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Tim Worstall, if a PhD economist has pleasurable dreams about winning the lottery, that is exactly what I would call "failing to understand probability on a gut level". Look at the water! A calculated probability of 0.0000001 should diminish the emotional strength of any anticipation, positive or negative, by a factor of ten million. Otherwise you've understood the probability as little symbols on paper but not what it *means* in real life.
Also, a good economist should be aware that winning the lottery often does not make people happy - though one must take into account that they were the sort of people who bought lottery tickets to begin with.
In that case, wouldn't you say that anyone who suffers from akrasia (which is pretty much everyone at some time) has a failure of understanding on a gut level? My subconscious mind doesn't seem to understand that it's a bad idea to eat a box of pizza every night; so I have to rely on my conscious mind to take charge, or at least try to.
Occasionally even health-conscious people eat stuff like pizza, which is arguably the equivalent of buying the occasional lottery ticket. In each case, the conscious mind is aware that one is doing something counter-productive. In the case of a lottery ticket, one is enjoying the fantasy of being free from his day-to-day financial worries,even though there is essentially zero chance of actually succeeding. In the case of pigging out, one is enjoying the feeling of being stuffed with tasty food, even though there is essentially zero chance that there will be a food shortage next week which will justify his having pigged out.
What's wrong with healthy people (in particular, gluten-tolerant) eating pizza?
It's high carb? It gives me heartburn (probably gluten intolerance?). If you are trying to go on a cut i.e. want a six pack it's a bad idea.
And why is that a problem? You seem to be implying that a low-carb diet is The Only True Way which looks doubtful.
The claim was about "health-conscious" people, not body-image-conscious.
Because of the negative effects it has on your insulin response, leading to pancreas fatigue and type 2 diabetes.
I was under the impression that a low body fat percentage was healthier. Perhaps I'm wrong. I must admit my beliefs are influenced by aesthetics. I'd bet on low abdominal fat been the optimal via a low-ish carb diet.
We know that low-carb is effective at losing weight. The jury is still out on whether low-carb is healthy in the long term.
Similarly, while it is clear that being obese is unhealthy, I don't think that there is any evidence to show that being very thin (having low body fat %) is healthier than being normal.
See here, though it uses BMI rather than body fat %.
Yes, and it does show the expected U-shaped curve.
BMI is pretty useless as an individual metric, though.
That was the point. (I also incorrectly remembered that the minimum was shifted a bit to the right of what's usually called “normal weight”, i.e. 18.5 to 25, but in the case of healthy people who've never smoked it looks like that range is about right.)
Depends on what you mean by normal?
The usual: 10-20% BF for men (you can have less if you're actually an athlete), 20-30% for women.
Oh you mean healthy not normal? Few men are at 10-20%.
In which case you should take “healthy people” to mean those who are not trying to go on a cut because they already have a six-pack.
The main problem is that for a large percentage of people, pizza is a super-stimulus. i.e. it tastes far better that what was normally available in the ancestral environment so that it's difficult to avoid over-consuming it. Of course the health dangers of over-consumption of food are well known.
If you think pizza is a bad example, feel free to substitute candy bars or coca-cola.
I don't think this is true. Or, rather, if you think that pizza is a super-stimulus food, most food around is super-stimulus (with exceptions for things like stale cold porridge).
Super-stimulus foods are ether very sugary or very salty. Pizza is neither.
What pizza is, it's a cheap easily-available high-calorie convenience food. That makes it easy to abuse (=overconsume), but doesn't make it inherently unhealthy.
I disagree, depending on how you define "most food around" of course. If you are talking about food that you can go into a restaurant or fast food joint and buy, then I would have to agree with you. If you are talking about the dinners mom cooked back in the 70s, then I would not agree.
Well do you agree that pizza tastes really good? Do you agree that (generally speaking) small children LOVE pizza?
It's unhealthy for the reasons I stated earlier. But let me ask you this: What is a food or drink which you do consider to be unhealthy?
