Thanks for this. It's always flattering when people take the time to write about one's views. A couple of thoughts upon reading it.
1) I think the concept of "reflective equilibrium" is useful. I tend to think that at reflective equilibrium, few people would want blue hair, androgyny, etc. There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex. Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness. You seem to see this as a matter of simply being open or not open to experience. I'm pretty open to experience when it comes to drugs, being outgoing, meeting new people, new ideas, etc. I think the pronoun stuff and blue hair reflect openness to experience plus something else that I don't think is healthy. Was Don Draper in Mad Men "open to experience"? I think so, but people would recognize there's something very different between him and what we mean when we use that term today. That said, you are right that I find polyamory, etc., sort of disgusting and would not want it to be widespread no matter what, as per the pronoun/genocide piece.
2) You underestimate the extent to which my worldview is libertarian, or at least don't give it enough attention. We can talk about my instincts, but actual policy opinions are where the rubber meets the road, and there I'm probably more libertarian than 99% of the population. My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. So it would be a mistake I think to exaggerate the links between my thought and right-wing authoritarianism. I'm happy to live and let live mostly. But I think you are touching on something real when it comes to conservatives more generally, where all the tribal insanity is part of the joy of politics. Yet I'd consider many of those people on the "right" to be political opponents. I therefore think that this probably works better as an essay about conservatives more generally than just me, with my writing being a sort of window into how others see the world.
> There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I think it's implicitly equating "adaptations that increased evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment" with "actions I'd like to do in the present environment". We may have evolved adaptations like "impress others", and in the past being gender-nonconforming was not an effective way to do that, but social norms can change, and what our instincts consider to be "validation" changes along with now. It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?
> Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness.
Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)
Regarding libertarian philosophy, I'm reminded of this quote from your article on quitting Twitter:
> I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long. I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
"It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?"
I don't think these things are infinitely malleable. Imagine two women, one goes to the gym, dresses nicely, and makes herself as conventionally attractive as possible. She feels attractive when looking in the mirror, and most people will treat her that way. Say there's another woman who lets herself go, dresses like a slob, gets covered in tattoos, etc., and she's fitting in to some community where that is the way to gain status. I think the second woman is living in a community that has found itself in a kind of mass delusion, and it will have to practice a lot of cognitive dissonance. Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control. When Woman 1 looks in the mirror, human nature is telling her she's doing something right and the world confirms that instinct, while Woman 2 knows she looks awful, and has to live a life of lies. She might find herself unable to attract a quality mate to stick around and will be left wondering why. In the long run she would be better off losing weight and taking care of herself.
"Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)"
Well it's interesting either way. Either accepting left-wing social views makes you miserable, or miserable people are drawn to those views. Either way, it suggests this stuff is maladaptive. I don't think we can blame discrimination, because the connection between LGBT identity and mental illness has actually gotten stronger over time as we've become more accepting of these things.
I think this is making a *lot* of assumptions about evolution that are not very well justified. Tattooing has been practiced for at least six thousand years. Fashion changes wildly enough that "dressing like a slob" doesn't have any sort of cross-cultural meaning. (Tightlacing, for example, has transformed from a routine practice among fashionable women to a niche fetish.) And it seems very unlikely to me that we evolved any sort of genetic distaste for oddly colored hair. It seems to me that tattoos, dress style, and hair color are all markers of one's ingroup/subculture. Your reaction to women with tattoos is no more universal than my husband's (anecdote: when I dragged him to a My Chemical Romance concert he said "oh! this is where the hot women hang out! I should pretend to be into MCR to get girls").
I also think that you're underestimating the value of catering to a niche in dating. A trans man (for example) is unlikely to be appealing to most people, but often does quite well among people who chase trans men. What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
I disagree with you about fat acceptance but that seems like a rather tangential point. :)
Seconded. On the male end, the "pretty boy" look has plenty of female admirers; lots of "teen heartthrob" actors and musicians are far from conventionally masculine. Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Prince, most "boy band" performers, Justin Beiber, and many other men that teenage girls go crazy for are more feminine than the conventionally attractive masculine man.
