6 ms·

I'm going to put on my Boomer pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps hat, but are you concerned about the loss of grit resulting from changing your behaviors with

I'm going to put on my Boomer pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps hat, but are you concerned about the loss of grit resulting from changing your behaviors without the drug?

afthonos 1y ago
Definitely not GP, but I think it’s pretty clear that whatever grit there was to have, GP did not have it. “Die an early death due to being overweight or build the grit” is strictly worse than “lose the weight without building the grit, or build the grit”, and it’s even more so when you realize that “or build the grit” was never in the cards. Because then the choice becomes “die an early death or don’t“. Building the grit can be done on other, hopefully less lethal, projects.
- a-french-anon 1y ago
  Preface: I'm going to sound quite harsh by changing scales, so put your tough skin on before continuing. This is certainly worse for the individual, but at society scale, the cost being the obvious devaluation of willpower is way too high. Way too high because everything good in that society was built almost exclusively by driven and strong-willed individuals.
  - nwienert 1y ago
    I'll give a reply a go - of course we want strong people. That said, we've introduced incredible amounts of weird new things to the world. Advertising, shit food, tech, and a litany of responsibilities. Some of these are very bad and we all paying heavy prices for it. I don't think we need to treat every bad thing society does as only needing a "toughen up" solution, instead we should fix the root cause. An extreme example would be if the government poisons your water, maybe some medicine is ok. We should un-poison the water too, but I'm ok with medicine in the meantime.
  - phil21 1y ago
    Then we should start selecting strong willed individuals who do not fit into the “normie” path as those we uphold and show to be role models and examples. Instead we collectively shit on them and force them into the most useless lifestyles ever devised - effectively pushing paper on rigid schedules or they don’t get to eat. I’ve thought about this one quite a bit. The world has narrowed a whole lot to define acceptable behavior and who is allowed a seat at the table. Almost all those “strong willed” individuals of the past who actually built things had lifestyles that would have gotten them entirely shunned from society today. It’s not impossible but even compared to 30 years ago it’s an entirely different world for such folks. The way I “came up” in life would not be possible today due to the gatekeepers of “respectable society”. Needing drugs to fit into that incredibly narrow and basic framework of a life should be of no surprise to anyone. Only a few of incredible luck and willpower and probably even naivety will survive that filter. This whole topic is the epitome of “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” - entirely predictable, and it’s what society seems to want.
  - afthonos 1y ago
    Expanding on what a sibling comment said, we live in an adversarial environment. A successful food product is one you want to eat, whether you need it or not. Willpower is important, I agree. Almost everyone needing willpower to not eat, though, is a fairly new phenomenon. If anything, the new drugs restore the balance that existed before —and if willpower is a limited resource, actively help society by returning to us what is taken by the relentless grind of profit maximization. For a bit. The grind will not sit still.
    - a-french-anon 1y ago
      Willpower to not eat really isn't the same as willpower to eat reasonably (in quantity and quality), though. There's even exercise to offset the effects of suboptimal alimentation.
      - afthonos 1y ago
        Either willpower is fungible, in which case it doesn’t matter what you use it on because you’re using it up no matter what, or it isn’t, in which case the original point about losing willpower due to leaning on GPL-1 inhibitors for weight loss is mostly invalid, since it wouldn’t affect the willpower to do other things.
        a-french-anon 1y ago
        The loss I wrote about is society-wide, not for individuals. Weak-willed people won't change, the problem is the damage to people who have willpower but are basically told it doesn't matter. It's really a matter of incentives and proper valuation.
inopinatus 1y ago
Turns out that this attitude was bullgrit all along.
hiddencost 1y ago
[flagged]
_yb2s 1y ago
