It’s rather annoying than offensive. Every mention of problems related to obesity reinforces the present unhealthily and unaesthetically thin female cultural weight standard. Therefore I am a bit annoyed when this topic is brought up when not necessary.
Again, the relationship between weight and health needn’t be monotonic, so “obesity is bad” doesn’t imply “emaciation is good”. (And while I agree that the “cultural weight standard” is unhealthily and unaesthetically thin throughout the developed world, the de facto weight standard (i.e. how much the average person actually weighs, regardless of how much they think they should weigh) is unhealthily and unaesthetically large in certain countries (ETA: especially among males). (The average US man weighs 86.6 kg (190.9 lb) and is 1.763 m (5 ft 9 1⁄2 in) tall, according to Wikipedia… WTF?))
Every mention of problems related to obesity reinforces the present unhealthily and unaesthetically thin female cultural weight standard.
And makes it more difficult for those of us who are actively rejecting that standard (and the health=weight meme, which does seem plausibly based on a correlation-equals-causation fallacy, to me) to participate comfortably here.
(That’s not the primary reason I haven’t been around for the last 6 months or so, but it certainly didn’t help...)
Not every drug, but some examples of drugs, are more unambiguously and uncontroversially unhealthful than any kind of food. (I didn’t claim to be offended. I’m way too unsurprised to be offended.)
Fair enough. I can see why a specific example of a drug known to be harmful (i.e. cocaine) would be clearer than the example given, where the harm is only long-term and not directly related to that particular occasion of eating ice cream.
Other people might also find the example “offensive” because there are likely more LW-ers who are overweight and still eat ice cream (and consider this a perfectly legitimate personal choice) than who take [harmful] drugs recreationally.
Other people might also find the example “offensive” because there are likely more LW-ers who are overweight and still eat ice cream (and consider this a perfectly legitimate personal choice) than who take [harmful] drugs recreationally.
Not offensive exactly, but annoying and harder to be emotionally detached from (fat people tend to get a lot of shit about it, and therefore be a bit touchy about the subject), yes.
See my explanation above as part of an apology for any offense I have caused. I actually needed that specific advice, and so I asked. I used the ice cream itself in lieu of unhealthy eating habits in general, not that I think ice cream itself is wrong to eat (although being lactose-intolerant myself, I choose not to eat much of it, for everyone’s sake). Additionally, the answer can help those of us who might be overweight consider that maybe despite our partner’s kindness and understanding and helping remove stigma and make us comfortable, maybe it’s time to stop overindulging without having to be asked.
Additionally, the answer can help those of us who might be overweight consider that maybe despite our partner’s kindness and understanding and helping remove stigma and make us comfortable, maybe it’s time to stop overindulging without having to be asked.
This is the first part of the thread to actually straight-up offend me. It’s phrased so carefully, and I think you really are trying to be kind, but this sentence puts “being fat” on a par with something more like “never bathing”. (And it is the “being fat”, not the “overindulgence” itself, based on how this is phrased: you didn’t say something like “because it can make people uncomfortable to watch others display unhealthy behaviors, everyone, regardless of their size, should avoid overindulging”, but you singled out the overweight.)
People being fat is not about having to be asked; people don’t wake up in the morning and neglect to be thin today because it slipped their mind so they should maybe write it on their to-do list so folks won’t have to remind them. Person A never says to Person B, “It makes me concerned when you eat all that ice cream” in such a way that makes Person B go “Gosh, where are my manners”; at best you can make Person B eat ice cream in private rather than risk the judgment of friends and maybe develop an eating disorder.
Even if we operate under the assumption that fat is simplistically a function of exactly what you eat (in a neat and tidy way, so no one is fainting or unable to concentrate or miserable from hunger while failing to lose weight or anything terribly unfair that The Universe Is Not Allowed To Do like that)… this is still not a good way to paint it. This makes it sound like people around you being fat is a lousy thing for them to do to you.