> What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
Well, obviously this ratio can't be smaller than 1 for everyone. And an easy way for it to approximately 1 is for everyone to have a preference for conventionally attractive people (of the opposite sex) and to be conventionally attractive themselves. That seems like a pretty good solution, if you don't mind changing other people's preferences.
I think you might be making a small mistake, where you are modelling people trying to optimize their expected value or average sexual attractiveness across a broad group of people, but unless you are constantly switching partners or are a movie star, what is actually more important is being very attractive to your potential partner, and not care about what that does to the average.
E.g. if your partner likes your tattoos then it doesn't matter if that tattoo makes you less attractive to 90% of the population. A spiky distribution might actually help you find you partner faster by weeding out people , yes?
This may be true, but it sure seems hard to distinguish between what's biologically nailed-down and what's cultural. I find hairy legs and armpits on women not very attractive, for example, but that's pretty clearly cultural--the natural state of womens' legs and armpits is hairy.
Facial asymmetry, markers of age or ill health, and lack of secondary sexual traits seem like they'd be unattractive most anywhere, but blue hair and tattoos seems no more likely to be universally unattractive than shaved legs and armpits.
The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance? An explanation of the fifth law I’ve heard is that a high mutagenic load, for instance acquired in the early embryonic stage due to whatever reason, could damage multiple genes otherwise not related in the final phenotype, such as, say, intelligence and health. Then, in this example, the just-so story develops that smart people are cognitively able to take better care of themselves.
> The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance?
No, it would say that genetic correlations are often due to stuff like vertical pleiotropy. For instance, smarter people might live in better neighborhoods, which are therefore healthier. This would lead to a genetic correlation between health and intelligence which would not be genetically confounded but instead would be an instance of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
There is an assumption here that I would disagree with: that "self-control" and "taking care of yourself" can treat or prevent obesity. As far as I can tell, it can't. There is only one safe medical intervention that reliably treats obesity, and that's bariatric surgery. Diet and exercise can make a fat person healthier, but it will not make them into a thin person who stays thin for five years. Trying to become thin is about as useful and effective as trying to become tall. Fat acceptance exists for the same reason disability acceptance exists: because blaming and shaming people for being fat is about as useful and moral as blaming and shaming people for being short, being deaf, or being wheelchair bound. Being fat sucks, but so does suffering from lots of other medical conditions that we don't blame the sufferers for.
I think you're just wrong here--the problem is that it's really hard, not that it doesn't work. I went from persistently-chubby to persistently-fit in my early adulthood and it was a fuckload of work. Both in an acute "lose the weight and transform my body" sense and a persistent "my life must forever be different than it was before to maintain this" sense. I eat differently and lift regularly and if I want to stay this way I must do so forever. And while I cannot prove it to you from here, it is as clear as day to me that virtually any person who took the same set of actions would get the same kind of outcome, barring some wild medical anomaly stuff
The problems are that to some people, this is just genuinely not worth it (is this a problem? perhaps only because we have insane cultural views about fatness, and with greater acceptance people could comfortably say "yeah, it's just not worth it to me not to be fat", while instead today they live in a perpetual internal tension from thinking they should lose weight but not actually wanting to). And also that "how do you make yourself make these changes" is a genuinely hard question that I cannot answer. It aint easy.
Perhaps it's more useful to think in terms of response to incentives. Most people could lose a fair bit of weight and get into much better shape if they were, say, put into basic training in the Army with lots of mandatory exercise and their food limited to get their weight down, with the consequences for failure being high. Similarly, people in combat sports with weight classes, actors and actresses, models, and the like all do, in fact, manage to diet down to much lower weights than they'd default to, since doing this is a requirement for their jobs. (Missing weight is a costly screwup for a pro MMA fighter.) And probably most of us could lose a lot of weight with really large incentives to do so--say, you're going to lose your job if you don't get your weight down to 240 lbs by this time next year.
