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Given that obesity is sorta culture war related and in the news a lot, I figured this story would be relevant: Weight-Loss Stocks Soar After Obesity-Drug Study Spurs Investor Frenzy
I am more convinced than ever that these drugs are not only the future of wright loss, but similar to Paxil, is also going to a part of culture too and another tool or crutch to mitigate the downsides of modernity, except instead of social anxiety , it's too much food. We're sorta collectively inflicted this on ourselves, as victims of our own success. The pendulum if progress has swung so far towards abundance that we need modern technology just to try to undo it.
I think ultimately, even with the drugs, there’s just no getting around the need for better choices.
In part, I think this is an aesthetic horror for me. We aren’t becoming more emotionally resilient by deadening our emotions, nor are we going to solve our food issues by artificially turning down our hunger thermostat.
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 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.
Keep in mind that they won't be chemically fit, they'll just be chemically less fat. Ozempic face is already a thing:
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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