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> Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly ho

> Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit. Where does this line of thinking stop? Is everything pre-determined by genetics? Is everyone who is smarter than me, just actually lucky that their dopamine system works correctly, and mine doesn't, and hasn't since I was a very young kid? I'm sure this response will get down voted but its an honest question. This line of thinking that everything is genetically pre-determined seems both accurate and somewhat depressing. It means that if I'm skinny and can't gain weight, I need to take steroids and lift. Or if I'm fat, I should take a GLP-1 agonist. If I'm underperforming in my career or school, I should take adderal or similar pharma solutions. What role does good old fashioned hard work and discipline have in this day and age?

tormeh 4y ago
We’re products of our nature and environment. Belief in free will, virtue, etc. are useful beliefs, but they’re also just not true.
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  Free will is a product of our nature.
nunez 4y ago
I don't think _everything_ comes down to genetics, but a lot of stuff does, including the attributes you mentioned here.
scarmig 4y ago
I didn't say anything about genetics, though I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a part. Might be how you were raised. Might be simply your cumulative life path leaving you in a particular state. Might be toxins in the environment. It doesn't matter; in the existing present, people have wildly different responses to food and diet. As for your actual question, it depends on the particular thing we're talking about. For obesity, we've tried telling people to do more hard work and discipline, and it's been a spectacular failure. Plenty of people who do work hard and have incredible discipline in other areas of their life fail when it comes to getting to a normal BMI. There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. This also is more common in our current society, for whatever reason (likely not genes, since we're close enough to our grandparents), than it was historically. This isn't some natural state of affairs we live in. So, bring on the drugs! If there are ones that help other things with minimal side effects, bring them on too. Everyone wins, because we end up with a better, happier, more productive society.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  > There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. Out of curiosity, what kind of food were you obsessing over, specifically? Why were you craving that kind of food, instead of, say, lettuce?
  - scarmig 4y ago
    For me, it was primarily carbs. Not potato chips or anything particularly greasy, but things like tortillas, rice, noodles, bread, potatoes. As to why, who knows. I'd be "starving" but have zero desire to eat lettuce, but then jump on the first chance I got to eat a couple cups of rice.
    - depressedpanda 4y ago
      Well, simple carbs (which includes sugar) are highly addictive, so I can't say I'm surprised. Your brain was trying to get you your fix by convincing you that you were starving. In contrast, if you were truly starving you'd eat anything -- including lettuce ; ) So, maybe you already tried that, but there's a psychological/addiction angle that's seldom explored when it comes to simple carbs and obesity. That said, if there's a drug that you can take that'll numb those cravings down to a healthy level, there's nothing wrong with that.
nerdbert 4y ago
Let's say there were a drug that made people motivated to study hard and get a lot of work done. Would the successes people reaped from that be less useful to themselves and people around them, than those which other people reaped from being natively predisposed in that direction?
hypatiadotca 4y ago
If your eyes got bad, would you get glasses? My brain doesn't produce the same amount of dopamine as a non-ADHD human's brain. It's morally neutral to fix that with medication, same as it's morally neutral to wear glasses, imo.
telchior 4y ago
Instead of thinking in terms of "everything", "everyone", etc, it may help to think in terms of bell curves and outliers on that curve. Would you be willing to believe that, out of 7+ billions people in the world, there is at least one person whose brain is set up to constantly hammer them with feelings of hunger? (I'm not sure how a basic proposition like this could be rejected, since the chemicals and processes that govern hunger are something that science actually has some understanding of, and we also know that basically anything can go haywire.) Next: if you can believe that one person is such an outlier, can you believe that hundreds are? Thousands? Millions? Whatever size that group is, it seems like a possible answer to your worry of when these lines of thinking stop. Perhaps some outlying group of people do actually need something more than "good old fashioned hard work and discipline", especially considering that thousands of years of people repeating such sentiments hasn't solved quite a lot of problems (beyond just obesity).
- naasking 4y ago
  > Next: if you can believe that one person is such an outlier, can you believe that hundreds are? Thousands? Millions? Yes, those people exist as outliers. But a population-level outlier theory doesn't explain why obesity is growing in the population.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    ADHD used to be only a tiny amount of outliers and is growing, thanks to the lifestyle we lead. Obesity is similar. This feeling of hunger is thrown out of whack often not by genetic but by lifestyle. I’m lucky enough that I haven’t felt it all my life, but I have felt it during multiple phases of my life; i know exactly how eating the wrong kinds of food can teach your body to eat more than it needs and to adapt to that new number. Our environment sucks ass.
    - chownie 4y ago
      > ADHD used to be only a tiny amount of outliers and is growing, thanks to the lifestyle we lead. I think this might be a misunderstanding. Rates of ADHD may be higher but I think it's more likely we have an environment which now challenges people with ADHD more than in the past. The advent of electrical lighting did not cause an increase in pattern-reactive epilepsy, it just created conditions in which pattern-reactive epilepsy were more likely to be triggered. I believe now is the same.
derefr 4y ago
"Hard work and discipline" are multipliers for the output of an otherwise-balanced brain and body chemistry. But they're no substitute for fixing that balance when it is imbalanced. An analogy: "hard work" is what your car's engine does when you throttle it up. But that "hard work" isn't going to take you very far — or even in the right direction — if the car's wheels aren't aligned and balanced equidistantly on the car's axle. This "imbalance" will mean that any power put into the system, just gets shunted into running you faster and faster in circles, and/or into "spinning your wheels" and "burning out." Bringing the car into balance is an overriding concern. You won't get anywhere without first doing that, no matter how hard you push the engine. Once you've done that, though, then the amount of power you're pushing through the engine — your "hard work and discipline" – becomes relevant.
not_kurt_godel 4y ago
Why are you more worried about "good old fashioned hard work and discipline" than taking a scientific and results-oriented approach to improve people's lives? Do you want to see people toil and suffer for its own sake?
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Funnily enough one could argue that we're also biologically predisposed to apply certain moral judgements to the behaviour of other people and our own. After all, our environment of selection didn't include the ability to alter much of our body chemistry.
Gwarzo 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  You're breaking the site guidelines badly with your posts in this thread. Moreover it looks like you've done that more than once in the past as well. Can you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation, not angry putdowns. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
concordDance 4y ago
Genetics and microbiome are the biggest factors, but training, habits and environment (how accessible is that junk food?) also matters.
tomp 4y ago
There is 0% chance that human genetics changed this much in the last 100 years (3-4 generations). Look at photos from 100 years ago, people were mostly thin. So no, we’re not genetically predetermined to be hungry. There’s something in our environment that’s messing with our circuits. Either some toxins (e.g. endocrine disrupters) or hyper palatable food (artificially engineered for max enjoyment and min satiety), or maybe something else.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  But this doesn’t dismiss the idea that some people are genetically predisposed to be far hungrier. While true cheap and abundant calories facilitate obesity, that probably synergizes with people who have naturally voracious appetites. Someone in the pre-industrialized past wouldn’t have been able to binge on so much calorie dense food, but they may very well have felt gnawing hunger more strongly than their peers.
pmarreck 4y ago
> Is everything pre-determined by genetics? Well, much more is, than isn't, it seems. You may trim the sails, but life will provide you your wind direction... And in this case: "As many as 400 genes have been shown to affect body weight in one way or another." https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/obesity-is-it-in-our-genes/ https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/obesity-is-it-...

tormeh 4y ago

We’re products of our nature and environment. Belief in free will, virtue, etc. are useful beliefs, but they’re also just not true.

raspberry1337 4y ago
Free will is a product of our nature.

nunez 4y ago

I don't think _everything_ comes down to genetics, but a lot of stuff does, including the attributes you mentioned here.

scarmig 4y ago

I didn't say anything about genetics, though I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a part. Might be how you were raised. Might be simply your cumulative life path leaving you in a particular state. Might be toxins in the environment. It doesn't matter; in the existing present, people have wildly different responses to food and diet. As for your actual question, it depends on the particular thing we're talking about. For obesity, we've tried telling people to do more hard work and discipline, and it's been a spectacular failure. Plenty of people who do work hard and have incredible discipline in other areas of their life fail when it comes to getting to a normal BMI. There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. This also is more common in our current society, for whatever reason (likely not genes, since we're close enough to our grandparents), than it was historically. This isn't some natural state of affairs we live in. So, bring on the drugs! If there are ones that help other things with minimal side effects, bring them on too. Everyone wins, because we end up with a better, happier, more productive society.

depressedpanda 4y ago
> There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. Out of curiosity, what kind of food were you obsessing over, specifically? Why were you craving that kind of food, instead of, say, lettuce?
- scarmig 4y ago
  For me, it was primarily carbs. Not potato chips or anything particularly greasy, but things like tortillas, rice, noodles, bread, potatoes. As to why, who knows. I'd be "starving" but have zero desire to eat lettuce, but then jump on the first chance I got to eat a couple cups of rice.
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
    Well, simple carbs (which includes sugar) are highly addictive, so I can't say I'm surprised. Your brain was trying to get you your fix by convincing you that you were starving. In contrast, if you were truly starving you'd eat anything -- including lettuce ; ) So, maybe you already tried that, but there's a psychological/addiction angle that's seldom explored when it comes to simple carbs and obesity. That said, if there's a drug that you can take that'll numb those cravings down to a healthy level, there's nothing wrong with that.

nerdbert 4y ago

Let's say there were a drug that made people motivated to study hard and get a lot of work done. Would the successes people reaped from that be less useful to themselves and people around them, than those which other people reaped from being natively predisposed in that direction?

hypatiadotca 4y ago

If your eyes got bad, would you get glasses? My brain doesn't produce the same amount of dopamine as a non-ADHD human's brain. It's morally neutral to fix that with medication, same as it's morally neutral to wear glasses, imo.

telchior 4y ago

Instead of thinking in terms of "everything", "everyone", etc, it may help to think in terms of bell curves and outliers on that curve. Would you be willing to believe that, out of 7+ billions people in the world, there is at least one person whose brain is set up to constantly hammer them with feelings of hunger? (I'm not sure how a basic proposition like this could be rejected, since the chemicals and processes that govern hunger are something that science actually has some understanding of, and we also know that basically anything can go haywire.) Next: if you can believe that one person is such an outlier, can you believe that hundreds are? Thousands? Millions? Whatever size that group is, it seems like a possible answer to your worry of when these lines of thinking stop. Perhaps some outlying group of people do actually need something more than "good old fashioned hard work and discipline", especially considering that thousands of years of people repeating such sentiments hasn't solved quite a lot of problems (beyond just obesity).

naasking 4y ago
> Next: if you can believe that one person is such an outlier, can you believe that hundreds are? Thousands? Millions? Yes, those people exist as outliers. But a population-level outlier theory doesn't explain why obesity is growing in the population.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  ADHD used to be only a tiny amount of outliers and is growing, thanks to the lifestyle we lead. Obesity is similar. This feeling of hunger is thrown out of whack often not by genetic but by lifestyle. I’m lucky enough that I haven’t felt it all my life, but I have felt it during multiple phases of my life; i know exactly how eating the wrong kinds of food can teach your body to eat more than it needs and to adapt to that new number. Our environment sucks ass.
  - chownie 4y ago
    > ADHD used to be only a tiny amount of outliers and is growing, thanks to the lifestyle we lead. I think this might be a misunderstanding. Rates of ADHD may be higher but I think it's more likely we have an environment which now challenges people with ADHD more than in the past. The advent of electrical lighting did not cause an increase in pattern-reactive epilepsy, it just created conditions in which pattern-reactive epilepsy were more likely to be triggered. I believe now is the same.

derefr 4y ago

"Hard work and discipline" are multipliers for the output of an otherwise-balanced brain and body chemistry. But they're no substitute for fixing that balance when it is imbalanced. An analogy: "hard work" is what your car's engine does when you throttle it up. But that "hard work" isn't going to take you very far — or even in the right direction — if the car's wheels aren't aligned and balanced equidistantly on the car's axle. This "imbalance" will mean that any power put into the system, just gets shunted into running you faster and faster in circles, and/or into "spinning your wheels" and "burning out." Bringing the car into balance is an overriding concern. You won't get anywhere without first doing that, no matter how hard you push the engine. Once you've done that, though, then the amount of power you're pushing through the engine — your "hard work and discipline" – becomes relevant.

not_kurt_godel 4y ago

Why are you more worried about "good old fashioned hard work and discipline" than taking a scientific and results-oriented approach to improve people's lives? Do you want to see people toil and suffer for its own sake?

ithkuil 4y ago
Funnily enough one could argue that we're also biologically predisposed to apply certain moral judgements to the behaviour of other people and our own. After all, our environment of selection didn't include the ability to alter much of our body chemistry.

Gwarzo 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
You're breaking the site guidelines badly with your posts in this thread. Moreover it looks like you've done that more than once in the past as well. Can you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation, not angry putdowns. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

concordDance 4y ago

Genetics and microbiome are the biggest factors, but training, habits and environment (how accessible is that junk food?) also matters.

tomp 4y ago

There is 0% chance that human genetics changed this much in the last 100 years (3-4 generations). Look at photos from 100 years ago, people were mostly thin. So no, we’re not genetically predetermined to be hungry. There’s something in our environment that’s messing with our circuits. Either some toxins (e.g. endocrine disrupters) or hyper palatable food (artificially engineered for max enjoyment and min satiety), or maybe something else.

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
But this doesn’t dismiss the idea that some people are genetically predisposed to be far hungrier. While true cheap and abundant calories facilitate obesity, that probably synergizes with people who have naturally voracious appetites. Someone in the pre-industrialized past wouldn’t have been able to binge on so much calorie dense food, but they may very well have felt gnawing hunger more strongly than their peers.

pmarreck 4y ago

> Is everything pre-determined by genetics? Well, much more is, than isn't, it seems. You may trim the sails, but life will provide you your wind direction... And in this case: "As many as 400 genes have been shown to affect body weight in one way or another." https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/obesity-is-it-in-our-genes/ https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/obesity-is-it-...