But with the normal set of incentives for most people in modern US society, it seems really hard to get people to lose weight. That includes social incentives about being attractive, health incentives, etc.
One way to think about this is that stronger incentives to lose weight would decrease obesity/overweight. And indeed, this must be true, though it's not so clear how large the incentives would have to become before you saw a significant effect. And a lot of ways the incentives might work could be pretty nasty--if you decree you're going to fire all your fat employees Jan 1 2024, you're both going to put a lot of people through a miserable stressful experience, and also lose a bunch of employees who don't have to put up with that kind of crap.
This is one reason you might want to push back on the fat acceptance movement--you might worry that it will decrease the existing incentives to lose weight/stay thin, and that this will lead to even more obesity.
There's a kind of deadweight loss thing going on here, though. If there are high social costs to being overweight, and this gets some people to lose weight and be healthier/happier, that may make the world a better place. But if they don't cause much of a change, they just end up making fat people less happy, making the world a worse place.
And as with so many social science issues, especially those with a culture-war valence and many people occupying basically moral positions on factual questions, I despair of getting good information on this stuff. Perhaps we get the people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is healthy when it's not; perhaps we'll get people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is more bad for you than it really is, but I'm not confidence in my ability, as an outsider to the relevant fields, to distinguish between the folks lying to me for a good cause and the ones honestly trying to get to the truth.
Excellent comment. Yes it's about incentives. But not just incentives to lose weight, also incentives not to gain it in the first place. This could involve regulations on the food industry (both in terms of production and advertising), higher taxes on food with high fat and sugar etc. Of course a large part of it is culture, education, upbringing.
I would add that the "fat acceptance" movement seems to exclusively focus on acceptance of fat women. At the same time, male celebrities are shamed in the media for their "dad bod" if they put on even a little weight. Remember the reactions on that Elon Musk picture with him on a boat somewhere looking fat?
This leads me to believe the fat acceptance movement is largely another bs hypocritical offshoot of modern feminism, not wanting actual equality but rather special treatment.
You just seem to be saying that living healthily is hard in modern (Western) society, which I don't dispute. Our environment and society is not conductive to healthy living. There's too much easy and bad food, and our lives are too sedentary. Now we don't even have to get out of our house to get food delivered to us.
Of course staying fit takes constant work (or I would say, "effort"). That's what self control and taking care of yourself is. So what?
I never said any of this is easy. I find it hard too. I'm not super fit but I did go from never working out at all to working out 3-4 times a week and it made a difference. Yes, my life was "forever different" after I started working out. For the better! The problem I have with this whole "acceptance" theory is that in the end, being fat is unhealthy, being fat makes you less attractive (if you are dating it's going to severely limit your options, that's not a cultural thing IMO, but an evolutionary biology/psychology thing. We instinctively look for markers of health when dating although obviously physical atractiveness is not the only thing we look for) and it shows you have problems with self control and discipline. I'm not saying that to be judgemental. I myself have problems with those things but I'm not trying to pretend that that isn't an issue when it gets out of hand.
I admittedly drink too much alcohol.
Nobody is talking about being more accepting of alcoholism and telling people we have "insane cultural views about not being a raging alcoholic".
No, we would see an alcoholic has a problem that they'd better take care of.
Now of course it's everyone personal decision whether addressing that problem is worth the effort. But I think it's wrong to expect the world to treat you like what you're doing doesn't matter. You can't force the world to accept you. I think we're better off as a society if we're honest about things that are bad, without being too judgemental about it. Being fat (or an alcoholic) doesn't make you a "bad person". But it does have repercussions for your life that you have to take responsibility for.
We were not talking about "chubby" btw but about "fat" and "obese". I think those are different things.
Anyway, you said "taking care of yourself and self control can't treat or prevent obesity" when obviously they can and they do (or everyone would be obese). Now you say "yes they can but it's hard" to which I would say, I agree, of course it's hard! But so what?
