Study: people who grow up poor have a harder time regulating their food intake | Hacker News Reader

Study: people who grow up poor have a harder time regulating their food intake

washingtonpost.com

162 pointsohjeez96 comments

Over the many years of assisting people seeking treatment for excess body weight, I'm constantly amazed by the endless complexity of the condition, not surprising given the crucial importance of energy intake and regulation for biological survival.

Unfortunately the research full report is behind a paywall, and the abstract/summary leaves out a lot of info. However the findings are interesting in linking the dysregulated eating behavior to childhood SES. The details of the full report are needed to clarify some questions, like the demographic composition of the sample populations.

It's been observed for a long time that some minority groups (e.g., black and Hispanic) have higher rates of obesity. The fact that these groups are also over-represented in lower SES population segments could be a factor in the results. It's not clear how such variables were accounted for.

Perhaps a key was the last experiment discussed in the article, where there was reduced response to blood glucose level. Ordinarily increased glucose acts as a feedback signal of nutrient status turning off the drive to keep eating.

Problems with satiety (sense of fullness) are common in obesity, though how it works is incredibly intricate and poorly understood. There are dozens of genetic elements and a vast array of hormones and other body messenger systems implicated, ultimately it involves most every part of the body. No wonder theorizing about causes of eating/metabolic disturbances is frustrating and unsatisfying.

I'll take a stab at it anyway. IMHO nutritional factors should be a major suspect. A big change in diet over the last few decades has been the substantially increased intake of sugars put into processed/convenience foods. Fructose in foods has increased the most and thought to play a prominent role in higher rates of obesity. It's conceivable that early life exposure to high levels of sugars could bring about enduring abnormalities in body systems responsible for metabolic regulation.

If the last part is true, it is rather shocking! It really should be better publicized.

As usual the facts are messier than any single assertion will ever be, even my own.

Here's an interesting review, more or less reflecting "the state of the art":

Okręglicka K, Health effects of changes in the structure of dietary macronutrients intake in western societies. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26024397

It's important to consider the effect of early life exposure to low levels of sugar. I think much the contrary, if you're exposed to high levels of sugar in utero and in early childhood, you will develop a fast metabolism and have little trouble with obesity or anything.

The Dutch Hunger Winter studies show quite conclusively that if your mother was literally starving while pregnant with you, and you have access to abundant sources of food, you're more prone to obesity and all the accompanying ailments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944#Legacy

Research indeed shows connection between maternal nutritional status and health outcomes of children. However it's a complicated, non-linear relationship.

There is evidence that individuals born to mothers overweight during pregnancy will as adults be more likely to have metabolic markers of health risk. IOW maternal over-nutrition can lead to offspring having greater chance of being overweight or having related health problems in early adulthood.

You might be interested in this review article: Amudha Poobalan and Lorna Aucott, Obesity Among Young Adults in Developing Countries: A Systematic Overview http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4796326/

I think you can find the article for free, hosted by one of the authors, at this link: http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/Hill_Prokosch_PsySci_2016.pdf

A version with the paper which seems to have supplemental information at the end is available at this link: http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/SES_Hunger_4_Nov_15.pdf

Thank you! I'll take advantage of the author's generosity, making it available is a good thing to do.

> over-represented in lower SES population segments

Just say "disproportionately poor".

Euphimisms suck.

> Euphimisms suck.

Just say "are bad". :)

My personal and anecdotal observations is that it is not sugar alone that causes weight gain but a combination of a lot of sugar or starches and a lot of oil or animal fat. This is what processed/convenience food typically contains. With that pretty much all the fat is stored for later as body has strong preference for using glucose and carbohydrates in general over fat to produce energy. Also compared with, for example, pigs, humans and apes are very inefficient at converting carbohydrates into fats for storage resulting at up to 30% loss of energy on the process.

It is very difficult to disentangle the role of various nutritional elements in the rising tide of obesity. A number of factors have been occurring at the same time, such as, alterations in amount and sources of protein, changing proportion and composition of dietary fat, and of course, large increases in the amount of sugar (and to lesser extent, other carbohydrate) consumption.

So in a sense you are right, consuming more sugar while continuing to have high intake of saturated, trans and n-6 fat is certainly a recipe for producing metabolic disease.

However the level of unhealthful fat intake has been fairly steady in recent decades while the proportion of sugar increased. This is the basis for the focus on reducing sugar intake as a way to improve the health of populations.

