I'm guessing that you meant this in a semi-humorous and hyperbolic way rather than a mean way, but it would probably be good to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. A comment like this wouldn't need too much to come across as friendly rather than aggressive.
GLP-1s disprove this to an extent. Personal responsibility is based on a fallacy, it’s just brain chemistry.
So give everyone GLP-1s to cast the shadow of personality responsibility (reduction in adverse reward center operations, broadly speaking) through better brain chemistry. Existence is hard, we can twiddle the wetware to make it less hard.
The only thing that GLP-1 agonists prove is that CICO does indeed work - if you force yourself into a caloric deficit through the inhibition of hunger hormones using drugs that you will lose weight. It has nothing to do with people choosing to eat highly processed unhealthy foods over healthier options. When you're on Ozempic or peptides like Retatrutide/Tirzepatide you don't think "I will not eat a bag of chips today because it's unhealthy and calorie dense", you simply don't think about eating because your feeling of hunger is inhibited.
That fallacy is "free will", which as we know doesn't exist at least in the way we think it does. Society's reckoning with the idea of free will as something fictional is on par with our upcoming intelligence reckoning, evolutionary reckoning and heliocentric reckoning.
If a company put a giant a giant bollard in the middle of the interstate and someone hit it, are you saying that the company bears zero responsibility for that?
Are millions of people voluntarily paying money to hit the bollard daily or thereabouts when not hitting the bollard is free and takes less time out of their day?
Yeah it would be better if everyone just didn't eat crap but crap is what people want.
Having briefly experienced weight loss drugs - and the bliss of that constant “EAT!” voice in your head just going quiet - I’m pretty convinced most humans have a genuine genetic predisposition to overeating.
And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier.
Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.
Humans and dogs: how many dog owners have to store their dog’s food in a bin the dog can’t get into? How many can’t leave more than one meal’s worth of food out at a time?
Until the past century or so, “eat up the available food while available” was generally a plus for survival for most populations - a person who could keep some of that excess around on them was more likely to survive a famine than their leaner peers.
Even my grandmothers (born in early 1920s Texas) remembered not always getting as much to eat as they wanted as children, and it wasn’t because their mothers were afraid of them getting fat - there just wasn’t any extra food. One of them likely did have a caloric deficit a few times here and there around age 10-12, and it showed: she was rather small.
One of my grandfathers lied his way into the Army at 16 just to be one less mouth for his mother to have to feed.
We’re really not that far separated from “eat all the food” being a health benefit.
dang|11 days ago
toomuchtodo|11 days ago
So give everyone GLP-1s to cast the shadow of personality responsibility (reduction in adverse reward center operations, broadly speaking) through better brain chemistry. Existence is hard, we can twiddle the wetware to make it less hard.
diath|11 days ago
bossyTeacher|10 days ago
That fallacy is "free will", which as we know doesn't exist at least in the way we think it does. Society's reckoning with the idea of free will as something fictional is on par with our upcoming intelligence reckoning, evolutionary reckoning and heliocentric reckoning.
whackernews|11 days ago
munificent|11 days ago
If a company put a giant a giant bollard in the middle of the interstate and someone hit it, are you saying that the company bears zero responsibility for that?
cucumber3732842|11 days ago
Yeah it would be better if everyone just didn't eat crap but crap is what people want.
mbeavitt|11 days ago
And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier. Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.
MandieD|11 days ago
Until the past century or so, “eat up the available food while available” was generally a plus for survival for most populations - a person who could keep some of that excess around on them was more likely to survive a famine than their leaner peers.
Even my grandmothers (born in early 1920s Texas) remembered not always getting as much to eat as they wanted as children, and it wasn’t because their mothers were afraid of them getting fat - there just wasn’t any extra food. One of them likely did have a caloric deficit a few times here and there around age 10-12, and it showed: she was rather small.
One of my grandfathers lied his way into the Army at 16 just to be one less mouth for his mother to have to feed.
We’re really not that far separated from “eat all the food” being a health benefit.