As with alcoholism, there isn't one way to fix it. Some people get sober on their own, some go to AA, some take meds. All these are valid treatments or ways to tackle the issue. What I would disagree with is saying that the best solution would be to be "more accepting" of something that is obviously very damaging and bad for you. These days we are constantly arguing that society should just change to accept and affirm every "flaw" a person can have. I think that just leads to the death of personal responsibility. "Society" eventually pays for the healthcare costs too. Society has a stake in promoting healthy living of it's members. We can be more accepting of the person, sure, be less judgemental, but that's something different.
That seems like another outcome that can be achieved, but I don't think those people would be incapable of also not appearing fat, if their diet and exercise program went harder.
Not saying that's necessarily something they *should* do, I would expect for many people it isn't. Just that it's possible (and I think framing weight loss as a control process makes this clear--easy to see that for any weight a person can live at, there's some level of food intake + exercise that will achieve it)
Surely there may be certain medical conditions that make certain people fat beyond their ability to influence it by making different lifestyle choices. But most fat people are fat because they eat too many calories and don't get enough exercise. That is hardly rocket science. There are countless examples of people who made transitions in their life from being fat and generally unhealthy, to being fit, by changing their diet and exercising regularly.
Diet and exercise absolutely can improve the health of someone who is fat and unhealthy. What it can't do is make most people who *look* fat into people who *look* thin, and have them maintain that appearance for five years, because the amount of weight loss a person needs to improve their health is usually much less than the amount they need to go from "fat" to "thin".
Also, I think fat is the marker, but state of your arteries and blood chemistry is the thing you care about for health. (For attractiveness, OTOH, fat is the problem and arteries/blood chemistry isn't an issue.). Being fat is correlated with clogged arteries and high cholesterol and insulin resistance and such, but it's not the same thing.
Are there cultures/societies where being fat is sufficiently unpopular that very few people are fat? My guess is that there are. (I think in the military you can get kicked out for being too fat, and I expect the incentives there are strong enough to convince a lot of people to keep their weight down.)
One weirdness of all this is that in approximately every human civilization everywhere and everywhen before modern times, being at least somewhat fat was a marker for high wealth, status, and class. In modern US society, it's now the opposite, and being very fit is somewhat correlated with high wealth, status, and class.
The problem for nearly all our ancestors was that we might have a bad harvest and starve to death, or get deficiency diseases from having nothing to eat but one staple like white rice. The problem for us is that we might eat too much of the amazingly abundant tasty food all around us and get fat enough to endanger our health.
Well, not quite. Blue haired types have managed to convince a sizable chunk of the population that they're an oppressed class deserving sympathy, which isn't something that anybody thought about the KGB.
A universal way to gain in status is to show that you understand the social norms in your society and align with the high-status people. I don't know that blue hair and tattoos manages that, but I expect it works in some places. (And the look that knocks the girls dead on a cute 20 year old boy in college isn't going to work out the same way for a 50 year old man, or even for a cute 20 year old boy who works hanging drywall.)
I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong about the androgyny. Basically, the extremal functional cultures, Jewish and Japanese culture, both tend towards androgyny (though more masculine in the first case and more feminine in the second), while the least functional cultures seem to all exaggerate sexual dimorphism.
I think that tells me that if your culture is functional you want androgyny, although the causation might go both ways. Either way, it implies sexual dimorphism isn’t the reflective equilibrium.
Furthermore, having two gender phenotypes would be a weird coincidence. One instance of a set or many both occur regularly but sets of two are extremely uncommon.
Thanks for this. It's always flattering when people take the time to write about one's views. A couple of thoughts upon reading it.
1) I think the concept of "reflective equilibrium" is useful. I tend to think that at reflective equilibrium, few people would want blue hair, androgyny, etc. There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex. Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness. You seem to see this as a matter of simply being open or not open to experience. I'm pretty open to experience when it comes to drugs, being outgoing, meeting new people, new ideas, etc. I think the pronoun stuff and blue hair reflect openness to experience plus something else that I don't think is healthy. Was Don Draper in Mad Men "open to experience"? I think so, but people would recognize there's something very different between him and what we mean when we use that term today. That said, you are right that I find polyamory, etc., sort of disgusting and would not want it to be widespread no matter what, as per the pronoun/genocide piece.