I define it as food I see and eat in my home as well as food in the restaurants. I like yummy food and I see no reason to eat non-yummy food.
You seem to think that any tasty food is super-stimulus food. That's not how most people use the term.
Depends. There's a lot of bad pizza out there. You can get very good pizza but you can also get mediocre or bad pizza.
I don't see why this is relevant. Small children in general also like pasta and even you probably wouldn't consider it a super-stimulus food.
The dose make the poison. In small amounts or consumed rarely, pretty much no food or drink is unhealthy (of course there are a bunch of obvious exceptions for allergies, gluten- or lactose-intolerance, outright toxins, etc.).
With this caveat, I generally consider to be unhealthy things like the large variety of liquid sugar (e.g. soda or juice) or, say, hydrogenated fats (e.g margarine, many cookies).
Or fatty.
Shouldn't pretty much any cooked food be a super-stimulus considering the relevant ancestral environment and why we intricately cook food in the first place?
Super-stimuli could be different for different age groups. I've never seen anyone love plain pasta, they like their ketchup and sauce too.
Not sure about that. Fat makes food more tasty (mostly through contributing what's called "mouth feel"), but it doesn't look like a super-stimulus to me.
Well, depends on how do you want to define "super-stimulus". I understand it to mean triggering hardwired biological preferences above and beyond the usual and normal desire to eat tasty food. The two substances specifically linked to super-stimulus are sugar and salt.
Again, super-stimulus is not the same thing as yummy.
I'm not sure it's that simple -- chocolate is more of a super-stimulus than fruits for most people.
Did our preferences mostly evolve for "tasty food" or for raw meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts etc? I thought super-stimulus usually means something that goes beyond the stimuli in the ancestral environment where the preferences for the relevant stimuli were selected for.
I don't understand how you draw the line between stimuli and super-stimuli without such reasoning.
I guess it's possible most our preferences evolved for cooked food, but I'd like to see the evidence first before I believe it.
ETA: I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with super-stimuli, so let's drop the baggage of that connotation.
According to what I read in Scientific American, the human digestive system has evolved to require cooked food; humans can't survive on what chimpanzees and other primates eat.
Oh God! Please never utter those two words in the same sentence where an Italian can hear you. I was about to barf on the keyboard! :-)
Then again, people (other than me, at least) don't usually binge on flat bread without toppings, either.
Are you saying that plain pasta and bread without toppings are super-stimuli for you? Are you not even using oil? :)
I can understand the bread part if it's fresh, but as far as I'm concerned pasta doesn't taste much like anything. Perhaps I've just eaten the wrong kind of bland crap.
I binge on (fresh) bread without toppings, but I find pasta much more enjoyable with ketchup or some sort of spice.
It's ok! I'll prepare a tomato, garlic, and basil sauce with some Merlot cooked in, stat!
Do you still believe that fatty equals not good for you? Plus who the hell puts ketchup anywhere near pasta?
No. Why would you think that?
People who torture kittens for fun. Both are an acquired taste.
It doesn't?
I'm not sure what kind of food you keep in your home, but thinking on the fact that a huge percentage of American adults are overweight or obese, I would probably agree that "most food around" is super-stimulating.
Well you asked me why I consider pizza to be a problem. If you don't want to use the word "super-stimulus," it doesn't really affect my point. Pizza tastes good enough to most people that it's difficult to resist the urge to over-eat. That's my answer.
Oh come on. Please use the Principle of Charity if you engage me. When I assert that "pizza tastes really good," you know what I mean.
Well small children are naive enough to come right out and express a strong preference for the foods they love. And they don't beg their parents for pasta parties.
Well let me put the question a slightly different way: Do you agree that there exist certain foods which taste really good; which a lot of people have a problem with, which in many ways are like an addiction?
From what I remember, I did occasionally beg for pizza around that age, but if I'm modeling my early childhood psychology right that had as much to do with cultural/media influence as native preference. Pizza is the canonical party food in American children's media, and its prominence in e.g. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably didn't help.
