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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.
I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.
Not a defense of 'fat acceptance', but by normalization I think you mean positive acceptance? Obesity is, in any objective sense, normal in many communities in the United States.
Arguably obesity needs ... not necessarily more shame, it was and still is incredibly shameful in the eyes of most. I think a combination of explicit coercion, both towards the obese and towards those who create the conditions that lead to it (i.e. those who sell the food), is justified.
One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work. Being fat isn't exactly desirable in our society, and they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives. The whole point of the fat acceptance movement is to remove what they see as an unfair stigma.
I would say shame does work, but it needs to be more constant and even. You should feel shame evenly and not at distributed points.
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In the Year of Our Lord 2023, is that really the case? My sense from the doctors I know as friends is that they are absolutely loath to suggest, "Ya know, diet and exercise could help with..." because they know 1) Patients don't want to hear it, and 2) They aren't going to do it anyway.
I have other close friends who are obese and have proactively asked their doctor for help. Like pleading to have some direction, a support structure, a pathway to success. You know what the most phenomenal response I heard was? "Well, you're getting older... [next topic]."
In forums like this one, people constantly constantly lie about how weight loss/gain works. One bucket is CICO disbelievers generally (the true cranks). Others retreat to some form of, "Well, CICO may be true, but it's not helpful, so we really just need to point out that most people have absolutely no control over their weight." This is a complete lie that is far less helpful than explaining how things actually work and making suggestions for how to properly plan, build a support system, etc. It is not the people who are saying, "This is the way, walk you in it," who are doing the thing that doesn't work. It is the people who are perpetuating this lie, saying that the only choices are shame or doing nothing (or, I guess, like, chemicals or something that magically change CICO), who are doing the thing that doesn't work.
From my experience, that's completely not true. Every doctor suggests it as if it's a novel idea you've just never thought of. They don't have many suggestions beyond that, other than to tell you to go see a specialist, who also doesn't have any ideas to help.
The most frustrating thing I find is that doctors also don't want to tell you to just eat less, which is in my experience the only thing that'll cause you to lose weight. If you adopt a strategy of severely limiting calories or working with some strategy that works for you but is not officially approved (like being really strict but having cheat days), then they think you have an eating disorder, and they warn you about that. They tell you to just lose weight, but don't approve of options that actually work for you.
Perhaps we need some way of gathering data by sending a bunch of obese testers to doctors. Sort of in any event, either response is equally useless, though I can understand why doctors would opt for either path, given their experiences/incentives. What I think we can both probably agree on is that they are not likely to give real, actionable advice that can be directly pursued to success, and that is the real shame.
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This really strikes me as wishful thinking. Richard Hanania made the comparison with smoking. In the West, the rate of smoking has plummeted since the 1960s. I'm sure raising awareness of the dangers associated with the smoking played a significant part of that, but I don't think anyone can really deny that a major cause of this shift was simply social: smoking has more widely come to be seen as a filthy habit, which imposes a social cost on those who choose to do it. In much of the world it's illegal to advertise tobacco products, and legislation or local rules make it less convenient to do so.
If obesity was a truly immutable trait, criticising a fat person for being fat would be like criticising an amputee for having one leg. Fat acceptance activists are incentivised to downplay the mutability of their condition, in order to present it as something that they are powerless to prevent.
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This argument is simply untrue. I would eat far more and be fat if I would not be ashamed of being (potentially) fat. Another big factor is health impact, and more extreme fat deniers deny also health dangers ("healthy at any size" insanity)
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It does work for some people, you can definitely find cases of people losing the weight, and they often frame their motivation in terms of self-image and shame.
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
I know multiple people personally who have lost weight in the long term, and I myself am sitting quite stably at about 15kg below my peak weight (though I will probably try to gain weight again soon). The notion that it's impossible is just ludicrous.
I will say that I think some very morbidly obese individuals have permanently wrecked their body's ability to regulate hunger and weight. I give credit to their tales of constant, unbearable hunger and strict dieting for slow results. But such people are still the minority, and their situation is still ultimately the result of their decisions.
I agree that the obesity crisis is not a result of a sudden decline in morals, and I've said the same thing myself. And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us. The refusal to engage morally with this issue is tying people into knots, forcing them to insist that weight loss is impossible or to search for villains in the hecking sneed oil, because otherwise people would be responsible for themselves. And you know what, if Linda wants to eat ice cream and Harry wants to drink beer, go ahead. It's not important to me that everyone looks like a model. But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).
With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.
I don't find anything specifically virtuous about my own losing weight. In fact I sometimes worry that it's wrong for me to do so because I find it quite easy.
Yes, if you are given a moral choice and choose wrong, it is your responsibility, not the fault of society for giving you the wrong meds, or for making ice cream that tastes too good. Weight gain is not some biological inevitability. People a hundred years ago did not find their homeostasis point at gaining 2lbs every year. Not because of morality, but because of lifestyle and diet habits that are quite in reach for the average person today.
