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ciphergoth comments on Akrasia and Shangri-La - Less Wrong
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The whole business is an unbelievable nightmare realm. I'm slightly underweight, but I've watched several people close to me go though all sorts of struggles with it, and I can understand how much everyone wants to be the one who's going to deliver the secret that can help all these people achieve what they want.
On the engineering level, only one fact matters: change in energy stored equals energy consumed minus energy expended (as The Hacker's Diet observes). But acting on that equation looks like the hardest thing in the world. Did you read "Breakdown of Will"? His explanation of why in some ways dieting is harder than kicking heroin made sense to me, though I don't think much in that book besides the fact of hyperbolic discounting is empirically verified.
Bullshit.
There's a hundred factors being identified that e.g. control how fast energy gets sucked up by fat cells leaving you weak and still hungry, versus how long energy is left available in the bloodstream leaving you feel strong and ready for running. Or e.g. how much nutrient that passes into your mouth is absorbed in the intestinal tract. Or e.g. when exercise creates new lean muscle that burns more calories on its own.
The fact that change in fat equals fat stored minus fat consumed is technically true but useless: I deny its connotations. The idea that the calories you take in through your mouth are the "input" and that the exercise you do to burn them is "output" and that the balance between the two is all that matters is false but appealing bullshit that plays hell with the bodies and feelings of every poor fat person who tries to live that lie. Between input and output there is a giant complicated machine and yes the exact form of the input and the exact form of the output and what you ate as a kid and all sorts of other things affect it.
This is precisely how I feel about most self-help and productivity advice, except substituting "mind" for "bodies", and "procrastinator" for "fat person". ;-)
The fact that it feels precisely identical should not be surprising at all - precisely the same mechanism is occurring in both cases.
Mental health/productivity and physical health/fitness are both situations that have a massive social stigma, and a massive incentive for people who are (to use Msr. Yudkowski's term) "privileged" to function in a manner that allows them to achieve socially acceptable results by performing socially acceptable procedures.
The fact is, our culture (and regrettably, ESPECIALLY the sort of people who are attracted to lesswrong) thrives on the sort of "but I'm better than that!" thinking that leads directly to prejudiced bullshit about "willpower" and "not trying hard enough" and "wanting to fail" and "ugly fat fucks" and "useless social retards" and "parasite welfare queens". Because, as a species of social primate thrust into a constant high-stress environment, those of you who are constantly receiving cortisol/dopamine signals that you're just-barely-making-it-but-look-out-for-that-tiger need people to feel superior to.
I find that LW has much less of the prejudiced bullshit you describe than mainstream culture, probably because of the common belief that willpower isn't magic.
Interesting. I would very much like to also find that LW has much less of that prejudiced bullshit. Can you think of a way that our behaviors might lead to our differences in experience, so that I might experience more of the LW that you are experiencing?
I suspect that I've got some tendency towards "glass half full"-- I tend to notice the good stuff.
Also, LW being better on the issue than the mainstream doesn't mean that LW is consistently good, just that it isn't resoundingly awful.
This update from CFAR is a good example on LW of supporting skillful means rather than just blaming people who aren't doing well.
True on the other hand, social pressure is a great way to fight akrasia. On the other hand telling people they have no control over their actions is a great way to promote akrasia.
Social pressure works to oppose akrasia.... except when it doesn't work. Some people end up crushed rather than pushed in a useful direction.
See also
Do you use the second person with the intention of not including yourself in that group?
If so, I'm interested in what you believe distinguishes your group from the group you're addressing.
I'm a useless social retard, and thus am no longer receiving signals that I'm just-barely-making-it. I am instead receiving I'm-fucked-and-need-to-self-terminate-for-the-sake-of-the-pack signals.
Um, no you're not? This is the theory of Group Selectionism. There is no chemical signal that your brain will naturally produce corresponding to "suicide for the good of the pack". You can arrive at that idea through other means, but there is almost certainly no low-level chemical signal which corresponds to suicide for the good of the group; everyone who might've passed that gene on to you died out for the sake of the people that didn't have it.
If the pack contains blood relatives, yes it can. See Kin Selection.
Well, if you manage to consistently gain weight while consuming fewer calories than you expend, this has interesting consequences for thermodynamics.
It's not bullshit, but it's also a red herring for the actual question, which is how to actually reduce body weight in a sustainable, healthy manner.
There's a difference between "false" and "bullshit". You could argue that the equation is bullshit without saying that it was strictly false.
The thing is, it's both bullshit and strictly false. There's always some amount of food energy that goes in your mouth and comes straight out the other end, and this varies based on a host of poorly-understood factors.
Edit: I'm arguing against the extremely common assertion that energy eaten = energy expended + weight gain, which is what your original comment looked like. If you're talking strictly about fat cell behavior, you're right, but this is rather useless information for the purpose of weight loss. What SoullessAutomaton said was energy eaten >= energy expended + weight gain, which is indeed true.
If you have diabetes mellitus you lose a lot of glucose in your urine. Certainly that simple case complicates the energy in energy out dogma.
"out" would have been a better word than "expended" - to cover all the ways that energy can leave your body, including glucose in the urine.
Fair enough, but I think making the distinction explicit is important, and that Eliezer's edited post is better for it.
Call me superstitious, but I prefer to avoid anything that might get the Laws of Thermodynamics angry. You don't wanna mess with those guys.
Nah - they're cool
Edited to make clear the difference.
0 < bullshit(change in weight = consumption - exercise) < bullshit(you can lose a pound of fat a day with my new diet even though you expend less than a pound of fat's worth of calories in a day).
From personal experience, this is a great one, and seldom mentioned. Bodybuilding can be a better way to lose weight than running, even though the running burns more calories while you're doing it.
Edited following your edit.
I'm slightly worried about the way my laptop seems to have developed hands that are closing around my throat.
For those who need help with the joke.
edited to use proper LW linking