There’s been a lot of hype on Twitter this year about how GLP-1 agonists [semaglutide/Ozempic, tirzepatide/Mounjaro] are “the miracle cure for obesity”.
People in the past ate more, yes, but obviously also expended more energy. A hundred years ago in Finland for example the average intake was like 3500 kcal per day, but then that was a society of agricultural manual labour.
The mice make for an interesting, big-if-true type of data point. I have another. I, as any gymrat is wont to do, have done a bit of a laboratory experiment on myself. When I’m cutting, my weight exactly tracks the loss expected by calories in calorie out model. At one point my diet for cutting included a package of Oreo cookies every day, which made no difference, calorie in calorie out.
My background is that I suffered of obesity all my life until I discovered that no actually if you just stop eating once you hit your daily calorie quota you can choose how much do you want to weight.
So in light of all this I hope you don’t mind my saying that calling calorie in calorie our obviously insane is, uh, obviosly insane. In fact to me it seems that Yudkowsky is emotionally very invested in believing that it is impossible to affect one’s bodyweight, and his judgement on the matter is clouded.
1. I get how he comes across. It's not good PR, but it's not productive in general to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, how would *you* do *good* PR on this topic? It's almost impossible when something is *this taboo*. People are going to assume the worst about me, too, and whatever, I genuinely think the more we talk about it, the better for solving the problem.
2. The CICO paradigm works at least that well on me, too. I myself have also literally used CICO as an excuse to eat Oreos! But there are people who it *doesn't* work that well on. That this is medically *possible* is illustrated by, eg, this kind of result: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.00474.2002#
3. I'm legit curious, because I don't hear too many stories where someone uses CICO to lose a lot of weight and then has an easy time keeping it off without changing anything else - have you kept it off for a long time, and has it been easy?
4. If it hasn't been easy, why shouldn't we *make* it easy, for people like me and you, along with solving the horrible health problems that befall the people who have it the worst and for one reason or another don't end up "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" and fixing it?
5. The relevant environment when we're talking about what we can expect humans to have *evolved to withstand*, is not early agricultural societies at all, it's forager societies. People in forager societies do much less hard physical work, and are even thinner than poor agriculturalists.
People in the past ate more, yes, but obviously also expended more energy. A hundred years ago in Finland for example the average intake was like 3500 kcal per day, but then that was a society of agricultural manual labour.
The mice make for an interesting, big-if-true type of data point. I have another. I, as any gymrat is wont to do, have done a bit of a laboratory experiment on myself. When I’m cutting, my weight exactly tracks the loss expected by calories in calorie out model. At one point my diet for cutting included a package of Oreo cookies every day, which made no difference, calorie in calorie out.
My background is that I suffered of obesity all my life until I discovered that no actually if you just stop eating once you hit your daily calorie quota you can choose how much do you want to weight.
So in light of all this I hope you don’t mind my saying that calling calorie in calorie our obviously insane is, uh, obviosly insane. In fact to me it seems that Yudkowsky is emotionally very invested in believing that it is impossible to affect one’s bodyweight, and his judgement on the matter is clouded.
1. I get how he comes across. It's not good PR, but it's not productive in general to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, how would *you* do *good* PR on this topic? It's almost impossible when something is *this taboo*. People are going to assume the worst about me, too, and whatever, I genuinely think the more we talk about it, the better for solving the problem.
2. The CICO paradigm works at least that well on me, too. I myself have also literally used CICO as an excuse to eat Oreos! But there are people who it *doesn't* work that well on. That this is medically *possible* is illustrated by, eg, this kind of result: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.00474.2002#
3. I'm legit curious, because I don't hear too many stories where someone uses CICO to lose a lot of weight and then has an easy time keeping it off without changing anything else - have you kept it off for a long time, and has it been easy?
4. If it hasn't been easy, why shouldn't we *make* it easy, for people like me and you, along with solving the horrible health problems that befall the people who have it the worst and for one reason or another don't end up "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" and fixing it?
5. The relevant environment when we're talking about what we can expect humans to have *evolved to withstand*, is not early agricultural societies at all, it's forager societies. People in forager societies do much less hard physical work, and are even thinner than poor agriculturalists.