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Multiheaded comments on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (313)
Moderately surprising corollary: so society IS treating fat people in a horribly unjust manner after all. Those boring SJW types who have been going on and on about "fat-shaming" and "thin privilege"... are yet again more morally correct on average than the general public.
Am now mildly ashamed of some previous thoughts and/or attitudes.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? Is this a failure of measurement (e.g. standards for what count as "obesity" are dropping), has the Western diet changed our genetics, or something else altogether?
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
Environmental changes over time may have shifted the entire distribution of people's weights upwards without affecting the distribution's variance. This would reconcile an environmentally-driven obesity rate increase with the NYT's report that 70% of the variance is genetic.
The obvious cross comparison would be to look at populations distributions of weight and see if they share the same pattern shifted left or right based on the primary food source.
Hypothesis possibly reconciling link between impulse control and weight, strong heritability of both, resistance to experimental intervention, and society scale shifts in weight:
Body weight is largely determined by the 'set point' to which the body's metabolism returns, hence resistance to intervention. This set point can be influenced through lifestyle, hence link to impulse control and changes across time/cultures. However this influence can only be exerted either a) during development and/or b) over longer time scales than are generally used in experiments.
This should be easy enough to test. Are there any relevant data on e.g. people raised in non-obesity ridden cultures and then introduced to one? Or on interventions with obese adolescents?l
I dunno, ask the OP. I was merely pointing out that in the event that obesity has a more or less significant hereditary/genetic component, the social stigma against it must be an even more horrible and cruel thing than most enlightened people would admit today.
(Consider, for example, just the fact that our attractiveness criteria appear to be almost entirely a "social construct" - otherwise it'd be hard to explain the enormity of variance; AFAIK the only human universal is a preference for facial symmetry in either gender. If society could just make certain traits that people are stuck with regardless of their will, and cannot really affect, fall within the norms of "beauty" in a generation or two... then all the "social justice"/"body positivity"/etc campaigns to do so might have a big potential leverage on many people's mental health and happiness. So it must be in fact reasonable and ethical of activists to "police" everyday language for fat-shaming/body-negativity, devote resources and effort to press for better representation in media, etc.
Yet again I'm struck by just how rational - in intention and planning, at least - some odd-seeming "activist" stuff comes across as on close examination.)
A possible hypothesis is that the genes encode your set point weight given optimal nutrition, but if you don't get adequate nutrition during childhood you don't attain it. IIRC something similar is believed to apply to intelligence and height and explain the Flynn effect and the fact that young generations are taller than older ones.
Flynn effect?
Sure. Fixed. Thanks.
I've moved away slightly from SJW attitudes on various matters, since starting to read LW, Yvain's blog and various other things, however, I've actually moved closer to SJW attitudes to weight, since researching the issue. The fact that weight loss attempts hardly ever work in the long run, is what has changed my views the most.
[OT: just noting that one could be "away from SJW attitudes" in different directions, some of them mutually exclusive. For example, on some particular things (racial discrimination, etc) I take the Marxist view that activism can't help the roots of the problem which are endemic to the functioning of capitalism - except that I don't believe it's possible or sane to try and replace global capitalism with something better anytime soon, either... so there might be no hope of reaching "endgame" for some struggles until post-scarcity. Although activists should probably at least try and defend the progress made on them to-date from being optimized away by hostile political agendas.]
Actually, I still suspect that the benefiits in increased happiness and mental health would still be better than the marginal efficiency of pressuring lots of people to try and lose weight even if it depended in large part on personal behaviour. And social pressure is notoriously indiscriminate, so any undesirable messages would still hit people who can't or don't really need to change.
Plus there are still all the socioeconomic factors outside people's control, etc.
Whether or not this result is correct, society is definitely shaming the wrong people: some perfectly healthy people (e.g. young women) are shamed for not being as skinny as the models on TV, and not much is being done to prevent morbid obesity in certain people (esp. middle-aged and older) who don't even try to lose weight.