I think this is a valid point, and the reason I haven’t tried these drugs and don’t plan to. There are huge benefits to developing the mental strength and discipline to lean into discomfort consistently and just do what needs to be done- and all types of addiction provide one of the hardest, and therefore most valuable and useful obstacles here. As Marcus Aurelius said “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” I’ve found that the general act of leaning into challenges and mild physical discomfort has a ripple effect on my mind, and all types of addiction and dopamine seeking behaviors become automatically less interesting- almost exactly like what people report on these drugs. If I take a cold shower or work out every morning even when I don’t feel like it- pretty soon I’m eating healthier and limiting my alcohol, caffeine, and screen time without even really trying to. That said, it only works if you manage to actually do it. It’s much better to get over addiction with a drug than to continue suffering from the addiction, and be unable to escape, especially something that causes as much damage as alcohol can. One idea I had was to set a deadline for overcoming an addiction, and to just use the drug if you reach the deadline and the mental approach is still unsuccessful.
- ridgeguy 1y ago
  If you're wired like Marcus Aurelius, maybe it'll work out ok. Peoples' neurochemistry differs enormously. One person's positive reinforcing experience is another's nociceptive hell. (source: Ph.D. neurophysiologist here) Arguments like yours presuppose humans have free will, that it's widely distributed, and if $whoever would just get on it, they'd progress. More and more, it appears what we have is the perception of free will, not the real thing - whatever that actually might be.
  - _yb2s 1y ago
    Not doubting your expertise, but I am skeptical of the idea that this method of intentionally leaning into discomfort only works for some minuscule abnormal subset of people that are just wired differently. Instead, I suspect it's tapping into something deeper about how our reward system is structured, something extremely related to how these GLP-1 agonists work, which explains why they are both effective against a shockingly wide array of seemingly different situations. The basic idea seems to be at the core of both a lot of modern self help gurus advice that seems to actually work for a huge fraction of the people that really commit to them (David Goggins, Wim Hof, etc.) as well as modern psychotherapy systems like CBT and ACT that are proven clinically effective. How many people are really trying this approach, and it not working for them? More often, I see people saying it sounds like it royally sucks (which is true and basically the entire point), and never trying it- which is valid, but doesn't really demonstrate that it wouldn't work for them. It absolutely is a "nociceptive hell" at first for everyone that tries it, but when you connect that with intention, purpose, and meaning it eventually transforms into something almost enjoyable. Becoming strong enough to meet discomfort or pain feels amazing, especially for someone that usually experiences the opposite of that. I also have ADHD, which is explained in part as a developmental disability of executive control, but I find this approach to be extremely effective for regaining executive control, even to levels that people without ADHD lack. Basically, I suspect ADHD isn't a loss of executive control at all, but the executive control is being blocked by something like the feeling of pain or drug withdrawal, and that once you are okay with just having that bad feeling all of the time, you get your executive control back. I'm curious if GLP-1 drugs also help with ADHD? My prediction is that they would.
smiley1437 1y ago
Not the GP, but do you think Serena Williams - world number 1 womens tennis player for 319 weeks, who trained for 5 hours per day at her peak - has insufficient grit? Because she went on GLP-1 to lose weight.
- justinator 1y ago
  [flagged]
- Leherenn 1y ago
  Grit, or willpower, or whatever you want to name it isn't a unique, constant value. There are plenty of athletes who could spent hours training every day but are overcome by addictions. People who grind at work but cannot fill paperwork to save their life. That will diligently do something for months then stops after an unexpected interruption. There's probably generally a bit of correlation. But just because someone can be very focused and go to extreme lengths in one aspect of their life doesn't mean they can consistently do it in every aspect of their life.
- justinator 1y ago
  My last comment was flagged, but the fact remains that Serena Williams is a paid spokesperson for Ro. https://ro.co/weight-loss/serena/ https://ro.co/weight-loss/serena/ Her use is an advertisement, it's marketing. Her story as to why she's using it is a fiction, a fabrication.
WheatMillington 1y ago
The idea that some people are overweight simply because they don't have grit, determination and self-discipline is asinine.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  I'm overweight for those reasons.
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  _some_ of the overweight people? most certainly! Most of them? I don’t think so. Life is more complicated than that. We all know that.
  - galagawinkle489 1y ago
    [flagged]
- vintermann 1y ago
