The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic
Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 3:31 pm
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True. That's the number 6 reason why I chose to leave my recent-ex who looked like a cross between Paul Wheaton and Nassim Taleb, but more so. The things we find attractive are not always good for us (sigh.) OTOH, I don't really like it when a man just serves me chicken breast he dried out on the grill and a chopped green pepper for dinner., even if I know that sort of behavior has positive correlation to likelihood of good circulatory flow into his 70s. Decisions, decisions, decisions...Jacob said: The cultural problem can't be fixed because most humans inately adopt the behavior of those around them and take the choices they are given instead of making their own. (Same as the ERE vs consumers).
Maybe, but if a significant portion of obesity stems from other issues (like mental health issues or genetics/epigenetics) then there might be a scientific remedy for those issues that helps to alleviate the underlying reason for weight gain. I recently read this article about how fish oil helps prevent the chance of a psychotic episode in young people with an increased risk. That's an easy fix for what can be a debilitating problem.jacob wrote:The technological ingenuity problem is that medical ("there's a pill for that") science has reached a limit because human physiology is too complex to fix metabolic problem hitting just one kind of molecule in the body. Fixing an overloaded metabolism is not as easy as hiding the symptoms of a headache or lowering blood pressure.
So many kids need to be protected from their parents!jennypenny wrote:Now that I've said that, I'll add my own rant ...
All my friends talk about is making kids safe.
Its a bit of a cliché but its amazing the amount of freedom children had before ~ WW2. Took themselves to and from school, sent out on their own to play in the streets or countryside all day at the weekend. Then it was normal, now parents doing this would be reported to social services. Is the world more dangerous ? Or are we just more paranoid ?jennypenny wrote:Now that I've said that, I'll add my own rant ...
All my friends talk about is making kids safe. Some parents go to ridiculous lengths to protect their kids. I'm talking about things like school buses instead of walking to school, crazy limitations on recess and sports, things like those catcher's masks ffj said the infield players had to wear, keeping kids indoors when the weather isn't perfect, antibacterial everything, etc. It's too much. I feel like we're raising a generation of softies. Let the kids get tired and dirty, even if it means they occasionally hurt themselves. An active childhood might be a little less 'safe' but might instill a lifestyle that, in the end, is much more healthy as an adult.
But that's just not the case (except for the side-effects of antidepressants ... but then again, Americans use more prescription drugs than practically any other place---and that's yet another problem with similar dynamics).jennypenny wrote: Maybe, but if a significant portion of obesity stems from other issues (like mental health issues or genetics/epigenetics)...
So I wonder if the ingenuity gap problem turns obesity into a 'ruin problem'. On an individual level, obesity can be 'fixed' - but on a society level, it can't. Perhaps the cultural problem is not only unsolvable, but also spreading (hence the term, obesity 'epidemic'). Of course, the conclusion to this logic would seem to be "humanity is headed towards unrecoverable losses", which big part me thinks is pretty silly to think, but I'm not completely sure.The purpose of the PP is to avoid a certain class of what, in probability and insurance, is called “ruin" problems. A ruin problem is one where outcomes of risks have a non-zero probability of resulting in unrecoverable losses. An often-cited illustrative case is that of a gambler who loses his entire fortune and so cannot return to the game. In biology, an example would be a species that has gone extinct. For nature, "ruin" is ecocide: an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be planetwide. The large majority of variations that occur within a system, even drastic ones, fundamentally differ from ruin problems: a system that achieves ruin cannot recover. As long as the instance is bounded, e.g. a gambler can work to gain additional resources, there may be some hope of reversing the misfortune. This is not the case when it is global. Our concern is with public policy. While an individual may be advised to not "bet the farm," whether or not he does so is generally a matter of individual preferences. Policy makers have a responsibility to avoid catastrophic harm for society as a whole; the focus is on the aggregate, not at the level of single individuals, and on global-systemic, not idiosyncratic, harm. This is the domain of collective "ruin" problems.
Tangent: buddy and I did some bicycle touring and one of the most important items we brought along was a bottle of whiskey for social consumption. Also, from living in a barebones van I would say having some beer is pretty high on the checklist (though it's definitely after water, sleeping bag, mouthwash, multitool, lighting).7Wannabe5 wrote:@jp- I think you may be right. Do you know how much whiskey the average pioneer family took west with them?