The so-called personality disorders are pretty much intractable. About the only thing that changes personality is brain damage and the various extreme measures called "brainwashing" (usually involving drugs, torture, or both)

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What if the US just tried harder? In wartime, if fighting hasn't worked, then surrender, flight or negotiation are alternative options. But you can also fight harder to achieve victory.

I refuse to accept that the US has made a serious effort to fight obesity. European and American versions of food are wildly different in their ingredients, even the unhealthy stuff is markedly more full of weird chemicals:https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/

I know that everything is technically a chemical but there should not be petroleum products in food, not even as preservatives. That's not something we were supposed to consume. Reduce the processed chemical slop, return to food that comes from fields, seas and pasture.

We're not going to turn the U.S. into Japan.

Well, when Japan faced serious problems with their society, they tried consciously and intensively to turn itself into a blend of the UK, Germany and America. They copied the strengths of other nations and became stronger for it, while the rest of Asia was left behind. But they could've said, 'oh we're not going to turn Japan into Germany', done nothing and gotten colonized. Learning from other countries and copying what they do well is a useful and beneficial tactic. Refusing to learn is not a recipe for success.

https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/

It would have been nice if she had compared calories as well as ingredients. I tried looking up mcdonalds fries in the US vs UK and they give calories but not serving size on their website. The US is fatter than the UK but the UK is still pretty fat, something like a 30% obesity rate, so if weird ingredients are the cause of obesity I would expect the UK to be doing better than they are.

I like the idea of fighting harder against obesity, I really do think it's one of our biggest problems. But I don't think the government is likely to fight very well. With coronavirus we got a lot of draconian regulations that caused a lot of suffering but failed to do much if anything to save lives. This is the same government that made a food pyramid telling everyone to eat a ton of carbs and mostly avoid protein.

Good points as long as "try harder" isn't just try the same stuff that's failed over and over again but the Max Power way.

I said I didn't have any ideas, but interventions targeted at youth seem like they have the greatest chance of success. People who are fat at age 18 tend to be fat for life. We could have more P.E. classes and actually flunk the nerds and fat kids who fail to meet standards instead of giving everyone who shows up an A.

If we're allowed to consider pharmaceutical inventions, then Metformin and Semalglutide should be free.

I think it would be good to teach young people how to cook for themselves. It's a basic, important skill. Economical too.

I mean, if Semaglutide works then great. It just seems like a really inelegant solution. What are the other consequences of eating highly processed food? Is processed food or additives making people mentally ill? Reducing sperm counts? There are other modern plagues aside from obesity. Even examining pictures of our grandfathers reveals significant differences in phenotype. There are faces that you just don't see anymore.

I think a big chunk of this multifaceted problem stems from things that people ingest, whether that's hormones, food additives, drugs or microplastics. Better to change diets than to introduce new sources of complexities via gastric bypass or drugs. Once we have a complete understanding of the body and biology generally, then we should be more aggressive. Given that our understanding is limited, we should try to reduce complexity of inputs (or use tried and tested inputs), reduce unnecessary medical interventions. Healthcare already gobbles up too much of our wealth as it is, with limited returns on quality of life.

As someone who doesn’t cook, it’s because it takes ages to get a worse-tasting product than what I can buy, it’s messy and I have to clean up afterwards. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time. It would be an ask even if I had a big kitchen and a short commute but otherwise it’s just not on.

Perhaps I’m overextending but I think that before 1950 cooking was done by housewives, employers or landladies. After the 80s it was mostly takeaways and microwaveable meals. The era when a majority of employed people cooked for themselves was almost infinitesimally short.

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I think it would be good to teach young people how to cook for themselves. It's a basic, important skill. Economical too.

I thought that's what home ec classes were supposed to cover.

Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Most of it, most of the time anyway. Easily the worst culinary experience of any country I've visited. I'm just not into raw fish or weird fish parts. For vegetarians it's even worse. Westernised sushi is great but is only superficially similar to "real" sushi.

I don't think this explains why Japan is thin; that would be the society wide state-sponsored social shaming. Men with a waistline over 33.5" face penalties & are forced into counselling sessions. Companies with too many fat employees can be fined. This is not height or race adjusted. I know a tall white man living in Japan who would be considered exceptionally fit by Western standards, struggling to keep his waistline down to that level. He'll likely need to emigrate next year.

Westernised sushi is great but is only superficially similar to "real" sushi.

Not to me. There is nothing more disgusting than shoving cream cheese next to cold rice and raw salmon. OTOH, remove that cream cheese and paint a small amount of actually fermented soy onto the salmon, and you have a real treat.

