= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Sly comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (343)
A very interesting article that made me think. I am not sure exactly where my thoughts line up with yours, so this will be primarily a means of clarifying what I think.
It seems to me that the entire purpose of framing obesity as a disease is a means to deflect the "blame" for obesity elsewhere. The disease-ness alone may not be the entire issue.
For example:
Person A bothers morbidly obese person B about trying to lose weight.
Person B says that obesity is a disease and not her fault.
Person A objects to obesity being a disease, in their mind person B is very much responsible for their obesity.
I do not think their dispute is about whether obesity is a disease but whether person B has obesity as a result of her own choices and actions.
To clarify:
Cancer patients are not responsible for cancer as the cause of cancer is separate from decisions that you make.
Yet we would say that someone with several STDs would be responsible if they were going around having frequent unprotected sex with several partners. The disease is a result of their own actions.
Obesity seems to fit more into the second example then the first.. Whereas even if it is a disease, society holds the person responsible for the disease.
Actually, many human behaviors like smoking and exposure to sunlight can cause cancer.
Ah true. I had something like brain cancer in mind when I wrote this. But yes, lung cancer in smokers would also fall into the second category.
Regret doesn't cure STDs.
I don't understand why this is downvoted to (as of my writing) -2. This actually seemed like a pithy response that raised a fascinating twist on the general model. It was a response to Sly saying:
The interesting part is that a given state can have different "choice and willpower" requirements for getting in versus getting out. This gets you back into the situation described by Holmes of punishing people in order to discourage other people from following their initial behavior, even (in the case of STDs) in the face of the inability of the punished person to "regret their way to a cure" once they've already made the mistake because they actually are infected with an "external agent" that meets basically all the criteria for disease that Yvain pointed out in the OP.
I downvoted it because I saw it as an irrelevent response to a claim nobody made or implicitly relied on. I was already interpreting Sly's comment in terms of "the situation described by Holmes of punishing people in order to discourage other people from following their initial behavior".