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 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.