Still, Japan has lots of stuff that should theoretically make you fat. Tempura, ramen/soba/udon, takoyaki, mochi, plenty of alcoholic beverages like beer, whiskey, sake, etc.

There is nothing more disgusting than shoving cream cheese next to cold rice and raw salmon.

I think that fad started in Japan. "Japan has finally discovered cheese" as my friend put it 3 or 4 years ago. Possibly starting with a cheese flavoured Kitkat, of all things, and then they tried it in everything.

Personally I much prefer westernized smoked salmon and avocado nori roll, than authentic raw salmon nigiri. I was a big fan of westernized Japanese food, so was looking forward to trying the "real thing" and came away disappointed. (As opposed to Thailand, which exceeded my expectations). But yes this is all tangential to the point, there's surely enough unhealthy food in Japan that you could get fat if you wanted to.

There's no mystery to how Japan stays thin. Draconian government enforcement. Being fat in Japan is literally illegal. That's all there is to it. I... don't think that would work in the west (and sincerely hopes noone tries!).

I suppose you can register my diametrically opposite reaction to Japanese food vs faux Japanese food. California rolls are downright nauseating and an abomination, while — staying entirely away from raw fish and weird fish parts and only confining myself to seafood — eel kabayaki; stewed/grilled/steamed/pickled mackerel/amberjack/sea bream/other fish species; seafood tempura; oshizushi with cooked fish…all of those sans oshizushi are quite mainstream even in the west, and most if not all should suit a western palate.

I’d also add that vegetarian food in Japan and China has been enormously better than vegetarian food I have had in the west. A dinner I had at a Buddhist abbot’s house in Kyushu was easily the best vegetarian food I’d had in my life (adding that I’ve been to Buddhist gatherings and houses and temples exactly twice in my life, and I didn’t eat that other time).

Salmon wasn’t even used as a raw fish originally (or anything more than seafood filler; it is not traditionally popular in Japan), only appearing in Japan in the 90s. To this day I still think it is a rather inferior sashimi/sushi fish. A good tuna with a well-made nikiri would have been a better experience.

There are other reasons other than food and Japan fining the shit out of fat people (which, in fact, Japan does not do on a personal basis) for the Japanese staying thin, though. Walking from one place to another is quite normalized, for one.

(and sincerely hopes noone tries!).

Why?

Personally I much prefer westernized smoked salmon and avocado nori roll,

Eww. Although you and my wife would agree.

I just want salted fish with umami added when I want sushi. If I want cheese, I'll do pasta TYVM.

Why?

Generically, because of the importance of personal liberty etc. Insert standard libertarian talking points here.

On a more personal level, I'm fat and not particularly bothered about it. The pleasure I derive from eating chocolate far outweighs my weight. I don't think it's something I can change - I can eat much worse than I do now and not gain any more weight, or I can try to starve myself and be hungry and grumpy until my willpower runs out and I walk to a 24 hour convenience store in the middle of the night to buy chocolate, and not lose any weight. Having a government agent step in to keep me perpetually hungry and grumpy sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Well I stand corrected about never hearing complaints about Japanese food. On my visit to Japan, the food tasted fine. And if it isn't the food but the shaming, then fat shaming does work then.

Companies with too many fat employees can be fined.

Sounds good, or at least better than our approach of 'companies with too many white employees can be fined'. I recall a case of black NYC teachers getting a big payout because they failed a test that too many whites passed.

This kind of top down enforcement is rarely desirable, though. I know plenty of guys at work who could probably be categorised as overweight based on crude heuristics like waist size or BMI. They're the same guys that I want with me when it's time to load the truck.

Sure. That's probably true; however, visceral fat is still unhealthy. Although a few extra pounds is mostly OK. Swole people also know who they are.

Maybe they do, but does the government know? Or care, since there's some evidence that carrying a lot of muscle is also harmful to longevity?

I don't buy the high-fructose corn syrup hate. HFCS is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Table sugar is sucrose, which is hydrolyzed in the gut to 50% fructose and 50% glucose. The metabolic pathways are almost identical. There's no reason to treat HFCS differently from any other cheap sweet food.

Does HFCS taste purely sweet or do the extra oligomers present impart a different taste? I swear US Coca Cola tastes like ass, but (most of) the rest of the world is fine; the only difference I know between the two is that the US coke definitely uses HFCS while I think it’s more common for…pure sucrose? to be used outside of the US.

Also putting sugar or HFCS in everything is a problem because everything tastes too sweet

If you put sugar in nearly everything, surely you would expect people to get fatter?

