Could you explain that without the metaphor of intentionality? Fat cells don't have their own germ line, so I can't reason about what they "want" the way I can reason about what a virus "wants". Thanks!
I think that was just a colorful way of saying what the rest of the post elaborated on--that the body may prioritize fat storage higher than other energy uses that the person associated with the body may prefer.
Also, fat cells are biologically active. Obesity is caused by hormone activity and fat cells provide inputs into that biological process as well as being part of the outcome of it.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese - the body gets energy by breaking down muscle - including heart muscle - in order to preserve the fat.
Regarding AGW:
I am not an expert on climate. I am not qualified to judge the evidence myself. If someone tried to present me with evidence for or against AGW, I would not be able to tell the difference between real evidence and numbers pulled out of someone's ass. All I can do is appeal to scientific consensus, and the consensus on AGW seems solid. If you have a problem with the consensus view, telling me about it will get you nowhere; take it up with the experts, as Stephen McIntyre of ClimateAudit appears to have done.
So, yeah, majoritarianism is my explicit justification for accepting AGW. And if you're not an expert, then rejecting AGW will cause me to think you're being overconfident and a bit silly
The phrase "the consensus" is slippery as there is a large gap between what the science tells us and what is claimed about it in third-hand accounts - even large, well-funded, and well-intentioned summaries of summaries. As we go from published scientific papers to what's in the IPCC main report to what's in the IPCC "Summary for Policymakers" to what's in the press release that accompanies it to what's in the news articles written from that press release, at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible uncertainty decreases.
The phrase "AGW" is slippery too. Nobody denies that humans do some things that have the effect of warming the planet. For instance, we pave roads and build cities and cut down forests. It's very hard to word a survey such that it excludes that sort of thing from the measured percentage of scientists who "think humans are warming the planet" and the people taking such surveys have little incentive to try. So attempts to quantify consensus tend to end up with large meaningless numbers. There is a fair amount of dissent within the IPCC - some of the scientists whose work formed a basis for it disagreed with the conclusions thereby generated - Chris Landsea would be a notable example - but the main problem is that the case presented within the IPCC reports isn't particularly alarming. To become alarmed, to think that AGW is urgent rather than simply interesting and probably worth further study to confirm and understand better, is to go beyond even what "the consensus" actually supports.
So AGW skepticism can be considered well-founded if one defines the terms carefully enough. Nonetheless, I don't think AGW is something one can reasonably assume everyone here has "seen the folly of". I'm sure some here have a worldview that renders the whole prospect dubious but I doubt many are followers of ClimateAudit and RealClimate or have even read the IPCC reports. Reflexive climate skepticism is common; informed climate skepticism is rare.
Do we have any randomized trials of the effects of weed legalization?
I don't think such a trial is possible; laws have to be uniform over large geographic areas to function, so noise from demographic effects drown out the data, and no government would allow its laws to be determined randomly for study purposes, anyways.
I have often thought new laws at the federal level should be treated much like new drugs are treated by the FDA. They should go through rigorous testing according to clear criteria. The proposer of a new law should specify in advance what effect they hope this law would have on the world and how we might measure this effect. Then when the law gets passed, a few small states (or perhaps counties) are initially chosen as the test group - the law only takes effect in those areas. To control for the placebo effect, we should also have a few regions in which the law is announced to take effect but is not, in practice, enforced. Then after ten years we look at the data and see whether the states with the new law are better off than they were before and better off than the states without it - better off specifically according to the previously-specified metric to a statistically significant degree.
Only after it passes that test, is the law extended to the entire nation.
Remember: "if it saves one life, it's worth it."
Did alcohol prohibition in the US actually fail? We have much lower levels of alcohol use, and thus presumably of alcohol abuse, in the US than in Europe. Perhaps this is the legacy of Prohibition.
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
current national alcohol consumption per capita alcoholic liver disease per capital
Assuming unlimited willpower, burning more calories than you consume will reduce body weight (c.f. thermodynamics, &c.). Easy!
The issue is not how to reduce weight, per se, it's about how to do so while also suppressing hunger pangs and other physiological and psychological effects of wanting more food than you're getting.
As an aside, exercise itself isn't actually particularly useful unless you devote a lot of time to it, as the calorie burn rate is fairly low. Raising the basal metabolic rate via anaerobic exercise may have value, though.
Another issue is how to reduce fat weight per se. One of the eye-opening parts of Gary Taubes' talk was the fact that somebody can be simultaneously emaciated and obese. Fat cells want to survive and sometimes will do so to the detriment of their host.
Another Taubes insight: when it comes to vertical growth, we posit one causal direction. We say that a teenager eats a lot because he's a growing boy; we do not say he's growing taller because he eats a lot. It's accepted that the body of a teenager has somehow decided for itself that it wants to get taller and appetite/metabolism will accommodate that need.
Perhaps horizontal growth isn't all that different.
Tried it. Didn't work. Welcome to the unfair universe.
Good thing you don't have that attitude about FAI.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn't have anything to do with weight loss.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I've read an interesting book that says aerobics don't actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you're doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more... which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn't dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I'm currently experimenting with one of his simpler "beginner" routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I'm only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I've not done it every day this week. I'll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one's results, and that "tried it, didn't work" isn't a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn't overweight was the time where I didn't have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I've observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you're not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you're getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate... even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I've had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they're all simultaneously satisfied, you're not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself "metabolically challenged" is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to "tweak" in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then... I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental - I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it's an observer affect, such as the fact that I'm paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there's a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
I've read an interesting book that says aerobics don't actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Title?
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn't work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn't go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
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One could imagine someone with a suitable archeological background reaching the conclusion that there used to be one or more interventionist gods around. These gods either lost interest in us or died out prior to modern times. If you take testimony from Biblical times seriously, it doesn't prove beings exist now who are immortal or omnipotent or able to perform magic, but it does suggest some people thought such beings existed in the past and if you take their testimony as more than good storytelling you might conclude the existence of a sort of trickster deity a few thousand years ago., one that made a lot of false claims or had fase claims made about it, but that also could do a few cool tricks based on abilities no longer evident today.