  If people want to believe in "grit", they at the very least have to also believe in Undset's dictum: the hearts of men do not change, not in any age. If it's an inherent quality, then there's no reason we should have any less of it than "the greatest generation", or whoever we should want to idolize. The difference has to be external, not internal. Let's work on what we can change, the external. What you are might change, but you can't change it - that's the core realization behind both European pagan obsession with fate, and Christian obsession with sin.
  - galagawinkle489 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - vintermann 1y ago
      You haven't understood what I'm saying. Call it grit, call it character, whatever: it can maybe be developed or change, but not on its own. Circumstance, including other people, can change it for better or worse, but you can't change it on your own. You are exactly what you are. Without input from outside, you'll never turn into anything that isn't already implicitly there. To explain it in computer science terms, since this is HN: suppose you have a method which takes no input. Even if it's self-modifying code, can it change into something else? Can it "improve"? No. Whatever it will turn into after overwriting its own code is essentially already there. You have all the "character", "grit", whatever, that you started off with. If you get some or lose some throughout your life, it's from outside yourself: it can go either way, and you can't take credit for it anyway. This is something that all sorts of pagans, and Christians, have understood for thousands of years, but the modern Horatio Alger "conservative" doesn't understand it.
Nursie 1y ago
Good god no. If I can change my behaviour and achieve good health outcomes, relatively painlessly, why on earth would I not? This comes across to me like people who won't use painkillers - I should feel the pain, masking it is fake, there is virtue in suffering etc. Turns out those people often end up with secondary complications to (for example) muscle damage, because they've adapted their movements so much to avoid using the painful muscle that now everything else is tense, strained and locked up. Better living through chemistry, 100%.
hbosch 1y ago
What do you mean "grit"? Does doing something more efficiently mean you lose it? What's the difference, say, between someone using an LLM to help them code and someone else using a drug to help them diet? Is the coder using an LLM losing their "grit"? Do you walk to work in 30 inches of snow, uphill both ways, in the rain? Are you concerned about your loss of "grit" by not doing so? This argument continues to baffle me. I didn't take the GLP to help me with addictive behavior traits beyond my diet, but I observed tertiary benefits of the drug. As I've titrated my dose down to zero, I've retained those habits and my weight. I'm in the best shape of my life and mentally healthier than I've been in over a decade.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  I think the comparison to LLM use is a bad idea, because LLM use has pretty clear adverse effects on your capacity to program unassisted, and almost certainly long term limits your potential growth as a programmer, in ways that the LLM can't compensate (at least, not with current tech). Basically using LLMs extensively as a junior may well make you a better junior, but guarantee you'll never be a senior. My understanding is that that GLP1 drugs don't actually have this effect, as much as we know so far.
slv77 1y ago
Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with? Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies. But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen. Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix. Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?
pjc50 1y ago
Maybe "grit", like phlogiston, isn't real, and neurotransmitters are?
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  This would be my suspicion as well. Once upon a time, diseases like scurvy, leprosy and cholera were described as caused by insufficient moral fibre of the patient. Maybe this sort of moralizing is the best indicator that the underlying cause of the disease is, in fact, unknown yet.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    The current scare mongering over an "increase" in Autism rates is entirely driven by the fact that we stopped diagnosing autistic people as having other intellectual disabilities Done by the same people who demonstrably treat ADHD as just "laziness"
coderenegade 1y ago
What if it were possible to get grit from a pill? People who have taken it and come off of it are saying that they haven't reverted. You get good at what you practice, which is as true for grit as it is of anything else. If some people need assistance in getting that practice, this can probably help them. I've taken ritalin for ADHD for a long time, and if I don't take my treatment, I'm still far more focused and productive than I ever was before treatment, because I developed habits through the medication that stuck. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar were at work here.

I'm going to put on my Boomer pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps hat, but are you concerned about the loss of grit resulting from changing your behaviors without the drug?

afthonos 1y ago

Definitely not GP, but I think it’s pretty clear that whatever grit there was to have, GP did not have it. “Die an early death due to being overweight or build the grit” is strictly worse than “lose the weight without building the grit, or build the grit”, and it’s even more so when you realize that “or build the grit” was never in the cards. Because then the choice becomes “die an early death or don’t“. Building the grit can be done on other, hopefully less lethal, projects.

a-french-anon 1y ago
Preface: I'm going to sound quite harsh by changing scales, so put your tough skin on before continuing. This is certainly worse for the individual, but at society scale, the cost being the obvious devaluation of willpower is way too high. Way too high because everything good in that society was built almost exclusively by driven and strong-willed individuals.
- nwienert 1y ago
  I'll give a reply a go - of course we want strong people. That said, we've introduced incredible amounts of weird new things to the world. Advertising, shit food, tech, and a litany of responsibilities. Some of these are very bad and we all paying heavy prices for it. I don't think we need to treat every bad thing society does as only needing a "toughen up" solution, instead we should fix the root cause. An extreme example would be if the government poisons your water, maybe some medicine is ok. We should un-poison the water too, but I'm ok with medicine in the meantime.
- phil21 1y ago
  Then we should start selecting strong willed individuals who do not fit into the “normie” path as those we uphold and show to be role models and examples. Instead we collectively shit on them and force them into the most useless lifestyles ever devised - effectively pushing paper on rigid schedules or they don’t get to eat. I’ve thought about this one quite a bit. The world has narrowed a whole lot to define acceptable behavior and who is allowed a seat at the table. Almost all those “strong willed” individuals of the past who actually built things had lifestyles that would have gotten them entirely shunned from society today. It’s not impossible but even compared to 30 years ago it’s an entirely different world for such folks. The way I “came up” in life would not be possible today due to the gatekeepers of “respectable society”. Needing drugs to fit into that incredibly narrow and basic framework of a life should be of no surprise to anyone. Only a few of incredible luck and willpower and probably even naivety will survive that filter. This whole topic is the epitome of “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” - entirely predictable, and it’s what society seems to want.
- afthonos 1y ago
  Expanding on what a sibling comment said, we live in an adversarial environment. A successful food product is one you want to eat, whether you need it or not. Willpower is important, I agree. Almost everyone needing willpower to not eat, though, is a fairly new phenomenon. If anything, the new drugs restore the balance that existed before —and if willpower is a limited resource, actively help society by returning to us what is taken by the relentless grind of profit maximization. For a bit. The grind will not sit still.
  - a-french-anon 1y ago
    Willpower to not eat really isn't the same as willpower to eat reasonably (in quantity and quality), though. There's even exercise to offset the effects of suboptimal alimentation.
    - afthonos 1y ago
      Either willpower is fungible, in which case it doesn’t matter what you use it on because you’re using it up no matter what, or it isn’t, in which case the original point about losing willpower due to leaning on GPL-1 inhibitors for weight loss is mostly invalid, since it wouldn’t affect the willpower to do other things.
      - a-french-anon 1y ago
        The loss I wrote about is society-wide, not for individuals. Weak-willed people won't change, the problem is the damage to people who have willpower but are basically told it doesn't matter. It's really a matter of incentives and proper valuation.

inopinatus 1y ago

Turns out that this attitude was bullgrit all along.

hiddencost 1y ago

[flagged]

