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> It would be lovely to live in a world in which telling obese people they should "just eat less" vs > Telling cigarette smokers to just smoke less didn't wo
by jack9 9y ago
> It would be lovely to live in a world in which telling obese people they should "just eat less"
vs
> Telling cigarette smokers to just smoke less didn't work either, but it's just as prescriptive.
"Work" is a weasel word being used here to describe the initial axiomatic assumption about "fat people". The assumption is there is a measure of conversion not being met by medical advice. The warning about the dangers of cigarettes are the template for such advice, so it's reasonable to equate the two. If you don't think telling people to eat less "works", then telling people to smoke less didn't "work" either. No other lever was applied and people continued to suffer the consequences.
I thought it was obvious, how I was making a correlation to highlight the absurdity of the initial axiomatic statement. I was not trying to revise history.
- glenra 9y ago> If you don't think telling people to eat less "works", then telling people to smoke less didn't "work" either. I think my metric for whether advice "works" is whether people attempting to seriously follow the advice have at least, say, a 1-in-20 chance of success. By that metric "smoke less" does work and "eat less" does not. When people follow the advice "eat less" it seems to have about a 1% chance of success 5 years later, whereas "smoke less" has at least a 10% chance of success. If only one of those numbers is meaningfully positive, only one of those sets of advice "works".