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Nick_Tarleton comments on Shortness is now a treatable condition - Less Wrong
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Is there a fact of the matter for it to be a lie about?
I think so. The traditional definition of an "illness", I think, is something that would cause you pain even if you were stuck on a desert island. Eg., even if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere, you still wouldn't want to get the flu. The point of the post is that the word "illness" is gradually being redefined more broadly, to "any physical/mental characteristic that society views as negative".
Eg., if I were 4'10", and stuck on a desert island, would it bother me to be 4'10" instead of 5'10"? I doubt it, unless it comes along with some sort of physical deformity; that's only a difference of 17%. Yet, if I were 4'10" now, it would probably have substantial negative effects, like earning less, and being considered generally less desirable in dating.
Good point. Not having any good video games is definitely an illness. As is not having food and not being immortal.
Not being immortal (in the sense of dying from old age) is obviously an illness, but hasn't been recognized as such by most outside the transhumanist community, because it's universal. It would be in a sane society, but there you go.
Nutrient deficiency of various sorts has always been recognized as an illness (eg., scurvy for lack of vitamin C), and this has since been expanded to include general starvation (ICD-10 code T73.0).
Lack of video games is a fact about the video games, not a fact about your body.
Is the set of all possible fatal illnesses itself an illness? I don't think so; that just seems like a type error. Lack of immortality is a bad thing that society ought to take steps towards fixing, but calling it an illness is just mixing up terminology.
You're right that death isn't a disease, it's an effect of disease. But aging itself is clearly a disease. When you get old, it's not like you're perfectly fine until you're age 80, and then you get struck down by a random sickness. The body itself degrades over time and loses various functions, like Lou Gehrig's disease.
I sort of agree with you, but a lot of illnesses are actually just vulnerabilities to certain other things. For instance, celiac is considered a disaease, but if a celiac patient never lets a grain of wheat pass their lips, they'll suffer no symptoms. As far as I know, AIDS won't kill you if you manage to avoid ever being exposed to any other infectious agent. A clinically significant phobia of spiders would not cause you any discomfort in a spider-free environment. Why couldn't we characterize "susceptibility to assorted causes of death" as an illness of its own?
The explicit cast provided avoids that problem.
It seems reasonable to describe ageing as an illness, particularly the symptoms that can be traced to a specific (and currently universal) biological flaw in cell reproduction.
Boredom is a problem with several solutions. If you actually have trouble functioning without video games specifically, yes, I'd classify that as an illness, along with any other problematic addiction.
You'd want to be immortal even if you were stuck on a desert island? I think we're assuming that "stuck" means "you are stuck and will stay that way".
Yes - you'd need to include more particular desert-island circumstances before I'd give up being immortal. Though I was assuming the 'stuck' was temporary, with a limiting case of having to swim / walk across the ocean to get home.
Clearly being stuck on a desert island is also an illness.
I hope you won't mind terribly if I steal this meme to use elsewhere.
Wikipedia says:
The key word is abnormal. If something is naturally common in humans, and doesn't impair any bodily functions, it shouldn't really count as a "disease". Like being short, as a matter of fact.
FDA has these views, as they only approve treatment of people with specific shortness-causing disorders, or within 1.2% of most extreme shortness (which is highly atypical). If people pursuing height expand this band to bottom 50% of current population, or bottom 80% of historical record, and redefine it as an illness, then it will be a lie, as a matter of fact.
Even better case is premature ejaculation, which is estimated to "affect" 30%-70% of American males. It doesn't impair any bodily functions. So it's factually incorrect to claim it's an illness.
Re: premature ejaculation, see The sooner the better. There is excellent therapy for those who desire it, but ironically the SSRI's that work so effectively to delay ejaculation were developed to treat depression, for which their effectiveness is the same as placebo. Yet, they are FDA-approved for treatment of the latter, not the former.
There always are the 1.2% shortest people. We'd end up making the whole population infinitely tall :-) They should define it as "at least X deviations below mean". I would support that.
Cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes affect way more than 1.2% of the population, and no one has ever had any trouble defining them as illnesses.
Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 3.56