Sure but HFCS specifically gets a lot of hate. If they replace HFCS with regular sugar then we're back where we started.

Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by a modern food environment? As far as I know, fatness isn't evenly distributed across populations, and it's not that hard to find subgroups and cultures with much less obesity than we observe as the baseline in America.

I specifically said "modern" instead of "American" or even "first world" one because food environment is quite globalized and obesity rates are rising world-wide, start points and speed differ but they rise nonetheless even in Japan. European 25% isn't very reassuring compared to American one of 40% if 20 years ago it was 15%.

One bit of anecdata I've heard over and over again, is people moving to Europe, not changing their diet what so ever, and losing weight. Because Europe doesn't put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

I've heard the same thing, but for Japan and Vietnam. It's worth noting that obesity in Europe is climbing rapidly as well. They are about 20 years behind the U.S.

Even Japan/Vietnam is seeing rising obesity but they seem to be much more resistant.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity. Areas where drinking water comes from agricultural runoff such as the Mississippi Delta have extremely high obesity while high altitude areas have less than would be expected from socioeconomic conditions. As far as I know, no one has adequately explained this phenomenon.

It seems relevant that adults living in the Mississippi delta basically don’t go outside for 4-5 months of the year.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity.

And they dismiss that people eat more calories and move less - and look for some grand mystery. There is none, CICO is the solution.

Of course CICO "works". No one is claiming that the laws of physics don't apply. It's just not a useful abstraction for maintaining weight in the real world.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite. Imagine being hungry and tired all the time. But that is what required for these people to maintain a healthy weight. Naturally, they can't do it.

In the past, people maintained their weight with less effort than today. Willpower didn't magically collapse in the 1970s. There has been a change in the natural environment.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

At the levels of cutting they're doing to become a television star (in that article), absolutely. For most people, you can get pretty deep into a cut before you start feeling physical/mental effects. They do come as you continue to cut; as the saying goes, "...cut until you hate your life." These things can be expected; they should be expected; thus, you can plan for them if you're properly educated on the reality of things (i.e., CICO works) and on how to make an appropriate plan.

What absolutely doesn't work is just lying to people and saying that it just doesn't work because it's hard. Of course people are going to give up when everyone is lying to them and saying that it doesn't work. Of course people are going to not remain at maintenance after a cut when everyone is lying to them and telling them that it just magically comes back after a cut, no matter what you do. Of course people aren't even going to try when everyone is lying to them and telling them that you have to constantly feel like shit to make any progress ever.

I've told the story here before, but I'll say it again. My wife was someone who heard all those lies all her life. She believed them, and of course, wouldn't have been successful if she had just tried on her own. When she had tried in the past, it was always some fad diet about how you need to cleanse this or remove that chemical. I got her to be at least willing to try, and armed her with the ability to actually plan. Even then, after she saw it slowly working for months, she would still be like, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE! MAYBE [insert some silly fool other idea here] INSTEAD!" And if I hadn't been there every time to essentially say, "Shut up. Keep doing it. You'll see in a week or two that it's still working," then she absolutely would have failed, specifically because people have been lying to her for her entire life.

So if you want an explanation for what's changed, there's at least two things. 1) The absolutely insane abundance of extremely high-calorie, low satiety foods and just calories in general, and 2) We started just lying to people over and over and over again. We shouldn't be surprised when people start believing the lie.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

Food become more available, more palatable and cheaper.

Note that curiously in Poland people have not become fatter in 1970s - it started to happen later.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

Well, why they have gained weight? Maybe restoring health weight is extremely hard, but you get there by overeating.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

not exactly natural one, but I agree (but it almost certainly was not lithium pushed by SM)

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The first thing that comes to my mind is that the Mississippi Delta is extremely hot and humid for a big part of the year while high altitude areas like Denver tend to have a lot of healthy people who specifically moved there for outdoor sports. They say it holds in other countries too but don't mention whether those low lying areas also have agricultural runoff.

I mean, lots of things could be the cause. But I'd say the lowest of hanging fruit is the fact that everything has way too much sugar.

Like, I just finished a killer workout. I went to make myself a post workout snack, protein, banana, got out some bread, Pepperidge Farm 15 Grain Whole Wheat, and the third ingredient is sugar. It has 4 grams of added sugar per serving. A fun size Snickers has 8g of added sugar.

You know... maybe I should start baking my own bread from week to week.

When I bake bread I put 7g (one teaspoon) of sugar in ~400ml of water with 600g of flour.

That Pepperidge loaf seems to be 624g, which at the same 1:0.66 ratio would make it roughly 380g flour, 250ml water, of which some part is 48g of sugar.