Media counts for a lot! Show of hands, who here found themselves craving Turkish delight after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe without actually knowing what it was?
Do you agree that part of the reason kids beg for pizza is that it tastes really good?
Let me ask you this: If you gave lab rats a choice between pizza and oatmeal, which do you think they would choose?
Anecdote time! There was a period when I loved pasta but wouldn't eat pizza because I had not yet grasped that Tomatoes Are Awesome. Also that book made me classify Turkish Delight as a drug, and Drugs Are Bad don'tcha know. And then when I finally got some I realized it also tastes bad.
Sigh. So you really think that the cause of obesity is that food is just too yummy, too attractive?
Before you answer, think about different countries, other than US. Japan, maybe? France?
Please try to avoid the typical mind fallacy. People around me don't seem to have the urge to overeat pizza. A lot of them just don't like it, others might eat a slice once in a while but no more. Nobody is obsessed with pizza and I doubt many will agree that "pizza tastes really good" -- they'll either say "it depends" or shrug and say that pizza is basic cheap food, to be grabbed on the run when hungry.
No one -- not a single person around me -- shows signs of having to exert significant will power to avoid stuffing her face with pizza.
Presumably there is a logical "AND" between you sentence parts. Depends on what do you mean by "taste really good" (see above about pizza) and by "a lot".
People generally overeat not because the food is too yummy. People generally overeat for hormonal and psychological reasons.
What is your hypothesis for why obesity rates have exploded to such an extent in the last several decades?
Absolutely. (And too available.)
I've been thinking about this question pretty intensely for a couple years now.
Where did you get the impression that I am going just by my own experiences?
Roughly what percentage of the people around you are overweight or obese? Of those who are overweight or obese, do they seem to have the urge to eat any foods or types of foods to excess?
For purposes of this exchange, I will define "taste really good" as being at the high end of "yummy." Since you used the word "yummy" before, you presumably know what you meant.
I will define "a lot" as more than 5 million Americans.
Ok, now do you agree that there exist certain foods which (1) are considered to be very yummy by a majority of Americans; (2) which a lot of Americans have a problem with (in the sense that they have difficulty controlling their consumption of these foods); and (3) which are like an addiction (in the sense that some people feel compelled to overconsume such foods despite knowing or having received professional advice that they are consuming too much food)
I'd guess it's got to do with affordability and convenience as well as taste. If I had to cook my own food or spend a sizeable fraction of my monthly wage on it, I would be much less likely to eat it unless I'm really hungry, no matter how good it tasted.
I would agree, but the same thing could be said about pretty much any super-stimulating good or service. If a dose of heroin were available for a nickel at any convenience store, then probably a lot more people would abuse heroin.
There are foods which, even when I'm not particularly hungry, once I start eating them it'd take a sizeable amount of willpower for me not to eat inordinate amounts of; these include chocolate, certain cookies, certain breakfast cereals, but not pizza. This doesn't mean I don't like pizza: I'm generally very happy to eat pizza for dinner, unless I've had copious amounts of pizza in the last few days.
I do agree that problem foods are not the same for everyone. However if you talk to people who have difficulty controlling their eating, the same foods and kinds of foods seem to come up pretty regularly . Chocolate is one of them.
As a side note, I get the sense that among people who have difficulty controlling their eating, some tend to have more difficulties with sweet foods like chocolate, cookies, cake, etc. Others seem to have more problems with foods which are fatty but not sweet, like potato chips, hot dogs, bacon, nachos, french fries, lasagna, and yes, pizza. Even so, the tastiness of all of these types of foods seems pretty universal.
I don't think this is at all accurate as a generalization. Insofar as any food can be said to qualify as a superstimulus, some of the best contenders are savory foods which are high in fats and starches, which in our ancestral environment would have been valuable sources of calories, calorie overabundance being far too rare a problem for us to be evolutionarily prepared against.
Peanut butter is a good example of a food which would have been an extreme outlier in terms of nutrient density in our ancestral environment (not for nothing is it the main ingredient in a therapeutic food to restore bodily health to people afflicted by famine) which is extremely moreish, despite not being especially high in either sugar or salt. Cheese is a similar case.