2) You underestimate the extent to which my worldview is libertarian, or at least don't give it enough attention. We can talk about my instincts, but actual policy opinions are where the rubber meets the road, and there I'm probably more libertarian than 99% of the population. My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. So it would be a mistake I think to exaggerate the links between my thought and right-wing authoritarianism. I'm happy to live and let live mostly. But I think you are touching on something real when it comes to conservatives more generally, where all the tribal insanity is part of the joy of politics. Yet I'd consider many of those people on the "right" to be political opponents. I therefore think that this probably works better as an essay about conservatives more generally than just me, with my writing being a sort of window into how others see the world.
> There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I think it's implicitly equating "adaptations that increased evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment" with "actions I'd like to do in the present environment". We may have evolved adaptations like "impress others", and in the past being gender-nonconforming was not an effective way to do that, but social norms can change, and what our instincts consider to be "validation" changes along with now. It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?
> Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness.
Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)
Regarding libertarian philosophy, I'm reminded of this quote from your article on quitting Twitter:
> I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long. I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
"It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?"
I don't think these things are infinitely malleable. Imagine two women, one goes to the gym, dresses nicely, and makes herself as conventionally attractive as possible. She feels attractive when looking in the mirror, and most people will treat her that way. Say there's another woman who lets herself go, dresses like a slob, gets covered in tattoos, etc., and she's fitting in to some community where that is the way to gain status. I think the second woman is living in a community that has found itself in a kind of mass delusion, and it will have to practice a lot of cognitive dissonance. Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control. When Woman 1 looks in the mirror, human nature is telling her she's doing something right and the world confirms that instinct, while Woman 2 knows she looks awful, and has to live a life of lies. She might find herself unable to attract a quality mate to stick around and will be left wondering why. In the long run she would be better off losing weight and taking care of herself.
"Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)"
Well it's interesting either way. Either accepting left-wing social views makes you miserable, or miserable people are drawn to those views. Either way, it suggests this stuff is maladaptive. I don't think we can blame discrimination, because the connection between LGBT identity and mental illness has actually gotten stronger over time as we've become more accepting of these things.
https://www.cspicenter.com/p/born-this-way-the-rise-of-lgbt-as-a-social-and-political-identity
I think this is making a *lot* of assumptions about evolution that are not very well justified. Tattooing has been practiced for at least six thousand years. Fashion changes wildly enough that "dressing like a slob" doesn't have any sort of cross-cultural meaning. (Tightlacing, for example, has transformed from a routine practice among fashionable women to a niche fetish.) And it seems very unlikely to me that we evolved any sort of genetic distaste for oddly colored hair. It seems to me that tattoos, dress style, and hair color are all markers of one's ingroup/subculture. Your reaction to women with tattoos is no more universal than my husband's (anecdote: when I dragged him to a My Chemical Romance concert he said "oh! this is where the hot women hang out! I should pretend to be into MCR to get girls").
I also think that you're underestimating the value of catering to a niche in dating. A trans man (for example) is unlikely to be appealing to most people, but often does quite well among people who chase trans men. What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
I disagree with you about fat acceptance but that seems like a rather tangential point. :)
Seconded. On the male end, the "pretty boy" look has plenty of female admirers; lots of "teen heartthrob" actors and musicians are far from conventionally masculine. Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Prince, most "boy band" performers, Justin Beiber, and many other men that teenage girls go crazy for are more feminine than the conventionally attractive masculine man.
That tends to die away after the teenage years.
> What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
Well, obviously this ratio can't be smaller than 1 for everyone. And an easy way for it to approximately 1 is for everyone to have a preference for conventionally attractive people (of the opposite sex) and to be conventionally attractive themselves. That seems like a pretty good solution, if you don't mind changing other people's preferences.