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What? Human bodies are not excempt from the laws of thermodynamics. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. Period. And you won't gain weight if you don't put more calories in than you burn. You have to actively do something in order to stay or become obese.
Now, is weight-loss extremely hard psychologically? Oh, absolutely. My own weight struggles can attest to that and I'm not even obese.
But it isn't weight-loss that's impossible. It's getting people to not overeat that's impossible. Two very different things. To pretend they're identical is irresponsible.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Obesity is defined as being above the threshold of a BMI of 30. Imagine a population where currently everyone has a BMI of 25, but it starts to increase by 1 every year from now. What would the corresponding graph like the one you linked look like? It would be 5 years of no change, until in year x+5 obesity "explodes" to 100%, despite the fact that the actual causal trend has been going on linearly for 5 years!
If we look at actual weight itself to avoid thresholding effects like I described above, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the 70s at all, they're right on trend. There's other data like discussed in this that indicate that the surge in weight had already begun around WWI, subsided a bit around the Great Depression and accelerated again in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
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It's important because the message is wrong-headed. Telling people that there is nothing they can do when there definitely are very simple things they can do (move more, eat less) is cruel because it leaves people to their misery.
Also, I don't see how it's necessarily wrong to cast some moral judgement on fat people. It doesn't mean I suddenly cast them out of the circle of persons who should be afforded curtesy, respect or dignity. It means I disapprove of behaviour that is harmful to themselves and others. I also disapprove when someone smokes indoors or farts in an elevator. And that disapproval might actually motivate them to break the cycle.
I know that our culture has elevated enabling people with all sorts of miscalibrated habits to a twisted virtue, but being nice and doing the right thing aren't always identical.
Very interesting. Are there any studies with a larger cohort?
It is eminently possible. Eat fewer calories than you consume. If your point is that it's impossible to maintain unhealthy eating and exercise regimens without becoming fat, then you're right. But there is no law of nature that says you have to stuff your face. Your argument about drastically reduced metabolism after increased physical activity is interesting, but I'll have to see more evidence.
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Really?
It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.
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Unless you're Eliezer, in which case diet and exercise are without value.
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A lot of relatively skinny people I know regularly shame themselves if they start to get a little fat. I’d almost say everyone does that whose skinny or fit.
I'm a (comparative) walrus, and let me tell you, I also shame myself. I avoid mirrors, going out, clothes shopping, and photographs, because just seeing my face makes my gorge rise.
The problem is that the shame turns into a ball of self-hatred and impotent rage in my gut and does not effectively spur me to take effective action; feeling bad about myself makes me more likely to turn to unhealthy foods for a hedonic bump-up, rather than hedonically-unsatisfying but long-term productive things like home cooking (yes I know home cooking can be delicious but I do not derive joy from the process and am currently marginally unskilled, so there's a learning curve that needs to be overcome) and exercise (which is painful, sweaty, and only reminds me how much less capable my body is now than it used to be).
Instead of shame, I need to find an emotional motivator which is a more effective spur to action rather than just recrimination.
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I felt pretty gross at 90+ kg. Not that I don't have body issues at sub-80 too.
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I can confirm that. As soon as you can look in the mirror and flex something you get this boost of motivation to improve your shape. I think it's much harder for obese people to get motivated, because going from 82 down to 72kg means your looks actually improve, but going from 160kg down to 140kg, that is, losing twice as much weight, might improve your quality of life (like, being able to wipe your own ass), but the person in the mirror is not that different: he's the same disgustingly fat person, just with some extra skin folds. Most people can't stay motivated simply by shame and the number going down for long enough.
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Seconding this. I'm not particularly skinny but I'm not overweight either. However if my weight goes above my ideal target by more than 1kg I immediately tell my self "cut down on your eating" multiple times a day whenever I make food related choices.
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I started feeling self conscious after hitting a BMI just a little under 24 (and immediately worked to drop it back down to the 22-23 range), it makes it difficult for me to even imagine how the morbidly obese can live with themselves.
It sucks. You know what makes suck-y feelings go away, at least for a little while? Delicious unhealthy foods. Not trying to justify it, just explaining the vicious cycle.
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I think different, more potent and coercion-adjacent flavors of shaming (more common in the past?) would be more effective than shame is today, so I don't want to say 'shame doesn't work', but it's true that the very real shame a fat person would feel today or a few decades ago didn't work. But your local grocer or mcdonalds refusing to sell you triple-decker burgers because you're 350lbs (or just not stocking the product at all) might!
Also, whatever the mechanisms, many young and higher-class subcultures in americans have managed to mostly eliminate obesity among their ranks. I don't think this is mostly just by selection, and, while higher IQ and other values do contribute, I don't think you need to be 115+ iq to prevent yourself from being obese. Maybe those values will diffuse?
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