I am not so sure about steady fat intake. One of the recent tendencies was replacing animal fat with oil in various bakeri products as a way to reduce price. As a vegan I should welcome that, however one typically needs much more cheap oil in calories than butter to get a product with about the same properties. So we get increase in calories when all of them are stored as fat. Again, as a vegan I am very aware of that as I gained about 4 kilos before I realized my mistake with bakery with too much oil.

It is true that to compensate for the worsen taste with cheap oils in bakery products, the producers add more sugar. However medical experiments that I am aware showed that humans are very bad at converting excessive sugar into fat. The body rather generates heat from extra carbohydrates than converts them to fat for storage unless one eats really way too much of sugar. That level is still well above what is found in a typical current western diet.

A bit missing from these studies are my parents' generation. My father grew up in hard times during the Depression, my mother grew up in WW2 ravaged Europe and spent some years with severe food shortages. Neither had any sort of obsessive relationship with food.

Ok, 2 people is not data. But this happened to tens of millions of people. As I understand it, that generation was less obese than later generations.

Interesting, same here but my parents are likely your generation. Grew up in 70s-80s communist Eastern Europe, lots of food shortages from government obsession with self-sufficiency. Stories of waiting in line for 3 hours for a maybe loaf of bread.

No sort of unusual relationship with food, especially compared to mine—I grew up with all the food I wanted and I stuff my face with pointless garbage every 30 seconds.

My mother wasn't in the eastern bloc, but would recount that many times her "breakfast" was a carrot. I have family letters where they'd list their rations and various struggles to obtain food. Things were bad throughout Europe for many years.

I think your folks may have these issues if healthy food was "expensive" but sugary processed foods would be "cheap" and plentiful. By expensive/cheap, you can substitute waiting in line for price.

Rice and beans are a complete diet. Potatoes and milk are a complete diet. Frozen vegetables fried with spices are tasty, nutritious and very fast to prepare. Porridge, aka oats with milk or water is also dirt cheap and nutritious.

I spent an unfortunate length of time watching my pennies when it came to my foodbudget, in a western country. Being poor sucks but healthy food isn't expensive unless you mean prepared, ready to eat expensive food.

Will power consumes mental energy. Fighting the urge not to consume the cheap sugary food all around you is not something many people have the resources to do - especially the poor, who are under stress and therefore have fewer cognitive resources to devote to willpower. Drop the politics and think about things logically - then reintroduce your emotion. If you manage it you will be outraged at the disgusting setup of modern society.

If one is very poor, one cannot afford money to get prepared food and forced to prepare food themselves no matter how weak is the will power. And that will be much healthier. The problem is that in Westen societies such extreme poverty is rare and people can afford junk food and advertisements heavily inclines them to get it.

The problem is also that it is easy to buy some cheap bad food while not saving up for rent/car/school payment. In other words, even though we can't afford our lifestyle, food dolllars are the first dollars, and we go into debt for the rest. So we can over spend on convenient food while still being broke.

Odd - I'd have to search, but your anecdotes are at odds with other anecdotes I've read about Soviet immigrants hoarding food due to being accustomed of the frequent shortages despite the fact food was plentiful in America.

Hoarding food is not the same as eating the hoarded food. (I mean they might do both, but hoarding as a reaction to potential future shortages is not an insane one)

We regularly had to stop my grandma from eating spoiled food. She wasn't obese or ate too much, but this is not healthy.

mm hmm. and when "real" americans do it, it's called prepping.

Perhaps the diet of the poor changed over time. Maybe it is cultural ?

My parents immigrated to the US and in the 70's we ate mostly beans, rice, tortillas, and less desirable cuts of meat. While I recall often feeling hungry, that "poor-man's diet" is relatively healthy. Sodas and snacks have always felt like an unnecessary luxury and yet is likely available in most present day poor households.

Side note: These days I deny myself breakfast until I have 2 to 3 billable hours of consulting completed. I can do this because, paradoxically, feeling hungry is not associated with a distracting obsession for food.

Beans, rice, and tortillas are all calorie-dense low-nutrient foods. They don’t really make a complete or balanced diet; for that you meed to add a lot of vegetables. It’s obviously better than eating just ramen and soda, but that’s a low bar.

Rural peasants in Mexico, whose diet is mostly tortillas, have short stature and relatively low life expectancy, like rural peasants in most parts of the world, who also get most calories from starchy staple foods.

