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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Actually, technologies allowed us making many terrible choices that in the past would have surely killed us. I'm certain that people became more care-free outside and at various worksites after consequences of unlucky cut changed from likely gangrene or tetanus to basically nothing.

Conservatives of course are for all technological wonders apart from the modern ones. Virtuous(ones who got lucky at genetics roulette) people will lose their status gained from being able to remain fit in the modern food environment and these disgusting(visually ergo personally) fatsos will get help to adapt their brains evolved for completely different circumstances to the food abundance of current time. Horrible! I will tell you more, when new drugs appear that will directly boost your metabolism rates and not making you want to eat less, people, regardless of their virtue, will become more hedonistic, healthier and happier, as they already did many times before.

I don’t think hedonism makes people long term happier. If it did, our kids would be happier than we are because they have more cool stuff. Except that we’ve never had so much loneliness or depression and anxiety. Something like 25% of the US population is on a drug for emotional regulation despite our abundant wealth and our higher levels of education.

I'm certain that people became more care-free outside and at various worksites after consequences of unlucky cut changed from likely gangrene or tetanus to basically nothing.

The opposite - life was just cheaper back then, and people tolerated workplace death rates that we wouldn't. The CDC reports a 90% decline in workplace death rates between 1933 and 1997 (and a bigger drop for specific dangerous industries like coal mining). The trend in the UK is even more stark, but I can't find data before the 1980's online. In the current year, workplace deaths in the US are mostly on-the-clock shootings and car crashes - i.e. not deaths amenable to improvements in traditional health-and-safety.

and these disgusting(visually ergo personally) fatsos will get help to adapt their brains evolved for completely different circumstances to the food abundance of current time.

I actually wonder how it'll go. Just like plastic surgery can't really make you younger but instead gives you a distinct post-op look, and Adderall doesn't just restore executive function to baseline, chemically fit people may become a very intriguing new phenotype. Are fat people today unjustly maligned for their looks? Or do they really have systematically different characters which will largely remain even without all the extra adipose tissue? We shall see.

chemically fit people may become a very intriguing new phenotype.

Keep in mind that they won't be chemically fit, they'll just be chemically less fat. Ozempic face is already a thing:

But some have also pointed to an unanticipated side effect: “Ozempic face.”

The buzzy term, coined by a New York dermatologist, describes the gaunt or hollow look of sagging facial skin that can appear when people lose excess fat in their cheeks or neck.

Weight loss always has some unappealing visual side effects, but I would expect weight loss with no improvement in actual underlying fitness to have a particularly unappealing aesthetic. Naturally, there are already plastic surgeons capitalizing on it!

Adderall doesn’t just restore executive function to baseline

What exactly do you mean by this? That Adderall can boost executive function to superhuman (or super-non-enhanced-human) levels?

@2rafa had a decent writeup on this but, as it happened, deleted. In short: no, it's not like having enhanced executive function, it's like being obsessive. I've written a bunch on this too.

There's the entire "Ozempic Face" thing, but that seems to be less a result of the drug itself and more of a result of rapid weight loss.

Character wise, it's fair to say most fat people have bad posture and less attention to hygiene and style, though you can imagine causality working either way.

Character wise, it's fair to say most fat people have bad posture and less attention to hygiene and style, though you can imagine causality working either way.

Honestly having lost about 20 KG from 130~ KG to 110KG at 6'3 and going from 'I need to actively hunt for clothing in my size that isn't a tent' to actually being able to walk into a reasonable department store and buy clothing off the rack that is semi-fashionable, suddenly style became a lot easy to participate in.

Also Big Man's Stores rarely do discounts on their upsized nice clothing, whilst getting to the point of buying from a standard department store means I've suddenly got an ability to participate in deals, clearances and the like. Buying 'nice jeans' would previously have cost about $150 AUD per pair, now it's closer to $50 if I'm at all patient.