What does it have to do with you? (I’d say, “You poor thing, do you have to look at them?” but I really do read you as being very sincerely well-intentioned here, so I’m just going to tuck the sarcasm that I can’t bear to delete into this parenthetical.) Do you have beliefs about their life expectancy that make you sad? If that’s it, do you avoid befriending old people or people with terminal illnesses or people who ride motorcycles or people with abusive spouses (or try to get them to stop being so old/sick/risky/abused so you won’t have to be sad)?
Well, I realize that personal health is a personal choice in most cases. But in the event of a collapse of civilization, there are points on every spectrum of behavior where you can draw a line and say that it is maladaptive, hence, wrong. That’s where I can draw the line. My ideals of how people should act draw from that picture, and while I won’t tell someone how they should act, I personally feel the pain of knowing that they are painting themselves out of a picture that is entirely possible to me. Whether I am deluded or not, I feel that sadness all the same.
General physical fitness is something that has a clear advantage in a primitive-life situation, and as long as that remains a possible future, it would be prudent to maintain that advantage, even if our modern society does not require it. If the preceding statement is false, please tell me why, so that I can understand the flaw in my thinking.
Well, I realize that personal health is a personal choice in most cases.
You might want to rethink your wording on that one. Perhaps ‘personal health status is a consequence of previous choices in many cases’ or something. As written it sounds a bit overstated.
General physical fitness and being fat are not mutually exclusive states. There’s an oft-quoted result from some study or other saying that people who are fat but in good shape (ie. aerobically fit) are healthier than thin people who never exercise and remain thin through diet or other means.
I’m having enough trouble parsing the last half-or-so of that that I’m writing it off as you being euphemistic in some way that’s not going to work on me, but:
overindulging
This is a value judgement, and (deontological/virtue-ethics-based) value judgements (as opposed to consequentialist pointing-out-of-actual-observed-results, which is occasionally useful when the person hasn’t also observed them) seem to range from useless through annoying and into emotionally abusive, without any significant subset of them actually achieving anything positive. If you think someone is overindulging, that’s your opinion, not some universal law that they’re breaking, and as such it’s not really their problem.
You really are trying to tell me that there is no qualitative way to distinguish between a behavior trend being healthy or unhealthy? My computer’s CPU fan makes loud buzzing noises and occasionally stops moving. If I call tech support and they tell me that my fan is not working like it should, I’m not going to say “You tech support people are all the same? Who says that fan has to be quiet and who are you to say it’s ‘not running properly’? I think you’d better rephrase that in a way that doesn’t offend me as a computer owner!” This site is devoted to rationality, I don’t see how a general comment can be taken personally when clearly I have no idea of the personal habits of other readers. Surely we won’t get very far if we can’t discuss things rationally to begin with.
Eating ice cream, unlike having a broken fan in a CPU, is not a purely harmful activity, or nobody would do it—it being enjoyable is a benefit, if nothing else, and the relative value of that and other benefits (social/cultural ingroup-ness, psychological self-care, avoiding disordered thinking relating to food restriction, not using up willpower that would be better spent on something else) compared to any harm that would come from it is a judgement call that the individual taking the action gets to make.
Relatedly, in a broader sense, “working like it should” is a decision that individuals get to make about their own lives, just like hardware owners get to decide what “working like it should” means for their hardware—if I decide to take my CPU’s noisy fan out and turn it into an alarm clock, that noise might then be purely positive! And, more importantly, that’s my call to make; it wouldn’t be reasonable for you to insist that I should have thrown the fan away just because you think it’s junk. By the same token, if someone is genuinely not bothered by the effect of their weight on their life, it’s not appropriate for a third party to step in and insist that their preferences are wrong and that they are obligated to change them.
I completely understand where you are getting these answers from. Thank you for sharing your psychological profile with me. Due to this understanding, I will refrain from pursuing my point any further.
By ‘psychological profile’ I assume you mean the bit where I’m compartmentalizing less than you are? I mean, maybe things have changed in the ~6 months I’ve been gone, but the idea that it’s okay—even expected—for people to have their own preferences and values and not defensible for others to call those values wrong used to be pretty uncontroversial here.