_yb2s 1y ago

I think this is a valid point, and the reason I haven’t tried these drugs and don’t plan to. There are huge benefits to developing the mental strength and discipline to lean into discomfort consistently and just do what needs to be done- and all types of addiction provide one of the hardest, and therefore most valuable and useful obstacles here. As Marcus Aurelius said “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” I’ve found that the general act of leaning into challenges and mild physical discomfort has a ripple effect on my mind, and all types of addiction and dopamine seeking behaviors become automatically less interesting- almost exactly like what people report on these drugs. If I take a cold shower or work out every morning even when I don’t feel like it- pretty soon I’m eating healthier and limiting my alcohol, caffeine, and screen time without even really trying to. That said, it only works if you manage to actually do it. It’s much better to get over addiction with a drug than to continue suffering from the addiction, and be unable to escape, especially something that causes as much damage as alcohol can. One idea I had was to set a deadline for overcoming an addiction, and to just use the drug if you reach the deadline and the mental approach is still unsuccessful.

ridgeguy 1y ago
If you're wired like Marcus Aurelius, maybe it'll work out ok. Peoples' neurochemistry differs enormously. One person's positive reinforcing experience is another's nociceptive hell. (source: Ph.D. neurophysiologist here) Arguments like yours presuppose humans have free will, that it's widely distributed, and if $whoever would just get on it, they'd progress. More and more, it appears what we have is the perception of free will, not the real thing - whatever that actually might be.
- _yb2s 1y ago
  Not doubting your expertise, but I am skeptical of the idea that this method of intentionally leaning into discomfort only works for some minuscule abnormal subset of people that are just wired differently. Instead, I suspect it's tapping into something deeper about how our reward system is structured, something extremely related to how these GLP-1 agonists work, which explains why they are both effective against a shockingly wide array of seemingly different situations. The basic idea seems to be at the core of both a lot of modern self help gurus advice that seems to actually work for a huge fraction of the people that really commit to them (David Goggins, Wim Hof, etc.) as well as modern psychotherapy systems like CBT and ACT that are proven clinically effective. How many people are really trying this approach, and it not working for them? More often, I see people saying it sounds like it royally sucks (which is true and basically the entire point), and never trying it- which is valid, but doesn't really demonstrate that it wouldn't work for them. It absolutely is a "nociceptive hell" at first for everyone that tries it, but when you connect that with intention, purpose, and meaning it eventually transforms into something almost enjoyable. Becoming strong enough to meet discomfort or pain feels amazing, especially for someone that usually experiences the opposite of that. I also have ADHD, which is explained in part as a developmental disability of executive control, but I find this approach to be extremely effective for regaining executive control, even to levels that people without ADHD lack. Basically, I suspect ADHD isn't a loss of executive control at all, but the executive control is being blocked by something like the feeling of pain or drug withdrawal, and that once you are okay with just having that bad feeling all of the time, you get your executive control back. I'm curious if GLP-1 drugs also help with ADHD? My prediction is that they would.

smiley1437 1y ago

Not the GP, but do you think Serena Williams - world number 1 womens tennis player for 319 weeks, who trained for 5 hours per day at her peak - has insufficient grit? Because she went on GLP-1 to lose weight.

justinator 1y ago
[flagged]
Leherenn 1y ago
Grit, or willpower, or whatever you want to name it isn't a unique, constant value. There are plenty of athletes who could spent hours training every day but are overcome by addictions. People who grind at work but cannot fill paperwork to save their life. That will diligently do something for months then stops after an unexpected interruption. There's probably generally a bit of correlation. But just because someone can be very focused and go to extreme lengths in one aspect of their life doesn't mean they can consistently do it in every aspect of their life.
justinator 1y ago
My last comment was flagged, but the fact remains that Serena Williams is a paid spokesperson for Ro. https://ro.co/weight-loss/serena/ https://ro.co/weight-loss/serena/ Her use is an advertisement, it's marketing. Her story as to why she's using it is a fiction, a fabrication.

WheatMillington 1y ago

The idea that some people are overweight simply because they don't have grit, determination and self-discipline is asinine.