I think you might be making a small mistake, where you are modelling people trying to optimize their expected value or average sexual attractiveness across a broad group of people, but unless you are constantly switching partners or are a movie star, what is actually more important is being very attractive to your potential partner, and not care about what that does to the average.
E.g. if your partner likes your tattoos then it doesn't matter if that tattoo makes you less attractive to 90% of the population. A spiky distribution might actually help you find you partner faster by weeding out people , yes?
This may be true, but it sure seems hard to distinguish between what's biologically nailed-down and what's cultural. I find hairy legs and armpits on women not very attractive, for example, but that's pretty clearly cultural--the natural state of womens' legs and armpits is hairy.
Facial asymmetry, markers of age or ill health, and lack of secondary sexual traits seem like they'd be unattractive most anywhere, but blue hair and tattoos seems no more likely to be universally unattractive than shaved legs and armpits.
Causation needn’t be directional from one trait to another. Two correlated traits can be caused or mediated by a deeper trait.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/a-fifth-law-of-behavioral-genetics/
Fifth law looks like a misunderstanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8Koujx2SJZDG5W5kb/if-everything-is-genetic-then-nothing-is-genetic
The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance? An explanation of the fifth law I’ve heard is that a high mutagenic load, for instance acquired in the early embryonic stage due to whatever reason, could damage multiple genes otherwise not related in the final phenotype, such as, say, intelligence and health. Then, in this example, the just-so story develops that smart people are cognitively able to take better care of themselves.
> The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance?
No, it would say that genetic correlations are often due to stuff like vertical pleiotropy. For instance, smarter people might live in better neighborhoods, which are therefore healthier. This would lead to a genetic correlation between health and intelligence which would not be genetically confounded but instead would be an instance of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
There is an assumption here that I would disagree with: that "self-control" and "taking care of yourself" can treat or prevent obesity. As far as I can tell, it can't. There is only one safe medical intervention that reliably treats obesity, and that's bariatric surgery. Diet and exercise can make a fat person healthier, but it will not make them into a thin person who stays thin for five years. Trying to become thin is about as useful and effective as trying to become tall. Fat acceptance exists for the same reason disability acceptance exists: because blaming and shaming people for being fat is about as useful and moral as blaming and shaming people for being short, being deaf, or being wheelchair bound. Being fat sucks, but so does suffering from lots of other medical conditions that we don't blame the sufferers for.
I think you're just wrong here--the problem is that it's really hard, not that it doesn't work. I went from persistently-chubby to persistently-fit in my early adulthood and it was a fuckload of work. Both in an acute "lose the weight and transform my body" sense and a persistent "my life must forever be different than it was before to maintain this" sense. I eat differently and lift regularly and if I want to stay this way I must do so forever. And while I cannot prove it to you from here, it is as clear as day to me that virtually any person who took the same set of actions would get the same kind of outcome, barring some wild medical anomaly stuff
The problems are that to some people, this is just genuinely not worth it (is this a problem? perhaps only because we have insane cultural views about fatness, and with greater acceptance people could comfortably say "yeah, it's just not worth it to me not to be fat", while instead today they live in a perpetual internal tension from thinking they should lose weight but not actually wanting to). And also that "how do you make yourself make these changes" is a genuinely hard question that I cannot answer. It aint easy.
Perhaps it's more useful to think in terms of response to incentives. Most people could lose a fair bit of weight and get into much better shape if they were, say, put into basic training in the Army with lots of mandatory exercise and their food limited to get their weight down, with the consequences for failure being high. Similarly, people in combat sports with weight classes, actors and actresses, models, and the like all do, in fact, manage to diet down to much lower weights than they'd default to, since doing this is a requirement for their jobs. (Missing weight is a costly screwup for a pro MMA fighter.) And probably most of us could lose a lot of weight with really large incentives to do so--say, you're going to lose your job if you don't get your weight down to 240 lbs by this time next year.
