From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 13:00:06 MST
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 11:56:42AM -0500, Gary Miller wrote:
>
> But with all the psychological pressure this society places on people
> who are obese today, anybody who hasn't got the message yet that being
> overweight is hazardous to one's health doesn't want to get the message.
>
> We can't legislate calorie intake in a free society.
This is true. And attempting to get the government to enforce "better
health" might be a risky direction to move in - after all, many of the
things we are considering could be regarded as "alternate health".
I think the problem is similar to the one in Wright's _The Golden Age_:
there technology has advanced to such a degree that anybody can rewrite
themselves almost completely. So what is to keep people from accidentally or
"it seemed like a good idea at the time"-deliberately destroying themselves
in various ways? In the novel the fundamentally libertarian society
abstained from coercing people, even to save them from making these mistakes
(it could still prevent people from attacking *each other*). But a social
institution, the Hortators, was created to help people live a virtuous/good
life by exhorting them to behave and introducing social sanctions against
improper or overly self-destructive behavior. This is in many ways similar
to how Iain M. Banks' Culture is described dealing with crime and criminal
behavior.
Obesity is hardly mental self-mutilation, but it is the same kind of
problem: a habit that reduces the potential to live one's own life to its
fullest. Even when we factor in thrifty genes, metabolism, hypothalamic
set-points and other metabolic reasons one's weight is a function of what
one eats and hence regulatable through our own actions. It is just that we
need to acquire those habits that make our weights ideal for our purposes.
Note that the ideal weight is individual and tied to that person's life
project; this is why government intervention is so risky (what about people
who need to eat much? or want to eat much?).
Maybe the proper approach is the Hortators, a social infrastructure that
helps us maintain our ideal caloric intakes. The current situation is mostly
a simplistic "calories are bad, fat is bad" puritan bias in one direction
that at most produces guilt. A better infrastructure would encompass an
understanding of how our bodies are individual projects (making both the
obese person happy with his fat and the bodybuilder aiming for total
definition totally acceptable and no challenge to each other) and a sense of
how to encourage successful living in each other. That is of course a tall
order, but it would be applicable to many other >H fields.
Of course, any biomedical toy that could help us control weight would be
welcome, and would make this issue far less controversial. Xenical is a
small first step.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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