Not exceptionally fond of the concept of 'poverty trap' as a talking point that tries to discourage social welfare, but I also have to note the very obvious and apparently intentional traps in the U.S. at least around - specifically - long-term disability once that is necessary for self-sustenance; including attempting substantial gainful activity on disability; marrying someone while on disability; accepting gifts of any sort while on disability; and trying to save money on disability. Some of the specifics have thankfully improved, but there's just a bizarre number of gotchas that do aggressively penalize in some way most improvements in life situation, apparently as fallout from means testing.
(Oh, and you potentially qualify for sub-minimum wage jobs if you have a disability which impairs your ability to do that specific job, which ... well, I'm not sure how this changes the equilibrium; it gives options and also makes you more exploitable if the wage decrease is more than the impairment.)
Generally the hypothesis is that most people will get more sodium in their diet than they crave with their natural desire, if they just eat the food of least resistance (cheapest or easiest, most shelf stable, whatnot). A lot of the sodium that gets into your diet is not so richly activating your taste buds as table salt applied to taste.
What we want overall with salinity is to preserve it at a level that's correct for us, because we take it in through our diet and excrete it through various processes like sweat. Excessive salt consumption doesn't directly affect your overall salt and water balance that much, because the body has hormonal regulation of various mechanisms to keep it stable - it's presumably the overworking of these mechanisms that causes health issues, which is much preferable than it causing issues directly if you've seen the effects of the wrong salinity on cells in a petri dish under a microscope.
(The effects on whatever cells I was looking at, which started at a neutral salinity: Raising the salinity (saltier) caused them to shrivel up and dessicate like raisins; lowering the salinity (less salty) caused them to explode.)
Yeah, it'd be helpful to know what heavy lifting is going on there, because I feel like there's a pretty strong distinction between 'frozen burger patties that are otherwise indistinguishable from unfrozen burger patties' and 'TV dinner'.
Thanks for the reference! I'm definitely confused about the inclusion of "pre-prepared (packaged) meat, fish and vegetables" on the last list, though. Does cooking meat or vegetables before freezing it (rather than after? I presume most people aren't eating meat raw) actually change its processed status significantly?
Suppose my intuition is that the 'conscious experience' of 'an iPhone' varies based on what software is running on it. If it could run a thorough emulation of an ant and have its sensory inputs channeled to that emulation, it would be more likely to have conscious experience in a meaningful-to-me way than if nobody bothered (presuming ants do implement at least a trivial conscious experience).
(I guess that there's not necessarily something that it's like to be an iPhone, by default, but the hardware complexity could theoretically support an iAnt, which there is it is something that it's like to be?)
That certainly seems distinct from brain mass, though (except that it takes a certain amount to implement in the first place). I'd expect similar variation in feeling pain by becoming different neurologies of human; I know there are many reported variations in perception of felt pain inside our species already.
But that's in the limit. A function of electron = 0, ant = 1, cockroach = 4, mouse = 300 fits it just as well as electron = 0, ant = 1, cockroach = 2, mouse = 2^75, as does electron = 0, ant = 100, cockroach = 150, mouse = 200.
"Moral weights depend on intensity of conscient experience." - Just going to note that I've no particular reason to concede this point at the moment, so don't directly consider the next question a question of moral weight; I'd rather disassociate it first:
Is there ... any particular reason to expect intensity of conscious experience to grow 'super-additively', such that a tiny conscious mind experiences 1 intensity units, but a mind ten times as large experiences (since you reject linear, we'll step up to the exponential) 1024 intensity units? Given our general inability to exist as every mass of brain, what makes this more intuitive than no, marginal, or linear increase in intensity?
Personally, I would be actively surprised to spend time as a lower-brain-mass conscious animal and report that my experiences were (exceptionally) less intense. Why do our intuitions differ on this?
Yes, but also that there might not actually be a specific new thing, a detrimental thing, to gesture at.
If root causes of obesity existed all along, and changes in the modern Western diet revealed the potential for obesity in our region rather than actively causing it, looking for root causes specifically in things that have changed may not work out if the things that have changed are not the root causes.
(I.e., it's a seemingly useful constraint on looking at the solution space, that might not be true -- and not so useful a constraint if it isn't.)
Yeah, or even just not also on disability.
https://cdrnys.org/blog/disability-dialogue/the-disability-dialogue-marriage-equality/ discusses some of the issues around here at the time it was written, if you're curious.