Or, probably more likely, you simply came up with that as a polite way of saying “oh, okay, you’re crazy; I’ll ignore you now”, which—not cool, dude, but if that is how you feel, at least be up front about it instead of hiding behind the ‘don’t call me out’ signals.
I’m curious: what is it that you find more offensive about MaoShan’s example than a drug-related example?
It’s rather annoying than offensive. Every mention of problems related to obesity reinforces the present unhealthily and unaesthetically thin female cultural weight standard. Therefore I am a bit annoyed when this topic is brought up when not necessary.
Again, the relationship between weight and health needn’t be monotonic, so “obesity is bad” doesn’t imply “emaciation is good”. (And while I agree that the “cultural weight standard” is unhealthily and unaesthetically thin throughout the developed world, the de facto weight standard (i.e. how much the average person actually weighs, regardless of how much they think they should weigh) is unhealthily and unaesthetically large in certain countries (ETA: especially among males). (The average US man weighs 86.6 kg (190.9 lb) and is 1.763 m (5 ft 9 1⁄2 in) tall, according to Wikipedia… WTF?))
And makes it more difficult for those of us who are actively rejecting that standard (and the health=weight meme, which does seem plausibly based on a correlation-equals-causation fallacy, to me) to participate comfortably here.
(That’s not the primary reason I haven’t been around for the last 6 months or so, but it certainly didn’t help...)
Not every drug, but some examples of drugs, are more unambiguously and uncontroversially unhealthful than any kind of food. (I didn’t claim to be offended. I’m way too unsurprised to be offended.)
Fair enough. I can see why a specific example of a drug known to be harmful (i.e. cocaine) would be clearer than the example given, where the harm is only long-term and not directly related to that particular occasion of eating ice cream.
Other people might also find the example “offensive” because there are likely more LW-ers who are overweight and still eat ice cream (and consider this a perfectly legitimate personal choice) than who take [harmful] drugs recreationally.
Not offensive exactly, but annoying and harder to be emotionally detached from (fat people tend to get a lot of shit about it, and therefore be a bit touchy about the subject), yes.
See my explanation above as part of an apology for any offense I have caused. I actually needed that specific advice, and so I asked. I used the ice cream itself in lieu of unhealthy eating habits in general, not that I think ice cream itself is wrong to eat (although being lactose-intolerant myself, I choose not to eat much of it, for everyone’s sake). Additionally, the answer can help those of us who might be overweight consider that maybe despite our partner’s kindness and understanding and helping remove stigma and make us comfortable, maybe it’s time to stop overindulging without having to be asked.
This is the first part of the thread to actually straight-up offend me. It’s phrased so carefully, and I think you really are trying to be kind, but this sentence puts “being fat” on a par with something more like “never bathing”. (And it is the “being fat”, not the “overindulgence” itself, based on how this is phrased: you didn’t say something like “because it can make people uncomfortable to watch others display unhealthy behaviors, everyone, regardless of their size, should avoid overindulging”, but you singled out the overweight.)
People being fat is not about having to be asked; people don’t wake up in the morning and neglect to be thin today because it slipped their mind so they should maybe write it on their to-do list so folks won’t have to remind them. Person A never says to Person B, “It makes me concerned when you eat all that ice cream” in such a way that makes Person B go “Gosh, where are my manners”; at best you can make Person B eat ice cream in private rather than risk the judgment of friends and maybe develop an eating disorder.
Even if we operate under the assumption that fat is simplistically a function of exactly what you eat (in a neat and tidy way, so no one is fainting or unable to concentrate or miserable from hunger while failing to lose weight or anything terribly unfair that The Universe Is Not Allowed To Do like that)… this is still not a good way to paint it. This makes it sound like people around you being fat is a lousy thing for them to do to you.
What does it have to do with you? (I’d say, “You poor thing, do you have to look at them?” but I really do read you as being very sincerely well-intentioned here, so I’m just going to tuck the sarcasm that I can’t bear to delete into this parenthetical.) Do you have beliefs about their life expectancy that make you sad? If that’s it, do you avoid befriending old people or people with terminal illnesses or people who ride motorcycles or people with abusive spouses (or try to get them to stop being so old/sick/risky/abused so you won’t have to be sad)?