Beans really stand out from rice and tortillas in terms of nutrition. They have much higher protein content, and I believe they have some other good stuff going for them besides macro nutrients.

You’re right, I should clarify/restate more generously: beans are great, and beans + corn or beans + rice is a pretty good diet if it’s the only thing you can afford and the alternative is starvation. I’m sure you could survive for a good long time on mostly those alone, supplemented by occasional meat and a bit of vegetables.

They aren’t going to provide everything the body needs though, and a more varied diet would be better.

It sounds like that would be a much more interesting comparison.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/8323035/The-Kitchen-...

> American soldiers had more food than anyone

While that was true, my father (8th Air Force in England) said the food was still poor and only crew flying the next day got eggs. Steak and tomatoes was the first thing they'd eat arriving back in the states.

> Virtually every part of the globe acquired a taste for Coca-Cola and Spam.

But I don't like spam.

It may make a difference that your grandparents grew up before the sharp increase in daily calories consumed post-1960. One thing that sometimes gets neglected is that food was just way more expensive and so were normal portions.

And to add to that: most people's appetite starts to decline sometime in adulthood.

My girlfriend grew up poor, in a country that is one of the world's poorest, yet between the two of us I'm the one that obsesses over food.

Yes, this is what I have seen in Belarus as well until recently. Typically it was people with higher income who became overweight. For example, my grandmother lived through German occupation during 19941-1944 in a small village. For 3 years pretty much the only source of calories for her was potato with occasional fish and mushrooms. She never became overweight and died aged 92. My father (her son) have never experienced any food shortages and was always relatively well feed. Yet he became significantly overweight when he became 50 years old and 20 year later he continues to struggle with that.

But then starting about 10 years ago the pattern that I have been observing on the streets started to change. Now it is more common to see over-weighted young people from low income families.

From my experience in addiction therapy, one thing has become very clear to me and that is much of the compulsive behavior caused by faulty brain wiring began during early childhood.

In my case, I was abandoned by my biological parents for a three month period as an infant and was mistreated by Aunts and Uncles. I still have fleeting horrible memories of this event.

Eating without regards to health or other consequences is simply a form of addiction, as you are doing it for emotional reasons and not because of hunger.

All sorts of emotional traumas happen to infants and young children in poverty that are far less likely to happen to those in a more financially and, lets face it, emotionally stable environments. Poverty, of course, stresses everyone involved in it.

I am not sure how groundbreaking this research is as it has been well-known for many years that seriously stressing infants causes the brain's reward system to change.

The emotional part is huge.. Children are like sponges and soak up everything. If anxiety and depression are not genetic I definitely learned it from one of my parents.

> early childhood

I think this is a property of neural net style memories. Old data isn't "deleted" from the network; instead, new reinforcement makes older memories less accurate. This means memories that were particularly strong can persist for a long time; a lot of "overwriting" with unrelated data is necessary to dilute out a traumatic memory.

This can start at any point in life, but memories that happened in childhood have more time to cause the problems you mentioned.

From https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154144677734228:

> "Hill singles out childhood poverty, because she and her team asked participants not only for their socioeconomic statuses as children, but also their current socioeconomic statuses as adults, and, rather incredibly, the abnormal eating patterns only correlated with the former."

What a ridiculous and bizarre taboo it is that causes people to only ever consider psychological explanations of eating behavior and obesity. Could it maybe be that growing up poor changed something to do with adipose tissue or insulin regulation or God knows what? Obviously not, because obesity can only ever be caused by the Sin of Gluttony, which by basic just-world theory must ultimately reduce to a personal choice in some way, even if we pat you on the head forgivingly and talk about your traumatic childhood.

I would ordinarily wonder if the researchers were really this stupid or if it was the journalist, but unfortunately so far as I know most-not-all of academia is also still running on the rule that causal explanations for obesity must be somewhere intermediated by the Sin of Gluttony.

Well, probably because sins of gluttony and sloth are much more common causes then some "God knows what" condition, which become more serious when combined.

When did it become acceptable on Hacker News to post someone else's comments wholesale without any other contribution? I usually only see this with Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander quotes, so is it something from the LessWrong community?

I see this as similar to submitting links on HN.

This is not related to LessWrong. A lot of top-level comments here are just that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128

It's true that there are some psychological hypotheses being offered, but they also mention the possibility of biological changes that make it harder to self-regulate. This comment (or quote, I guess) seems like a complaint looking for a target.