Not an outlier at all. Paleo hunter-gatherers certainly ate nuts. And meat (not the lean muscle meat, but the whole-animal meat including organs and fat) is probably higher in nutrient density.
Nuts would have been one of the richest sources of macronutrients by density in our ancestral environment, and they wouldn't have been available in great quantity, which is probably in large part why they're such an addictive food.
(My girlfriend has a nut allergy, and since I've started having to keep track of nut content in foods, I've noticed that the "snack" aisles in grocery stores can be divided, with fairly little remainder, into chips, pretzels, and nut-based foods.)
Liver is higher in micronutrients than nuts, or just about anything else for that matter, and I suspect that it avoids being a superstimulus to our senses because it would be one of the few food sources in our ancestral environment that it's actually possible to get a nutrient overdose on (many species' livers contain toxic concentrations of vitamins, not to mention the various toxins it's filtered out of its host's blood.) In terms of macronutrients, nuts have a higher calorie concentration than any animal tissue other than lard (a cut of flesh which is as calorie dense as nuts would have to be about two thirds fat by weight.)
Lard of course is not known for being a very tasty food on its own (it's also very incomplete nutrition,) but is used extensively in cooking foods which people have a pronounced tendency to overeat.
It can be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food).
Except that, empirically speaking, there are lots and lots of people who actually can and do consume candy bars, soda pop, or pizza in moderation.
Which makes me wonder about the actual mind-mechanisms behind "superstimulus", since we seem to be so very good at learning to deal with it.
(Yes, I do have a hypothesis regarding obesity epidemics that's more complex than "Everyone in whole countries is getting caught in a superstimulus feedback loop with their eating habits.")
It strikes me as an overstatement to say that "we" seem to be very good at dealing with it. In most Western countries, the rates of overweight and obesity are quite high and/or rising. Surely a large majority of those people are failing to eat some kinds of food in moderation. And I doubt those people are overconsuming fresh vegetables and oatmeal.
Anyway, do you agree that there is a problem with a decent percentage of people overconsuming foods which tend to be far richer in calories/salt/fat/sugar/etc. than what was typically available in the ancestral environment? And if you agree, what do you think is the cause of the problem?
I think that "decent percentage" is imprecise, but there's definitely something going on that's making people fatter.
It could be bad habits. It could be superstimulus effects (though I'm suspicious regarding the lack of professional literature on a concept that primarily seems to be LessWrongian rather than empirically studied). It could be food additives.
I don't know yet; I need to see some actual studies to make a judgement.
Putting aside the "why" question, do you agree that if you look at people who are overweight or obese, their overconsumption problems tend to focus on certain types of foods, which tend to be very high in calories?
Overconsumption means "high in calories" almost (if not quite) by definition. Someone who eats raw cabbage nonstop simply isn't going to get to overconsumption levels.
So that means your answer is "yes"?
Also, it sounds like you are saying that among people who have difficulty resisting the urge to eat, there is no particular preference for foods like ice cream, french fries and cookies over foods like cabbage, tomatoes, and broccoli, it's just that the former foods are more likely to cause obesity because they are higher in calories.
Do I understand you correctly?
I like to know how you'd justify this claim. Remember that pizza has been available in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century and has been popular since at least the 1950's, yet the obesity epidemic has ony happened relatively recently.
Also, potato chips were invented in the 19th century; ice cream has been around for ages; ditto for french fries. Of course, obesity has also been growing as a problem over the years too.
I think what's changed is that these types of foods have become much more easily available in terms of cost, convenience, and marketing.
I don't think cost has changed much. Reportedly, in the 1950's a burger cost 15 cents (about $1.3 in today's money) and a slice of pizza cost 25 cents (about $2.2 in today's money). Convenience might have changed but not by a lot, and that may just be because people now just go out for food more often than making it at home.
However, marketing could be the big factor here.
