From f74d64c888d08963ea3ab2a8bd7b049515e7d84d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Zack M. Davis" Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2026 22:31:41 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] drafting "Listening Disorders" --- ...listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md | 23 +++++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md index f3e606b..1b2e05e 100644 --- a/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md +++ b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md @@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ The analogy is: just as I hold some people in absolute contempt for being so fin To be clear, it's not a great analogy. The domains of information and food intake aren't that similar, so of course there are disanalogies that run in my favor. For example, I could say that my health is no one's business but my own, but that falsehood in public discourse affects everyone. Or I could point out that I'm not _claiming_ to be some athlete with an optimally nourished body (where a suboptimal diet could call the claim into question), whereas the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be truthseeking intellectuals. -But the power of the analogy is that it forces me to attend to the practical weight of an involuntary Absolute No, rather than brushing it off with platitudes about idealized Bayesian reasoners. If someone tried to bully me into changing my diet with appeals to what an idealized healthy human would eat, I would be unmoved. I think whatever health deficits I'm suffering from my eating disorder are quantitatively small. Whatever I'm missing out on by not being able to tolerate most vegetables, my understanding is that I can fill out a relevantly similar nutrient profile with fruit, legumes, and whole grains. +But the power of the analogy is that it forces me to attend to the practical decision-weight of an involuntary Absolute No, rather than brushing it off with platitudes about idealized Bayesian reasoners. If someone tried to bully me into changing my diet with appeals to what an idealized healthy human would eat, I would be unmoved. I think whatever health deficits I'm suffering from my eating disorder are quantitatively small. Whatever I'm missing out on by not being able to tolerate most vegetables, my understanding is that I can fill out a relevantly similar nutrient profile with fruit, legumes, and whole grains. But then the people I'm trying to bully into changing their information diet could say the same thing. They might concede in the abstract that they're theoretically missing something by not being an info-omnivore but insist that the practical effect is quantitatively small. Whatever information they're missing out on by not being able to tolerate Sneer Club, they think they can fill it out from other sources.[^sneer-deficit] @@ -44,25 +44,28 @@ But then the people I'm trying to bully into changing their information diet cou The analogy also stress-tests my haughty claim that the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to. It's not that the claim is wrong, but the conditional is doing more work than I was giving it credit for. I think I _could_ beat my eating disorder—if I wanted to. There's lots of interventions to try: figure out what dimensions the aversion is responding to, do repeated exposure therapy in increasing doses, get skilled at cooking. Acquired tastes are a thing. (No one "innately" thinks coffee tastes good, and yet I drink decaf coffee, because at some point I acquired a coffee taste that remained even after I started being scared of caffeine.) I bet I could acquire a vegetable taste—if I made a project out of it. -But I don't want to make a project out of it! I just don't! One of the things that makes me most grateful to be an economically independent adult rather than a child is that I can control my own food supply. I buy and prepare the foods that I want to eat, and it's not a problem if I don't say it's a problem. +But I don't want to make a project out of it! I just don't! One of the things that makes me most grateful to be an economically independent adult rather than a child is that I can control my own food supply. I buy and prepare the foods that I want to eat, and it doesn't have to be a problem if _I_ don't think it's a problem. +I _can_ make an effortful project out of changing my habits when I genuinely think something is a problem. As it happens, I _have_ been adjusting my diet to address some health concerns—nothing immediately dangerous, just some suboptimal weight and A1C numbers that it would be nice to get down. But when I looked up what interventions would push on the numbers, it turned out that my vegetable problem was basically irrelevant. (For fat loss, apparently the idea is that you want to run a calorie deficit while exercising and eating a lot of protein so that your body knows it should respond to the deficit by cannabalizing fat instead of muscle; for glucose, there are some more complicated recommendations about limiting starchy foods and timing when and how you eat them. Neither requires me to learn to eat Not Food.) There's no reason for me to incur pain and expend effort to fix my eating disorder specifically when there are so many other competing projects that push on my actual goals. -[TODO— +But again, the fragile intellectuals I'm complaining about could say the same thing. They already have their hands full doing whatever kind of intellectual work they do, whether it's studying social dynamics or mechanistic interpretability. They could acquire a "masochistic" taste if they made a project out of it, but there's no reason for them to incur pain and expend effort on that particular project. It's not the low-hanging fruit for improving the work they do. + +------ + +So, in light of the analogy to my eating disorder, should I be more merciful to people with listening disorders? Should I stop openly expressing disdain for them in public forums, in timeless exchange for my not being disdained in social eating situations? -in fact, my diet reform has been about protein and kcal deficit; more vegetables doesn't really play into it +I'm tenatively inclined to continue being unmerciful. The issue is that I just don't think the analogy is that strong in the ways that matter. Ultimately, I think that confronting uncomfortable information is more fundamental to the project of rationality than eating vegetables is to the project of being healthy enough to participate in Society, such that I'm still going to be pretty "mean" about the former. -I don't want to spend time or effort on that particular project when I already have so many other projects in my life. -And they could say the same thing. +The analogy is useful for forcing me to confront uncomfortable information about how difficult it is to remediate a particular psychological weakness. -If they have intellectual work they do -studying mechinterp or social dynamics + +[TODO— The analogy is useful to make me not dismiss the costs, but ultimately the analogy is weak; flinching away from hypotheses is fatal. In the least convenient possible world, flinching from vegetables might be fatal, but it doesn't look like it! So, should I have mercy on people with listening disorders? Should I not take public status shots at them the way that I do? Um, actually I think the analogy is weak enough (accepting info is more fundamental to the rationality project than diet balance is to being healthy enough to participate in Society), that I'm still going to be pretty "mean" about it. But maybe I can be more clear-eyed about how much pain I'm dealing. I shouldn't flinch from that. - ] @@ -74,6 +77,6 @@ Am I a less complete human being because of this? There are people who won the c In fact, the whole idea of eating vegetables might be one of those things where agriculture was anti-human (against the interests of individual humans who were adapted to hunt and gather meat and berries, but agriculture economically outcompeted them). -(When Katie microwaved kale, the smell actually did have a "food" register to it.) +When Katie microwaved kale, the smell actually did have a "food" register to it. ] \ No newline at end of file -- 2.53.0