The fascinating thing about this situation is that Eliezer is about as high status here as it’s possible for a human being to be in a non-religious group, and it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal. (Well, there are medical studies, but they tend to test only not-very-strenuous diets and exercise routines.) It takes a while before you notice that there are real physiological variations. There are people who can’t run without joint pain; there are people who can’t go three hours without eating or they’ll faint; etc. There really are constraints that we don’t set ourselves. It’s not always an easy thing to accept.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal.
If only that were the situation.
There’s the generalizing from the one example which is your own experience, and then there’s the generalizing from the one example that everyone is telling you is the real truth.
There’s a complex, highly socially supported mind-blocking ideology which goes way beyond generalizing from one example. One is the common belief that “it’s just a matter of “calories in, calories out”, which eliminates a huge amount of biological detail. Another is “I didn’t say it was easy”, which is a way of blurring out the huge range of the amount of difficulty involved.
There seems to be an underlying belief that everyone is in some sense really fairly lean, so that any apparent health problems caused by (or causing!) weight loss can be ignored in favor of the Platonic truth of the ideal body.
It’s not just politics is the mind-killer—so are status markers.
it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
For how many people was it extremely easy?
I maintain a healthy weight with zero effort, and I have a friend for whom The Hacker’s Diet worked perfectly. I thought losing weight was a matter of eating less than you burn.
Then I read Eliezer’s twoposts. Oops, I thought. There’s no reason intake reduction has to work without severe and continuing side-effects.
The fascinating thing about this situation is that Eliezer is about as high status here as it’s possible for a human being to be in a non-religious group, and it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal. (Well, there are medical studies, but they tend to test only not-very-strenuous diets and exercise routines.) It takes a while before you notice that there are real physiological variations. There are people who can’t run without joint pain; there are people who can’t go three hours without eating or they’ll faint; etc. There really are constraints that we don’t set ourselves. It’s not always an easy thing to accept.
If only that were the situation.
There’s the generalizing from the one example which is your own experience, and then there’s the generalizing from the one example that everyone is telling you is the real truth.
There’s a complex, highly socially supported mind-blocking ideology which goes way beyond generalizing from one example. One is the common belief that “it’s just a matter of “calories in, calories out”, which eliminates a huge amount of biological detail. Another is “I didn’t say it was easy”, which is a way of blurring out the huge range of the amount of difficulty involved.
There seems to be an underlying belief that everyone is in some sense really fairly lean, so that any apparent health problems caused by (or causing!) weight loss can be ignored in favor of the Platonic truth of the ideal body.
It’s not just politics is the mind-killer—so are status markers.
For how many people was it extremely easy?
I maintain a healthy weight with zero effort, and I have a friend for whom The Hacker’s Diet worked perfectly. I thought losing weight was a matter of eating less than you burn.
Then I read Eliezer’s two posts. Oops, I thought. There’s no reason intake reduction has to work without severe and continuing side-effects.