BurningFrog 1y ago
I'm overweight for those reasons.
lurking_swe 1y ago
_some_ of the overweight people? most certainly! Most of them? I don’t think so. Life is more complicated than that. We all know that.
- galagawinkle489 1y ago
  [flagged]
vintermann 1y ago
If people want to believe in "grit", they at the very least have to also believe in Undset's dictum: the hearts of men do not change, not in any age. If it's an inherent quality, then there's no reason we should have any less of it than "the greatest generation", or whoever we should want to idolize. The difference has to be external, not internal. Let's work on what we can change, the external. What you are might change, but you can't change it - that's the core realization behind both European pagan obsession with fate, and Christian obsession with sin.
- galagawinkle489 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - vintermann 1y ago
    You haven't understood what I'm saying. Call it grit, call it character, whatever: it can maybe be developed or change, but not on its own. Circumstance, including other people, can change it for better or worse, but you can't change it on your own. You are exactly what you are. Without input from outside, you'll never turn into anything that isn't already implicitly there. To explain it in computer science terms, since this is HN: suppose you have a method which takes no input. Even if it's self-modifying code, can it change into something else? Can it "improve"? No. Whatever it will turn into after overwriting its own code is essentially already there. You have all the "character", "grit", whatever, that you started off with. If you get some or lose some throughout your life, it's from outside yourself: it can go either way, and you can't take credit for it anyway. This is something that all sorts of pagans, and Christians, have understood for thousands of years, but the modern Horatio Alger "conservative" doesn't understand it.

Nursie 1y ago

Good god no. If I can change my behaviour and achieve good health outcomes, relatively painlessly, why on earth would I not? This comes across to me like people who won't use painkillers - I should feel the pain, masking it is fake, there is virtue in suffering etc. Turns out those people often end up with secondary complications to (for example) muscle damage, because they've adapted their movements so much to avoid using the painful muscle that now everything else is tense, strained and locked up. Better living through chemistry, 100%.

hbosch 1y ago

What do you mean "grit"? Does doing something more efficiently mean you lose it? What's the difference, say, between someone using an LLM to help them code and someone else using a drug to help them diet? Is the coder using an LLM losing their "grit"? Do you walk to work in 30 inches of snow, uphill both ways, in the rain? Are you concerned about your loss of "grit" by not doing so? This argument continues to baffle me. I didn't take the GLP to help me with addictive behavior traits beyond my diet, but I observed tertiary benefits of the drug. As I've titrated my dose down to zero, I've retained those habits and my weight. I'm in the best shape of my life and mentally healthier than I've been in over a decade.

tsimionescu 1y ago
I think the comparison to LLM use is a bad idea, because LLM use has pretty clear adverse effects on your capacity to program unassisted, and almost certainly long term limits your potential growth as a programmer, in ways that the LLM can't compensate (at least, not with current tech). Basically using LLMs extensively as a junior may well make you a better junior, but guarantee you'll never be a senior. My understanding is that that GLP1 drugs don't actually have this effect, as much as we know so far.

slv77 1y ago

Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with? Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies. But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen. Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix. Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?

pjc50 1y ago

Maybe "grit", like phlogiston, isn't real, and neurotransmitters are?

inglor_cz 1y ago
This would be my suspicion as well. Once upon a time, diseases like scurvy, leprosy and cholera were described as caused by insufficient moral fibre of the patient. Maybe this sort of moralizing is the best indicator that the underlying cause of the disease is, in fact, unknown yet.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  The current scare mongering over an "increase" in Autism rates is entirely driven by the fact that we stopped diagnosing autistic people as having other intellectual disabilities Done by the same people who demonstrably treat ADHD as just "laziness"

coderenegade 1y ago

What if it were possible to get grit from a pill? People who have taken it and come off of it are saying that they haven't reverted. You get good at what you practice, which is as true for grit as it is of anything else. If some people need assistance in getting that practice, this can probably help them. I've taken ritalin for ADHD for a long time, and if I don't take my treatment, I'm still far more focused and productive than I ever was before treatment, because I developed habits through the medication that stuck. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar were at work here.