> The truth is that we designed a system in which a majority of people cannot thrive and in which a lot of people end up developing problems like obesity or being labeled as ADHD.
We designed — if you can call this "design" — a system where most people are not the literal property of their feudal lords and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Our genomes don't know we're not at constant risk of starving, they're not universally adapted to abundance. Heck, our genes are barely adapted to milk[0] or cooked food[1].
We don't know if our forebears had ADHD, but this not because they didn't, it's because approximately nobody in psychology wants to diagnose someone who isn't in the room with them — there's plenty of historical figures whose behaviour is compatible with such a diagnosis, which is a much weaker claim. Personally, I am suspicious of evolutionary psychology as being at risk of decorating "just-so" stories with just enough rigour to seem respectable, but even then one does need to make claims that at least add up, such as the ones behind this claim that it may have been an adaptation 50k years back: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-curiosities/20...
> The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
> You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...
Mm. And despite all those errors, where we are is "living longer and healthier lives in greater comfort… unless you're American for some reason, you guys should look at what all the rest of us have been doing and copy us". Even a few of those examples, like asbestos, were direct improvements over the previous status quo of "perhaps my house/factory will burn down with me in it".
> and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Yes, now the main causes of death are literal sloth and gluttony.
> living longer and healthier lives
Healthier ? 50% of people are basically disabled by the age of 40 because of obesity
You're conflating life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy, don't forget health-span expectancy either. The US life expectancy is going down, health span is going down in most of the west too:
Anyways, if your argument is that we should be glad that 70% of people are overweight/obese because people died earlier 300 years ago idk how many people you will convince...
Saying of employment and big companies "oh no totes the same as feudalism" from such superficial similarities is historically laughable. It's like saying that the Romans and the USA and Mussolini are all "the same thing" because of the iconography of the fasces.
> Yes, now the main causes of death are literal sloth and gluttony.
> You're conflating life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy, don't forget health-span expectancy either. The US life expectancy is going down, health span is going down in most of the west too:
Burden of disease
Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) per 100,000 individuals from all causes. DALYs measure the total burden of disease – both from years of life lost due to premature death and years lived with a disability. One DALY equals one lost year of healthy life.
Burden of disease goes down until the pandemic, only then goes up.
Even with pandemic making things worse, the USA was back at 1992 levels of health.
Specifically life expectancy: even in the USA, what you're seeing is the impact of the covid pandemic.
> Anyways, if your argument is that we should be glad that 70% of people are overweight/obese because people died earlier 300 years ago idk how many people you will convince...
And in any case, your previous argument was "Taking ozempic won't fix your stressful job that materialized into an compulsive eating", to which my snappy retort is: well, nothing else did that either, did it?
My real argument is: if you don't like the obesity epidemic, why are you opposed to people taking the magic weight loss treatment that actually works, and apparently has a whole bunch of surprising positive side effects such as the headline of this news story?
It's the solution, and you're complaining about the problem that it fixes as if it also causes it. Thinking of the asbestos example earlier, what you're arguing here is like saying "all fire-retardants must be bad because people are on fire a lot".
We designed — if you can call this "design" — a system where most people are not the literal property of their feudal lords and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Our genomes don't know we're not at constant risk of starving, they're not universally adapted to abundance. Heck, our genes are barely adapted to milk[0] or cooked food[1].
We don't know if our forebears had ADHD, but this not because they didn't, it's because approximately nobody in psychology wants to diagnose someone who isn't in the room with them — there's plenty of historical figures whose behaviour is compatible with such a diagnosis, which is a much weaker claim. Personally, I am suspicious of evolutionary psychology as being at risk of decorating "just-so" stories with just enough rigour to seem respectable, but even then one does need to make claims that at least add up, such as the ones behind this claim that it may have been an adaptation 50k years back: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-curiosities/20...
> The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
Life expectancy over the last 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-...
Here's ADHD, albeit the chart only goes back 35 years not 50. Biggest increase is (+444% ~=) 5.4x in Qatar, not 100x. "Upper-middle-income countries" was 2%, USA was 30%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-with-adhd?tab=tabl...
> You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...
Mm. And despite all those errors, where we are is "living longer and healthier lives in greater comfort… unless you're American for some reason, you guys should look at what all the rest of us have been doing and copy us". Even a few of those examples, like asbestos, were direct improvements over the previous status quo of "perhaps my house/factory will burn down with me in it".
[0] lactose tolerance
[1] Our mouths are too small for all the teeth we have, soft food diet does this, cooking makes food softer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage