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Related to your parent comment: > It's also been extended to the notion that if one fails, it is always someone else's fault. Sometimes it is someone else’s f

by awb 5y ago

Related to your parent comment: > It's also been extended to the notion that if one fails, it is always someone else's fault. Sometimes it is someone else’s fault. But no one is saying it’s always someone else’s fault. And what I meant by trust is that you have the illusion of agency in many situations. People think they have full agency over their health: they get to choose what to eat, where and how to exercise, what medicine to take, etc. Except we are restricted by our economic situation, local availability, local knowledge, social influences, etc. such that no two people have the exact same agency. I’m an extreme example, people are shunned or banned from communities for making certain decisions with their lives. In those scenarios, it isn’t a free market scenario where two choices can be evaluated and the best one picked. The deck is heavily stacked and your agency is impacted to some degree, such that saying that “people have agency over their lives” is too simplistic IMO.

WalterBright 5y ago
Having an agency is a book length topic. Of course a HN message is going to be short & simple. After all, people don't read long postings. <= yes, that's another generalization, but it's reasonably accurate. > People think they have full agency over their health I've seen estimates that 70-80% of health problems are the result of lifestyle choices.
- awb 5y ago
  Well there’s a lot of evidence about the role environment plays. The most famous example I know of is the Vietnam opioid study: https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/19/lessons-learned-and-lost-vietnam-era-addiction-study/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/19/lessons-learned-and-lost... When removing mental illness from the study, many service members who had addiction in Vietnam had no addiction or relapse when they returned to the US, even without any treatment. The leading theories were reduced stress, better social support and less access to opioids. So, if you’re growing up in a city and/or family unit with high stress (high crime, low opportunity), poor social influences / support structures and high access to dangerous or illegal activities, you’re far more likely to fall into addiction or poor decision making through no extra fault of your own. If you grow up with low stress, great influences and little temptation, you’re more likely to make good decisions with no bonus points for you. So yeah, decision making is a huge part of your health, but for this study of service men in the 50s the deck was stacked against them in Vietnam and stacked in their favor in the US. It’s interesting to see the same exact person experiencing two wildly different outcomes with their environment being the largest differing factor, rather than education, treatment, etc. It suggests that it’s hard to educate someone into making better decisions, but easier to help them make better decisions by helping them find a healthier environment. This line up with research about self control fatigue that each decision proves and act of self restraint is fatiguing (https://www.nutritionaction.com/daily/what-not-to-eat/decision-fatigue-can-lead-to-poor-choices-of-what-to-buy-and-eat/ https://www.nutritionaction.com/daily/what-not-to-eat/decisi...). Which is akin to the salesman’s trick of the trade: “persistence wears down resistance”. The more you’re tempted the more likely you are to succumb. So pick your guilty pleasure and now imagine it in your house, on the way to work, enjoyed by your friends and loved ones, everywhere all the time. It’s much harder to resist than if you don’t have access to it or have a healthy mix of people in your life who don’t indulge. I guess I see it more like 70-80% of decisions are influenced by your environment and we’re not as virtuous or evil as our actions alone might seem.
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    In economics we distinguish between naive and sophisticated agents. The naive agent assumes he can continue to maintain self control. However, we want our future selves to make a different set of choices than our future selves often want to make. So, the sophisticated agent recognizes brute self control does not always work and finds ways to commit himself. Most of us are familiar with ways of doing this: - Plan food for the week and don't keep unhealthy things in the house - Get a gym partner to avoid excuses for skipping workouts - Make a budget to place artificial limits on impulse spending If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there. Commit in advance to a course of action that maybe in the future I would not like, but the choice is already made and so I am better off. This is only one possible idea, of course there are others, the point is there are ways to mitigate these problems. There are ways we can work against our future selves to make better choices and doing this is an important part of being an adult. The fact that everybody is not perfect at it does not mean people don't have agency. And an idea of "self control fatigue" does not excuse people from responsibility for the consequences of their actions or failure to succeed.
    - awb 5y ago
      > If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there. Try this scenario again but without knowledge of the impact your decision will have and without a benevolent and cooperative support structure and I think it will more accurately describe what many people go through. Your scenario is from an ideal perspective: full information, full awareness and unlimited help from the community. Not everyone has all of those benefits. FYI, I don’t think the servicemen had an addiction to opioids prior to Vietnam. Drugs (and most “poor” decisions) aren’t usually offered up with a fair and balanced perspective, it’s more of a “hey, try this” and you’re already in a hole before you knew it was a hole. Same with healthy eating, financial literacy, etc. If you were raised in a poor, high-crime community by parents who made poor life choices and still found the time to learn about healthy meal prep, workout buddies and proper budgeting, then that’s amazing and kudos to you for overcoming a deck stacked against you.

by awb 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

Having an agency is a book length topic. Of course a HN message is going to be short & simple. After all, people don't read long postings. <= yes, that's another generalization, but it's reasonably accurate. > People think they have full agency over their health I've seen estimates that 70-80% of health problems are the result of lifestyle choices.

awb 5y ago
Well there’s a lot of evidence about the role environment plays. The most famous example I know of is the Vietnam opioid study: https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/19/lessons-learned-and-lost-vietnam-era-addiction-study/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/19/lessons-learned-and-lost... When removing mental illness from the study, many service members who had addiction in Vietnam had no addiction or relapse when they returned to the US, even without any treatment. The leading theories were reduced stress, better social support and less access to opioids. So, if you’re growing up in a city and/or family unit with high stress (high crime, low opportunity), poor social influences / support structures and high access to dangerous or illegal activities, you’re far more likely to fall into addiction or poor decision making through no extra fault of your own. If you grow up with low stress, great influences and little temptation, you’re more likely to make good decisions with no bonus points for you. So yeah, decision making is a huge part of your health, but for this study of service men in the 50s the deck was stacked against them in Vietnam and stacked in their favor in the US. It’s interesting to see the same exact person experiencing two wildly different outcomes with their environment being the largest differing factor, rather than education, treatment, etc. It suggests that it’s hard to educate someone into making better decisions, but easier to help them make better decisions by helping them find a healthier environment. This line up with research about self control fatigue that each decision proves and act of self restraint is fatiguing (https://www.nutritionaction.com/daily/what-not-to-eat/decision-fatigue-can-lead-to-poor-choices-of-what-to-buy-and-eat/ https://www.nutritionaction.com/daily/what-not-to-eat/decisi...). Which is akin to the salesman’s trick of the trade: “persistence wears down resistance”. The more you’re tempted the more likely you are to succumb. So pick your guilty pleasure and now imagine it in your house, on the way to work, enjoyed by your friends and loved ones, everywhere all the time. It’s much harder to resist than if you don’t have access to it or have a healthy mix of people in your life who don’t indulge. I guess I see it more like 70-80% of decisions are influenced by your environment and we’re not as virtuous or evil as our actions alone might seem.
- collegeburner 5y ago
  In economics we distinguish between naive and sophisticated agents. The naive agent assumes he can continue to maintain self control. However, we want our future selves to make a different set of choices than our future selves often want to make. So, the sophisticated agent recognizes brute self control does not always work and finds ways to commit himself. Most of us are familiar with ways of doing this: - Plan food for the week and don't keep unhealthy things in the house - Get a gym partner to avoid excuses for skipping workouts - Make a budget to place artificial limits on impulse spending If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there. Commit in advance to a course of action that maybe in the future I would not like, but the choice is already made and so I am better off. This is only one possible idea, of course there are others, the point is there are ways to mitigate these problems. There are ways we can work against our future selves to make better choices and doing this is an important part of being an adult. The fact that everybody is not perfect at it does not mean people don't have agency. And an idea of "self control fatigue" does not excuse people from responsibility for the consequences of their actions or failure to succeed.
  - awb 5y ago
    > If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there. Try this scenario again but without knowledge of the impact your decision will have and without a benevolent and cooperative support structure and I think it will more accurately describe what many people go through. Your scenario is from an ideal perspective: full information, full awareness and unlimited help from the community. Not everyone has all of those benefits. FYI, I don’t think the servicemen had an addiction to opioids prior to Vietnam. Drugs (and most “poor” decisions) aren’t usually offered up with a fair and balanced perspective, it’s more of a “hey, try this” and you’re already in a hole before you knew it was a hole. Same with healthy eating, financial literacy, etc. If you were raised in a poor, high-crime community by parents who made poor life choices and still found the time to learn about healthy meal prep, workout buddies and proper budgeting, then that’s amazing and kudos to you for overcoming a deck stacked against you.