But with the normal set of incentives for most people in modern US society, it seems really hard to get people to lose weight. That includes social incentives about being attractive, health incentives, etc.
One way to think about this is that stronger incentives to lose weight would decrease obesity/overweight. And indeed, this must be true, though it's not so clear how large the incentives would have to become before you saw a significant effect. And a lot of ways the incentives might work could be pretty nasty--if you decree you're going to fire all your fat employees Jan 1 2024, you're both going to put a lot of people through a miserable stressful experience, and also lose a bunch of employees who don't have to put up with that kind of crap.
This is one reason you might want to push back on the fat acceptance movement--you might worry that it will decrease the existing incentives to lose weight/stay thin, and that this will lead to even more obesity.
There's a kind of deadweight loss thing going on here, though. If there are high social costs to being overweight, and this gets some people to lose weight and be healthier/happier, that may make the world a better place. But if they don't cause much of a change, they just end up making fat people less happy, making the world a worse place.
And as with so many social science issues, especially those with a culture-war valence and many people occupying basically moral positions on factual questions, I despair of getting good information on this stuff. Perhaps we get the people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is healthy when it's not; perhaps we'll get people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is more bad for you than it really is, but I'm not confidence in my ability, as an outsider to the relevant fields, to distinguish between the folks lying to me for a good cause and the ones honestly trying to get to the truth.
Excellent comment. Yes it's about incentives. But not just incentives to lose weight, also incentives not to gain it in the first place. This could involve regulations on the food industry (both in terms of production and advertising), higher taxes on food with high fat and sugar etc. Of course a large part of it is culture, education, upbringing.
I would add that the "fat acceptance" movement seems to exclusively focus on acceptance of fat women. At the same time, male celebrities are shamed in the media for their "dad bod" if they put on even a little weight. Remember the reactions on that Elon Musk picture with him on a boat somewhere looking fat?
This leads me to believe the fat acceptance movement is largely another bs hypocritical offshoot of modern feminism, not wanting actual equality but rather special treatment.
You just seem to be saying that living healthily is hard in modern (Western) society, which I don't dispute. Our environment and society is not conductive to healthy living. There's too much easy and bad food, and our lives are too sedentary. Now we don't even have to get out of our house to get food delivered to us.
Of course staying fit takes constant work (or I would say, "effort"). That's what self control and taking care of yourself is. So what?
I never said any of this is easy. I find it hard too. I'm not super fit but I did go from never working out at all to working out 3-4 times a week and it made a difference. Yes, my life was "forever different" after I started working out. For the better! The problem I have with this whole "acceptance" theory is that in the end, being fat is unhealthy, being fat makes you less attractive (if you are dating it's going to severely limit your options, that's not a cultural thing IMO, but an evolutionary biology/psychology thing. We instinctively look for markers of health when dating although obviously physical atractiveness is not the only thing we look for) and it shows you have problems with self control and discipline. I'm not saying that to be judgemental. I myself have problems with those things but I'm not trying to pretend that that isn't an issue when it gets out of hand.
I admittedly drink too much alcohol.
Nobody is talking about being more accepting of alcoholism and telling people we have "insane cultural views about not being a raging alcoholic".
No, we would see an alcoholic has a problem that they'd better take care of.
Now of course it's everyone personal decision whether addressing that problem is worth the effort. But I think it's wrong to expect the world to treat you like what you're doing doesn't matter. You can't force the world to accept you. I think we're better off as a society if we're honest about things that are bad, without being too judgemental about it. Being fat (or an alcoholic) doesn't make you a "bad person". But it does have repercussions for your life that you have to take responsibility for.
We were not talking about "chubby" btw but about "fat" and "obese". I think those are different things.
Anyway, you said "taking care of yourself and self control can't treat or prevent obesity" when obviously they can and they do (or everyone would be obese). Now you say "yes they can but it's hard" to which I would say, I agree, of course it's hard! But so what?
