Nornagest comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 15 February 2011 11:43:11PM *  11 points [-]

Nutrition's also entangled with a horrific mess of body-image issues and cultural expectations. These aren't essential to any of the strains of cultural criticism that they intersect, so I don't think I'd call them ideological; but because they're so closely linked to people's identities, they exhibit a lot of the problems we associate with ideology.

Same goes for related fields like exercise. The mind-killer here doesn't metastasize like ideology tends to, but it's every bit as pathological if you accidentally end up poking one of its hosts in the wrong spot.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:40:33AM 1 point [-]

Nornagest:

Nutrition's also entangled with a horrific mess of body-image issues and cultural expectations. These aren't essential to any of the strains of cultural criticism that they intersect, so I don't think I'd call them ideological; but because they're so closely linked to people's identities, they exhibit a lot of the problems we associate with ideology.

Well said. As you say, "ideological" is not a very accurate term here, but I meant it to also encompass this sort of thing.