I had a similar reaction: for the example of grandma saying “no technology”, yes, I know what she means and pointing out the thing about tables and glasses would just be stupid. But for the thing with chemicals, until I read this post, I didn’t feel like I had a good handle of what exactly their mental model was and how they defined this category.
Now, in the process of writing this comment, I gave it some thought, and came to the conclusion that something like “synthesized vs. naturally-occuring” would probably be roughly what these people mean. But that was only after it was specifically suggested to me that they might have a sensible concept they’re pointing at; when I read the example, my assumption was just that they didn’t have a coherent model and weren’t very familiar with chemistry, in which case “everything is chemicals” would have been fine as a response.
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Somewhere in the 20th century, people started getting a cluster of “Western diseases” (i.e obesity, heart disease) that seem to have something to do with diet (although non-diet lifestyle changes are another contender).
In general, the 20th century saw lots of industrialization that radically changed both diet and lifestyle. But in the diet front, there’s a specific with worth noting:
Prior to mid-20th century, we did not have very fine control over what sorts of chemicals went into food. Food was made of chunks of organic matter with a lot of complex reactions going on. Mid-20th century, we started being able to break that down into parts and optimize it.
And this meant that suddenly, food became goodhartable in a way that it hadn’t before. Industry could optimize it for tastiness/addictiveness, with a lot of incentives to do that without regard for health (and, not a lot of clear information on how to optimize it for health even if you wanted to, since health is long-term and tastiness is immediate).
So there is reason to want to be able to distinguish “food constructed the way we’ve been constructing it for thousands of years” and “food we only recently began to be able to construct.”
Now, this hypothesis might be wrong. Lots of people are just applying the naturalistic fallacy (in a way that also outputs preferences for ‘alternative medicine’ and the like). But, if you’re worried about that, it’s probably more helpful to respond one of the first three ways Alicorn suggests, rather than on the level of “obviously everything is chemicals.”
...
I did realizing in seeing Kaj’s comment and thinking through my reply, that this is fairly complex background framing, and if you don’t have it in mind, it may be hard to notice in realtime that the “everything is chemicals” response might be missing the point, and I’m not (currently) sure if there’s an algorithm I could recommend people run that would easily separate pedantry from potentially-important reframing
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Yup, a book. Not sure whether it’s super important to read in full (I think my comment here roughly covers the most important bit, but if it seemed interesting you may want to check it out)
Also, I wrote a LW Post on it many years back (I think it’s possible this was literally my first LW post, and if not was my second or third, so it has a bit of the “newbie introducing themselves” vibe.)
I wish to clarify that I’m not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are “chemicals” and what things are not. There’s room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish “few to no chemicals” from “lots of chemicals”. That there isn’t a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a “coherent model” doesn’t mean it’s not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don’t have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn’t elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song “poppy” or “jazzy” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a statement I might reasonably utter.
It’s a statement that’s reasonable to utter, and a statement that a more music-savvy friend might want to understand by asking what you mean, getting some positive and negative examples, and suggesting more precise terminology (along with suggesting specific music, one hopes). Pointing out that your use of those words is likely to confuse people and search engines is something I’d expect you to encourage rather than invoking your peeve. Note that I recognize that this comment may be an example of the thing you oppose—I’m verbosely challenging a (possibly) non-central point. I’d be interested to hear whether you find this example to be exasperating or valuable.
Suggesting search engine terms might be helpful. I don’t think I’d ever find “you’re going to confuse people” helpful—either I already know that I’m not being very precisely expressive and these are all the words I have, or, if that’s not the case, “could you elaborate/rephrase that” would be better. I didn’t feel exasperated by this comment but might by a long chain of them on this branch.
I had a similar reaction: for the example of grandma saying “no technology”, yes, I know what she means and pointing out the thing about tables and glasses would just be stupid. But for the thing with chemicals, until I read this post, I didn’t feel like I had a good handle of what exactly their mental model was and how they defined this category.
Now, in the process of writing this comment, I gave it some thought, and came to the conclusion that something like “synthesized vs. naturally-occuring” would probably be roughly what these people mean. But that was only after it was specifically suggested to me that they might have a sensible concept they’re pointing at; when I read the example, my assumption was just that they didn’t have a coherent model and weren’t very familiar with chemistry, in which case “everything is chemicals” would have been fine as a response.
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Somewhere in the 20th century, people started getting a cluster of “Western diseases” (i.e obesity, heart disease) that seem to have something to do with diet (although non-diet lifestyle changes are another contender).
In general, the 20th century saw lots of industrialization that radically changed both diet and lifestyle. But in the diet front, there’s a specific with worth noting:
Prior to mid-20th century, we did not have very fine control over what sorts of chemicals went into food. Food was made of chunks of organic matter with a lot of complex reactions going on. Mid-20th century, we started being able to break that down into parts and optimize it.
And this meant that suddenly, food became goodhartable in a way that it hadn’t before. Industry could optimize it for tastiness/addictiveness, with a lot of incentives to do that without regard for health (and, not a lot of clear information on how to optimize it for health even if you wanted to, since health is long-term and tastiness is immediate).
So there is reason to want to be able to distinguish “food constructed the way we’ve been constructing it for thousands of years” and “food we only recently began to be able to construct.”
Now, this hypothesis might be wrong. Lots of people are just applying the naturalistic fallacy (in a way that also outputs preferences for ‘alternative medicine’ and the like). But, if you’re worried about that, it’s probably more helpful to respond one of the first three ways Alicorn suggests, rather than on the level of “obviously everything is chemicals.”
...
I did realizing in seeing Kaj’s comment and thinking through my reply, that this is fairly complex background framing, and if you don’t have it in mind, it may be hard to notice in realtime that the “everything is chemicals” response might be missing the point, and I’m not (currently) sure if there’s an algorithm I could recommend people run that would easily separate pedantry from potentially-important reframing
What’s this now…? A book, or what?
Yup, a book. Not sure whether it’s super important to read in full (I think my comment here roughly covers the most important bit, but if it seemed interesting you may want to check it out)
Also, I wrote a LW Post on it many years back (I think it’s possible this was literally my first LW post, and if not was my second or third, so it has a bit of the “newbie introducing themselves” vibe.)
Amazon link for the book is here.
I wish to clarify that I’m not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are “chemicals” and what things are not. There’s room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish “few to no chemicals” from “lots of chemicals”. That there isn’t a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a “coherent model” doesn’t mean it’s not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don’t have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn’t elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song “poppy” or “jazzy” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a statement I might reasonably utter.
It’s a statement that’s reasonable to utter, and a statement that a more music-savvy friend might want to understand by asking what you mean, getting some positive and negative examples, and suggesting more precise terminology (along with suggesting specific music, one hopes). Pointing out that your use of those words is likely to confuse people and search engines is something I’d expect you to encourage rather than invoking your peeve.
Note that I recognize that this comment may be an example of the thing you oppose—I’m verbosely challenging a (possibly) non-central point. I’d be interested to hear whether you find this example to be exasperating or valuable.
Suggesting search engine terms might be helpful. I don’t think I’d ever find “you’re going to confuse people” helpful—either I already know that I’m not being very precisely expressive and these are all the words I have, or, if that’s not the case, “could you elaborate/rephrase that” would be better. I didn’t feel exasperated by this comment but might by a long chain of them on this branch.