As with alcoholism, there isn't one way to fix it. Some people get sober on their own, some go to AA, some take meds. All these are valid treatments or ways to tackle the issue. What I would disagree with is saying that the best solution would be to be "more accepting" of something that is obviously very damaging and bad for you. These days we are constantly arguing that society should just change to accept and affirm every "flaw" a person can have. I think that just leads to the death of personal responsibility. "Society" eventually pays for the healthcare costs too. Society has a stake in promoting healthy living of it's members. We can be more accepting of the person, sure, be less judgemental, but that's something different.
I believe that, for some people, a diet and exercise program will make them significantly healthier and cause them to lose weight, but not *enough* weight to avoid *appearing* fat. (Hence the "fat but fit" movement/controversy - https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/fitness/strength-training/a33441206/rose-stokes-odd-one-out/ )
That seems like another outcome that can be achieved, but I don't think those people would be incapable of also not appearing fat, if their diet and exercise program went harder.
Not saying that's necessarily something they *should* do, I would expect for many people it isn't. Just that it's possible (and I think framing weight loss as a control process makes this clear--easy to see that for any weight a person can live at, there's some level of food intake + exercise that will achieve it)
Surely there may be certain medical conditions that make certain people fat beyond their ability to influence it by making different lifestyle choices. But most fat people are fat because they eat too many calories and don't get enough exercise. That is hardly rocket science. There are countless examples of people who made transitions in their life from being fat and generally unhealthy, to being fit, by changing their diet and exercising regularly.
It's not at all the same as being tall.
Diet and exercise absolutely can improve the health of someone who is fat and unhealthy. What it can't do is make most people who *look* fat into people who *look* thin, and have them maintain that appearance for five years, because the amount of weight loss a person needs to improve their health is usually much less than the amount they need to go from "fat" to "thin".
Also, I think fat is the marker, but state of your arteries and blood chemistry is the thing you care about for health. (For attractiveness, OTOH, fat is the problem and arteries/blood chemistry isn't an issue.). Being fat is correlated with clogged arteries and high cholesterol and insulin resistance and such, but it's not the same thing.
Are there cultures/societies where being fat is sufficiently unpopular that very few people are fat? My guess is that there are. (I think in the military you can get kicked out for being too fat, and I expect the incentives there are strong enough to convince a lot of people to keep their weight down.)
"Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
One weirdness of all this is that in approximately every human civilization everywhere and everywhen before modern times, being at least somewhat fat was a marker for high wealth, status, and class. In modern US society, it's now the opposite, and being very fit is somewhat correlated with high wealth, status, and class.
The problem for nearly all our ancestors was that we might have a bad harvest and starve to death, or get deficiency diseases from having nothing to eat but one staple like white rice. The problem for us is that we might eat too much of the amazingly abundant tasty food all around us and get fat enough to endanger our health.
My understanding is that currently Darwinian selection among women is to be shorter than average and somewhat overweight.
Well, not quite. Blue haired types have managed to convince a sizable chunk of the population that they're an oppressed class deserving sympathy, which isn't something that anybody thought about the KGB.
A universal way to gain in status is to show that you understand the social norms in your society and align with the high-status people. I don't know that blue hair and tattoos manages that, but I expect it works in some places. (And the look that knocks the girls dead on a cute 20 year old boy in college isn't going to work out the same way for a 50 year old man, or even for a cute 20 year old boy who works hanging drywall.)
I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong about the androgyny. Basically, the extremal functional cultures, Jewish and Japanese culture, both tend towards androgyny (though more masculine in the first case and more feminine in the second), while the least functional cultures seem to all exaggerate sexual dimorphism.
I think that tells me that if your culture is functional you want androgyny, although the causation might go both ways. Either way, it implies sexual dimorphism isn’t the reflective equilibrium.
Furthermore, having two gender phenotypes would be a weird coincidence. One instance of a set or many both occur regularly but sets of two are extremely uncommon.
"My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. "
LOL. Do you really object to civil rights laws because they tell other people what to do, or because they tell YOU what to do?