What do you mean by that exactly? How many burgers could the median worker in 1950 buy with their hourly wage, and how many can the median worker today buy with theirs?
That's a very very complex (and controversial!) topic because 'median worker' or 'median household' is not well-defined. Many households during that era were single-income (not nearly as many as popular opinion would suggest, but still far more than today). There's also the fact that there were more married couples and more children than today. You also have to consider that food hasn't made up the bulk of household expenditures during modern times. Today food accounts for 10-15% of the average family's living expenses, and from the limited information I was able to find, it was about 30% in 1950.
To answer your question, I honestly don't know.
Just based on my general observations, I would have to disagree. Just walking down the street in New York, there are lots of places where you can get a large slice of pizza for $1.00. That's about 8 minutes of work at the minimum wage. Back in 1985, I remember the minimum wage was $3.35 per hour, so 8 minutes of work would have been about 45 cents. I don't recall ever seeing a large slice of pizza for 45 cents back in the 80s.
Also, during the 80s, I remember spending about $5.00 for a typical deli lunch consisting of a turkey sandwich and a can of soda. Twenty-five years later, it costs about $6.00 and there are still places where you can get it for $5.00. Or less.
Besides that, EITC has increased the effective wage.
It also occurs to me that portion sizes have perhaps increased. If you a Google image search for "portion" "sizes" "over" "time," you get all kinds of charts making this claim. I wasn't around in the 1950s, but it does seem that, at a minimum, soda sizes have increased. I vaguely remember that it was common to get a 10 ounce bottle of soda 30 or 40 years ago. I haven't seen a 10 ounce bottle in years; it seems that 16 ounces is the standard single serving bottle size and 20 ounces is pretty common too.
Here's an article which seems to agree:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129685
So if you look at things in terms of dollars per calorie, the decline in the price of prepared foods may very well be even more dramatic than it seems on the surface.
I guess it depends on whether you eat it for dinner, or as a snack in addition to whatever else you'd normally have for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I suspect he's thinking of the latter.
(Likewise, I guess that so long as you're not lactose-intolerant a large cone of ice cream isn't particularly unhealthy as modern foods go, if it's all you're having for lunch.)
Bad analogy. Eating pizza (or any other high-energy food that you happen to like) is intrinsically rewarding. You don't do it all the time because you trade off this reward with other rewards (e.g. not being fat and hence ugly and unhealthy). Buying a lottery ticket is not intrinsically rewarding if you don't win, which happens with a negligible probability.
Well, buying a lottery ticket may be intrinsically rewarding if you suffer from gambling addiction, which means that you've screwed your reward system and by gambling you are doing a sort of wireheading. That's pretty much like doing drugs.
At the level of conscious preferences, you don't want to do that.
I don't know about you, but when I buy a lottery ticket, I usually end up having a few nice daydreams about hitting the $400 million jackpot or whatever. So I would say that for me (and probably many other people), it's intrinsically rewarding.
FWIW I'm not a gambling addict.
Agree, that's pretty much the point. Of course some forms of wireheading are so dangerous that even occasional indulgence is a bad idea, for example heroin and cocaine. Other forms are less dangerous so that occasional indulgence is safe for most people.
I don't know, I've never bought lottery tickets, I may only gamble token amounts of money at events where it is socially expected to do so.
Maybe I'm wired differently than most people, but what do you find rewarding about it?
We are not talking of something like tasty food or sex, which your ancestors brains were evolutionary adapted to seek since the time they were lizards, gambling opportunities did not exist in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you need some high-level cognitive processes to tell a lottery ticket from any random piece of paper.
It's true that people have difficulties reasoning informally about low-probablity high-payoff (or high-cost) events, which explains why gambling is so popular, but gambling is also one of the few high-uncertainty scenarios where we can apply formal methods to obtain precise expected (monetary) value estimations. Once you do the math, you know it's not worth the cost.
But obviously you knew that already, so my question is, how can you still daydream about winning the lottery without experiencing cognitive dissonance?
As mentioned above, the pleasant daydream of hitting the big jackpot.