7/600 = 0.01g sugar per g flour
48/380 = 0.12g sugar per g flour

So roughly 10x as much sugar.

For comparison a can of Coke has 35g of sugar in 330ml. They're making bread with water that is more sugary than Coke.

Everything is sweeter in the US - that's true. But it's not the HFCS, it's just that there's more sugar (including hfcs) in everything, so people get more food energy.

Mind you, you can buy decent bread in the US. Not sure about Walmart, but when I visited New England the local supermarket chain's bakery was producing fairly decent ciabatta bread. I think it was called 'Market Basket'?)

IIRC Mexicans bake bread too. Also 'German bakeries' maybe ?

It does seem obvious, but sugar consumption hasn't grown in the last decade while obesity continues to rise. I'll concede that it could be a delayed effect from childhood consumption.

You know that flour has just as many calories as sugar, gram per gram, right?

Also, it's not for flavor that most bread recipes (except ones that use chemical leavening) call for added sugar. Yeast cannot thrive on flour alone.

In fact I’m pretty sure refined flour has a higher glycaemic index than sucrose, owing to the fructose part of sucrose being more difficult to metabolise by humans.

That said putting extra sugar in surely doesn’t help

Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't particularly know.

The entire concept of "shaming" seems like a relatively new concept to me, in much the same way that "gendering" is a relatively new concept. It used to be understood that some things (like being fat) were just inherently shameful by nature, irrespective of whether anyone was engaged in the act of "shaming." Now the idea is that things only become shameful as a result of the act of shaming, i.e. of being assigned shame by someone. I feel like a similar transformation took place around the concept of gender, from being a description of a state of affairs to being the result of "gendering," i.e. external assignment or perception of gender.

None of this is denying that shame and gender are socially constructed. But there's a big, unacknowledged leap from "X is a social construct" to "X is only real if individual people choose to acknowledge it." If I say my friend John is wealthy because he has $10 million in the bank, I'm describing a social construct. Money is a social construct, and the concept of what qualifies as "wealthy" is a social construct. But it doesn't follow that John ceases to be wealthy if I stop treating him as though he is wealthy. Even I refuse to acknowledge John's wealth, he still has $10 million of purchasing power. Even if everyone who John knows pretends like he's broke, he's still not broke.

It used to be understood that some things (like being fat) were just inherently shameful by nature, irrespective of whether anyone was engaged in the act of "shaming." Now the idea is that things only become shameful as a result of the act of shaming, i.e. of being assigned shame by someone.

Or: once the shaming architecture was created it required little active buy-in or serious positive action from any individual. If everyone thinks Stacy is a slut then Stacy is just a slut and no one who believes or even says it stands out that much.

However, when progressives start to problematize or taboo shaming, it suddenly requires active reinforcement. Then John stands out when he says Stacy is a slut after they got the talk on "slut-shaming" and a bunch of people were cowed into submission.

Look at gender: progressives love to raise practical issues with enforcing gendered bathrooms ("will you check genitals?") as if we haven't had a workable honor system up until they ruined it. Now, after some people have been convinced it's their human right to use the wrong bathroom, we need to enforce gender and we're gonna have uncomfortable things like false positives and some dude - or more likely a Karen - being a gatekeeping asshole.

I think this and other things like it point to why we’ve lost the good parts of shame — that we’ve lost any notion of an objective standard of good. You cannot call something shameful and bad unless the society at large has an idea about that thing being bad. I cannot fat-shame unless the whole of society thinks that being fat is bad and bad enough to call people on. If I or, for that matter you, don’t see fatness as bad, there’s no way to make you feel bad about being fat. It’s then down to personal taste, and loses power as a judgement. Or if I attempt to shame you for expressing positive views of HBD. If you think it’s the right opinion to hold, shaming doesn’t work.

It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

There seems to be a clear dividing line between your examples; we can shame people for things they choose to do but not for things they didn't choose.

Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?

Absolutely fucking not. This just ensures every conflict goes to whoever has the socially acceptable position and therefore bigger mob, not the best arguments. Without anonymity, one side still gets to abuse and belittle people; the "socially acceptable" side.

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

Uh, old school shame societies could and did destroy lives over things they considered shameful.

Now many of these things had more natural negative consequences than say, privately using a racial slur. But when progressives complain about lives being ruined over taboo violations in the past, most of the time the life ruining came from social consequences and not from natural consequences. Figures canceled for being gay in the 80’s died of aids at high rates, but not 100%. The only thing that’s really changed is what’s taboo.

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

This is also a possible explanation. We've gone from shaming bad behavior to shaming good behavior.

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