I don’t understand why you’re “retrying”. I already agree with your point and you not saying “yes, you already agree with me” is quite confusing to me. As I say in my comment:
Externally, why people feel the need to keep eating until they become obese is not a question with a clear (to me) answer. It could be because there is some process that’s operating in the body that’s taking priority over other activities and hoarding a lot of the energy intake to produce fat cells, which I think is your story.
Do you think this characterization of your position is unfair or wrong? If so, why?
As far as I can see the only object-level point I disagree with you about is that I don’t think the evidence for obesity being like cancer or pregnancy is as strong as you seem to think it is. It’s definitely possible for it to be like that but I would bet against it at even odds. I explain this here:
I don’t think the overfeeding experiments provide strong evidence for your scenario, though I agree that they should be a Bayesian update in favor of accounts in that broad neighborhood. What would convince me is experiments which involve smaller increases in calorie intake but sustained over much longer periods of time, on the order of a year or so. If such experiments failed to find an effect that would be a strong update for me towards your view. Right now I buy the cancer analogy on conceptual grounds but I don’t think we have enough evidence to conclude obesity is like cancer in this regard, though it very well could be the case.
On top of that I also have a separate disagreement with you about emphasis in the context of my comment, since the point of my top comment is to draw attention to 400 kcal/day not being a small increase in calorie intake. You agree with me about this but you just don’t think it’s worth focusing on, probably because you think it’s a trivial observation. I still think it’s something that should be corrected given that SMTM explicitly said that it’s a small increase.
As far as I can see the only object-level point I disagree with you about is that I don’t think the evidence for obesity being like cancer or pregnancy is as strong as you seem to think it is.
Some people certainly are obese because of literal cancer and literal pregnancy. We seem to have strong evidence for that.
The interesting question is about how much of the obesity pandemic is explainable by such factors and not whether evidence for such factors exists.
We certainly don’t see enough pregnancy and cancer to explain the obesity epidemic but there might be other factors that are similar but harder to see. Thermodynamic arguments don’t help us rule out other effects that are similar to pregnancy/cancer.
I agree with everything you said, so again I’m confused why you thought you should make this comment.
I feel like I don’t really disagree with most of the commenters but they either think I do disagree with them or that I did a very bad job of communicating exactly what my point was. It’s hard for me to understand.
I still stand by this claim, again with the caveat that you take it as a correlational use of the word “explain” (which is not at all uncommon e.g. when talking about “fraction of explained variance” and so forth) and not one that suggests a causal explanation of the form “people wanted to eat more food, so they ate more food, so they got fatter as a result”.
Ok. My main point is just to clarify that other people are reading you as talking about explanation in general, not just strictly correlational explanation (if that’s what’s happening).
I do also think that’s not a great use of the word “explain” and “mystery”, because it’s not why the colloquial word is useful. The colloquial words “explain”/”mystery” are useful because they index “more information and ideas given/needed about this”. So just because X correlationally explains Y, and X is true, doesn’t mean there’s no mystery about Y.
I never said there’s no mystery about Y, just that there’s no mystery about Y being true conditional on X being true.
It’s a fair point that my usage of “explain” and “mystery” confused some people but I’m not too sure how else I would have made my point. Should I have said “people today are eating about as much more compared to the past as we would expect given how much fatter they’ve gotten”?
I don’t understand why you’re “retrying”. I already agree with your point and you not saying “yes, you already agree with me” is quite confusing to me. As I say in my comment:
Do you think this characterization of your position is unfair or wrong? If so, why?
As far as I can see the only object-level point I disagree with you about is that I don’t think the evidence for obesity being like cancer or pregnancy is as strong as you seem to think it is. It’s definitely possible for it to be like that but I would bet against it at even odds. I explain this here:
On top of that I also have a separate disagreement with you about emphasis in the context of my comment, since the point of my top comment is to draw attention to 400 kcal/day not being a small increase in calorie intake. You agree with me about this but you just don’t think it’s worth focusing on, probably because you think it’s a trivial observation. I still think it’s something that should be corrected given that SMTM explicitly said that it’s a small increase.
Some people certainly are obese because of literal cancer and literal pregnancy. We seem to have strong evidence for that.
The interesting question is about how much of the obesity pandemic is explainable by such factors and not whether evidence for such factors exists.
We certainly don’t see enough pregnancy and cancer to explain the obesity epidemic but there might be other factors that are similar but harder to see. Thermodynamic arguments don’t help us rule out other effects that are similar to pregnancy/cancer.
I agree with everything you said, so again I’m confused why you thought you should make this comment.
I feel like I don’t really disagree with most of the commenters but they either think I do disagree with them or that I did a very bad job of communicating exactly what my point was. It’s hard for me to understand.
(The thread continues to look to me like what I described here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium?commentId=NxzEfuyGfuao25mrx
i.e. Yudkowsky is responding to the part of your original comment where you said
)
I still stand by this claim, again with the caveat that you take it as a correlational use of the word “explain” (which is not at all uncommon e.g. when talking about “fraction of explained variance” and so forth) and not one that suggests a causal explanation of the form “people wanted to eat more food, so they ate more food, so they got fatter as a result”.
Ok. My main point is just to clarify that other people are reading you as talking about explanation in general, not just strictly correlational explanation (if that’s what’s happening).
I do also think that’s not a great use of the word “explain” and “mystery”, because it’s not why the colloquial word is useful. The colloquial words “explain”/”mystery” are useful because they index “more information and ideas given/needed about this”. So just because X correlationally explains Y, and X is true, doesn’t mean there’s no mystery about Y.
I never said there’s no mystery about Y, just that there’s no mystery about Y being true conditional on X being true.
It’s a fair point that my usage of “explain” and “mystery” confused some people but I’m not too sure how else I would have made my point. Should I have said “people today are eating about as much more compared to the past as we would expect given how much fatter they’ve gotten”?
That’s clearer to me, yeah. It’s unambiguous that it’s about conditional prediction (“we would expect given”) rather than explanation-in-general.