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.
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.