8 Comments

Hey Roko, I don't have twitter so I don't know how else to contact you, but I'm very interested in your thread about weight loss. I've had great success in losing about 20kg and keeping them off with minimal effort by eating low calorie dense foods and replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners. I got all my recipes and cooking philosophy from this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9-aH9_TwE who's been a bodybuilder for 20 years, but is very intelligent and makes food that is high in volume, low in calories and palatable enough for me to be delicious and able to eat it forever. If you dig him, he has a playlist with everything from his 'Anabolic Kitchen' and showcases some of his recipes.

Expand full comment

The idea that momentary stimuli can cause permanent phenotypic change needs a lot of evidence, and you fail to provide any. Obesity goes on as long as the obesity stimuli (bad diet) continues and fades when that stimuli goes away. Likewise, we should expect another plastic phenotypic element (as you claim of the mind - dubiously) to bend in the face of the alleged stimuli (abuse) and bend back when that stimuli fades. In other words, abused children should display mental issues during their abuse, which then should resolve upon the termination of the abusive stimuli. Not only is this the intelligent null hypothesis, there is evidence that things work like this. While BPD is often purely genitic, PTSD basically requires environmental stimuli in order to form. You may think PTSD is a perfect example of one moment triggering a permanent adaptation, but that would be incorrect. PTSD is reliant on continual victimization via social messaging as shown by a study of African soldiers that revealed that those who lived in a village where soldiering is taboo suffered far more PTSD than otherwise. Historical data conforms as well. (The African study was cited in the book Tribe and is on pubmed if you want more info).

Conclusion: adjust your priors. You're spreading the Children are Special myth. This is a status quo legitimizing narrative. The aspect of the status quo it justifies is the one where mothers coddle their boys on this unscientific excuse. The real reason is bad instincts that go uninhibited by today's weak men.

Also, is this the level of rigor you're begging people to pay you to put out? You should at least top my free blog if you want money https://juliusbranson.wordpress.com/

People do love to pay for stuff like this though, because most people aren't very smart :(. So good luck I guess

Expand full comment

> If there was excess food, new people would be created to eat it. This would happen until people started dying of starvation. So the food supply conditions that create the opportunity for morbid obesity were reliably impossible in the past.

This may only be a detail in your argument, but it's incorrect. Malthusian conditions did not actually prevail before industrialization. Prehistoric artifacts recording the appearance of obese women: https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/trying-to-make-sense-of-the-venus

Remnants of early society have also been studied by anthropoligists; see https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still for a discussion of pre-malthusian societies.

Expand full comment

Roko, what is your take on the

Pollution Hypothesis of Obesity? https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/

Captivity Hypothesis of Porn Addiction? http://www.mehergutta.com/masturbation/

The Pill as cause of Sexual Disruption? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KET2JncpJ7o

Inflammation Hypothesis of Heart Disease?

Expand full comment