Well, I realize that personal health is a personal choice in most cases. But in the event of a collapse of civilization, there are points on every spectrum of behavior where you can draw a line and say that it is maladaptive, hence, wrong. That’s where I can draw the line. My ideals of how people should act draw from that picture, and while I won’t tell someone how they should act, I personally feel the pain of knowing that they are painting themselves out of a picture that is entirely possible to me. Whether I am deluded or not, I feel that sadness all the same.
General physical fitness is something that has a clear advantage in a primitive-life situation, and as long as that remains a possible future, it would be prudent to maintain that advantage, even if our modern society does not require it. If the preceding statement is false, please tell me why, so that I can understand the flaw in my thinking.
You might want to rethink your wording on that one. Perhaps ‘personal health status is a consequence of previous choices in many cases’ or something. As written it sounds a bit overstated.
True, I was trying not to step on any more toes at that point.
General physical fitness and being fat are not mutually exclusive states. There’s an oft-quoted result from some study or other saying that people who are fat but in good shape (ie. aerobically fit) are healthier than thin people who never exercise and remain thin through diet or other means.
That’s a relevant clarification. Thank you. Given that additional point, my original question remains.
I’m having enough trouble parsing the last half-or-so of that that I’m writing it off as you being euphemistic in some way that’s not going to work on me, but:
This is a value judgement, and (deontological/virtue-ethics-based) value judgements (as opposed to consequentialist pointing-out-of-actual-observed-results, which is occasionally useful when the person hasn’t also observed them) seem to range from useless through annoying and into emotionally abusive, without any significant subset of them actually achieving anything positive. If you think someone is overindulging, that’s your opinion, not some universal law that they’re breaking, and as such it’s not really their problem.
You really are trying to tell me that there is no qualitative way to distinguish between a behavior trend being healthy or unhealthy? My computer’s CPU fan makes loud buzzing noises and occasionally stops moving. If I call tech support and they tell me that my fan is not working like it should, I’m not going to say “You tech support people are all the same? Who says that fan has to be quiet and who are you to say it’s ‘not running properly’? I think you’d better rephrase that in a way that doesn’t offend me as a computer owner!” This site is devoted to rationality, I don’t see how a general comment can be taken personally when clearly I have no idea of the personal habits of other readers. Surely we won’t get very far if we can’t discuss things rationally to begin with.
Eating ice cream, unlike having a broken fan in a CPU, is not a purely harmful activity, or nobody would do it—it being enjoyable is a benefit, if nothing else, and the relative value of that and other benefits (social/cultural ingroup-ness, psychological self-care, avoiding disordered thinking relating to food restriction, not using up willpower that would be better spent on something else) compared to any harm that would come from it is a judgement call that the individual taking the action gets to make.
Relatedly, in a broader sense, “working like it should” is a decision that individuals get to make about their own lives, just like hardware owners get to decide what “working like it should” means for their hardware—if I decide to take my CPU’s noisy fan out and turn it into an alarm clock, that noise might then be purely positive! And, more importantly, that’s my call to make; it wouldn’t be reasonable for you to insist that I should have thrown the fan away just because you think it’s junk. By the same token, if someone is genuinely not bothered by the effect of their weight on their life, it’s not appropriate for a third party to step in and insist that their preferences are wrong and that they are obligated to change them.
I completely understand where you are getting these answers from. Thank you for sharing your psychological profile with me. Due to this understanding, I will refrain from pursuing my point any further.
By ‘psychological profile’ I assume you mean the bit where I’m compartmentalizing less than you are? I mean, maybe things have changed in the ~6 months I’ve been gone, but the idea that it’s okay—even expected—for people to have their own preferences and values and not defensible for others to call those values wrong used to be pretty uncontroversial here.
Or, probably more likely, you simply came up with that as a polite way of saying “oh, okay, you’re crazy; I’ll ignore you now”, which—not cool, dude, but if that is how you feel, at least be up front about it instead of hiding behind the ‘don’t call me out’ signals.