From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 17:07:57 MDT
On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 09:10:20AM -0700, Max More wrote:
> Anders -- thanks for showing me around Stockholm. I had great fun. And
> that walking helped keep off the pounds. ;-)
It was a pleasure. And if anybody else is passing by, I will gladly
play guide - this might be my only chance of avoiding
Dilbert-potatohood before I graduate :-)
> >From a transhumanist position, I think we should wend our way carefully
> >here. In we end we both need morphological freedom and self direction.
> >The SA policy is reasonable since it is a local action that makes people
> >pay for their lifestyle choices - and opens the door for competing
> >airlines without this rule; let the market sort this thing out.
>
> Yes, exactly. You do raise an important point, along with the Reason
> article, about the dangers of this becoming another political approach.
> I'm for social pressure (with respect, and directed at obesity not obese
> people as a whole) rather than legal approaches.
Social pressure is usually tricky to apply selectively. People tend to
mix up their properties with themselves, and hence react very bad to
criticism - or turn criticism of an unliked behavior into a criticism
of the person. So when trying to apply pressure it is a good idea to
find some kind of checks and balances to keep it controlled.
The obesity movement and its allies are usually complaining about the
prevalent very thin body ideal, supposed to be the source of many
eating disorders (is there any real evidence for this? anorexia
nervosa occured during the middle ages too) and a constant self-esteem
harming pressure on obese people. There is a fun asymmetry here: the
thin ideal is "unnatural" and should not be allowed to dominate us,
but we are not allowed to criticise the "fat and happy" ideal.
Obviously there is a mistake here: all body ideals should be open to
criticism and analysis, but we should also tolerate the choices people
actually make. But this requires people to realize that their ideals
are not themselves: we try to live according to our ideals but we are
not those ideas. And we should be ready to argue for what we strive to
be.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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