(Edited to replace “adult men” with “middle-aged and older” and “eat less” with “lose weight”.)
Yeah, and so it looks more and more that (as terribly impolite it might be to suggest in some circles on the Internet) we need much higher standards of "political correctness" and a way stronger "call-out culture" in some areas.
Most activists are neither saints nor superhumanly rational, of course - but at least in certain matters the general public might need to get out of their way and comply with "cultural engineering" projects, where those genuinely appear to be vital low-hanging fruit obscured by public denial and conformism.
A social justice style which includes recruiting imperfect allies rather than attacking them.
I'm pretty sure that call out culture needs some work. It's sort of feasible when there's agreement about what's privileged and what isn't, but I'd respect it more if there were peace between transgendered people and feminists.
From a place of general agreement with you, looking for thoughts on how to go forward:
Are second-wave feminists more transphobic than a random member of the population? Or do you think second-wave hypocrisy is evidence that the whole second-wave argument is flawed?
Because as skeptical as I often am of third-wave as actually practiced, they are particularly good (compared to society as a whole) on transgendered folks, right?
I don't think the problem is especially about transphobia, I think it's about a harsh style of enforcing whatever changes people from that subculture want to make. They want to believe-- and try to enforce-- that the harshness shouldn't matter, but it does.
This may offer some clues about a way forward.
IME "call out culture" feminists are very anti-transphobia. Second wave feminists aren't so interested in getting people to check their privilege.
If that's true, then I don't understand NancyLebovitz's criticism of "call out culture" or the relevance of her statement to Multiheaded's point.
I think that "calling out" types can be extremely harsh and unpleasant - I agree with NancyLebovitz there. However, I don't get what she meant by the problems between feminist and trans people leading her to respect it less.
I mean that call out culture presents itself as an optimal way for people with different levels of privilege to live with each other, and I think that intractable problem between second wave feminists and transpeople is evidence that there are problems with call out culture, even if .what second wave feminists have been doing is technically before the era of call out culture.
There used to be a really good analysis of the problems with call out culture at ozyfrantz.com, but that blog is no longer available.
I see. Personally, I'm struggling with the proper application of the Tone Argument. In archetypal form:
A: I don't like social expression X (e.g. scorn at transgendered).
B: You might have a point, but I'm turn off by your tone.
A: I don't think my tone is your true rejection.
But in practice, this can devolve into:
B: Social expression X isn't so bad / might be justified.
A: B deserves to be fired / assaulted / murdered. (e.g. a mindkilled response)
B: Overreacting much?
which is clearly problematic on A's part. Separating the not-true-rejection error by B from the mindkilled problem of A is very important. But the worry is that focusing our attention on that question diverts from the substantive issue of describing what social expressions are problematic and identifying them when they occur (to try to reduce their frequency in the future).
The fact that second wave feminists exercised cisgender privilege to be hurtful to the transgendered seems totally distinction from "Tone Argument" dynamic.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130412201542/http://ozyfrantz.com/2012/12/29/certain-propositions-concerning-callout-culture-part-one/
I'm pretty sure "trying to eat less" is exactly the wrong thing to do. Calorie restriction just triggers the starvation response which makes things worse in the long run.
Change what you eat, not how much.
I'm pretty sure "Force feeding yourself as much fat as you can keep down with the aid of anti-emetics, taking glucose intravenously while injecting insulin, estrogen and testosterone and taking a β2 antagonist" is closer to "exactly the wrong thing to do".
Physics is still relevant. The only way to lose weight (outside of surgery) is to spend more energy than you take in. The problem, of course, is that your energy intake and your energy output are functions of each other plus a lot of other things besides (including what's on your mind).
I still think that for most people (aka with an uninformative prior) the advice of "Eat less, move more" is a good starting point. Given more data, adjust as needed.
It's not that unusual for people to regain what they lost plus more after a failed diet.
I've replaced “eat less” with “lose weight” because I don't want to go into this, but see Lumifer's reply.