I disagree; for example one can easily envision a hypothetical caveman deciding whether to hunt for a big animal which may or may not be in the next valley.
I don't know. But I can tell you that it's a pleasant feeling. Let me ask you this: Do you ever daydream or fantasize about things which (1) you wish would happen; and (2) are extremely unlikely to happen?
Sure. But would this hypothetical caveman still decide to hunt if he was pretty much certain that the animal was not there?
Uh, sexual fantasies aside (which I can blame my "reptile brain" for), I don't think so.
I'm not sure, it would probably depend on his assessment of the costs, benefits, and risks involved. In any event, I don't see the point of your question. You asserted that gambling opportunities did not exist in the ancestral environment; that's not so.
I think you are pretty unusual; my impression is that most people daydream as far as I know.
But let me ask you this: Do you agree that there a decent number of people like me who are not gambling addicts but still occasionally buy lottery tickets? If you agree, then what do you think is the motivation?
That's just decision making under uncertainty. I was talking about proper gambling, such as buying lottery tickets. My point is that you need some high-level ("System 2") processing to associate the action of buying a ticket to the scenario of winning vast riches, since these are not the sort of things that existed in the ancestral environment.
But if you understand probability, then your System 2 should not make that association.
Given army1987's comment I suppose it is possible to get that association from social conditioning before you understand probability.
On further reflection I think I overstated my claim. I do speculate/daydream about fictional scenarios, and I find it rewarding (I used to that more often as a child, but I still do it).
Therefore I suppose it is possible to counterfactually pretend to having won the lottery using suspension of disbelief in the same way as when enjoing or creatiing a work of fiction. But in this case, you don't actually need to buy a ticket, you can just pretend to have bought one!
Yes.
Habit created by social conditioning looks like a plausible answer.
You either are using "System 2" with a narrower meaning than standard or are making a factually incorrect assumption. (There were no cars in the ancestral environment, and some people have driven cars while sleepwalking.)
I still have no idea what your point was. "proper junk food" didn't exist in the ancestral environment; "proper pornography" did not exist in the ancestral environment either. So what?
Do you need System 2 processing to associate an erotic story with sexual release? To associate the words "Coca Cola" with a nice sweet taste?
Well when you were a child, did you play with toys, for example toy trucks ? And was the play more enjoyable if it were a somewhat realistic toy truck as opposed to, say, a block of wood?
It's not very plausible to me. For example, if it were credibly announced that all of the winning tickets for a particular drawing had already been sold, I doubt that occasional lottery players would buy tickets for that drawing.
I used to daydream a lot, in particular of winning the lottery, when I was a child, but I'm pretty sure it's something I was taught to do by family, teachers and mass media. (The first lottery with really big jackpots in my country had just been introduced, and everybody was talking about what they would do with all that money.)
It's not like everything is either evolved or relies on cold emotionless System 2 only. I mean, it's easy for people to get hooked on TVTropes, but it's not like it fulfils any obvious ancestral desire.
For what value of ‘intrinsically’? It sure isn't rewarding for a paperclip maximizer, and IIUC you seem to be implying that doing drugs isn't intrinsically rewarding for non-addicted people.
I think for the value of "biologically hardwired into humans".
(I was going to say ‘then so is alcohol’ (specifically, the feeling of being tipsy), then I remembered of this claim and realized I was probably about to commit the typical mind fallacy.)
I'm not quite sure about this; there are certainly humans who find pizza inedible for cultural reasons. I suppose you could argue that the composition of pizza is such that it would appeal to a hypothetical "unbiased" human, but that might still be problematic.
I think the argument is really for "any ... high-energy food that you happen to like", not for culture-specific things like pizza.
Do I have to specify that I was talking about humans?
Non-addicted people generally understand that addictive drugs like heroin or cocaine can give them short-term rewards but potentially hamper the satisfaction of their long-term preferences, hence they assign a negative expected utility to them.
On the other hand, eating pizza in moderate amounts is consistent with the satisfaction of long-term preferences.