Shouldn't there be a control group, with a task not involving food, to see if the issue is food-related, or generally with impulse control? Maybe ask them to do some boring task they were told was important, but have Facebook, TV,sports or some other distraction immediately available too. I suspect the same people who had trouble with controlling food intake would also have trouble with other self control or delayed gratification tasks.

The explanation that first leapt into my mind (as someone who grew up poor and is now not-poor BTW) didn't seem to be considered. For some kids, snacks are a luxury. For others, they're an unremarkable part of the background. This is going to make a huge difference in people's responses, but not as a matter of hunger vs. satiety. There's a whole different part of the brain associated with status and self-image; I'll bet that's the part that lights up differently for the once-poor vs. never-poor. An fMRI should shed some good light on the matter.

Why would it still surprise anyone that being poor frequently leads to emotional and health issues of all kinds?! Good food is more expensive. Sugar is cheap (and causes huge problems when overused). Good veggies, fruit, meat, fish, olive oil and spices (just some random examples) are simply inaccessible to billions of people.

Emotional traumas mentioned by other commenters here may or may not be more prevalent in poorer social circles, but multi-faceted support systems definitely are less prevalent (money=resources of all kinds, especially health services and broader social support through extended connections). What would be really interesting is research on specific methods to fight emotional behaviors resulting from such life experience (i.e. what specific things you can do to [learn how to] regulate your food intake)... Because if there are millions of people with that problem, then actual source of that problem is unimportant at the moment.. unless nobody knows of a way to change thigns for the better and the only hope seems to be in uncovering the actual reasons.

Fascinating.

No surprise that stress has a major developmental effect.

Mouse models have shown various kinds of stress (including food stress) causing epigenetic changes that are passed down more than one generation. And in reptiles, temperature conditions (a form of stress) control the male-female split of offspring.

I wonder if there's a general theme here. Parental love, relationships, food, money, shelter, if you don't have access to those as you develop then you end up having a rather unhealthy relationship towards them in adulthood that might never be fixed without therapy.

I knew a guy who grew up poor and as a result he didn't have much to eat growing up. So whenever he had free food he'd eat/steal as much as he can because he'd never know when his next meal might be.

She also says that just because the pattern exists, doesn't mean it's not something we can change. "There's no reason to think we can't help them override this."

Et tu, WaPo?

We changed the title to a representative sentence from the article.

Thanks for this. These clickbait headlines are getting out of control.

Fair article, but definitely suffers from ethnocentrism. I'm pretty sure they'd find very different results in India, China, Egypt, etc.

One of the amazing things about the US is that poorest 15% of the population (by gross household income) is also the FATTEST segment of the population.

In developing countries where the poorest 15% are truly living a bare existence lifestyle (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh) you would never see a poor obese person.

Of the 0.2% of the population that is homeless, few are fat. Their level of poverty is closer to the poverty in developing countries.

Surely you're not serious. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925022/

Yes, I learned about this behavior in Introduction to Psychology; ever since I find myself learning more from people's behavior than ever before; after all that is psychology, the study of mental processes and behavior. The article is spot on. . .Overall, I think more emphasis should be put on the aspect of nature and nurture side of science to the application of understanding the people around with inclusion of holistic treatment for individuals; that is if one grew up poor can we than maybe attribute the cause of obesity to the psychological aspect and if they did not grow up poor then maybe we can attribute obesity and over consumption to sedentary lifestyle and relaxed selective pressure and mal-adaptation to the new environment. . . that is thrifty hypothesis. . .

The cause could be that people with poor SES still have worse nutrition (lack of some nutrients) and thus the urge to consume. (I mean, in addition to the urge caused by malnutrition in childhood.)

Except in the study they found that people who were in higher socioeconomic status now still had the issue. This wouldn't apply most likely, as they most likely more healthy and well nourished now

Not necessarily, wealth alone may not be enough to change established habits. The overeating could be related to "bluff food" that tastes like it would supply much of a given nutrient which it actually lacks. In that case, the direct cause would be the body trying to compensate a low level of that nutrient by eating more of the food that tastes like it would contain it. And while wealth might help to not even start with that bluff food trap, getting wealthy after establishing a habit for it will just allow to buy more.

I've been idly thinking about bluff food as well, thanks for putting a name on it. Is there evidence for the concept, do we crave bluff food that corresponds to our deficiencies?

What are the most common kinds of bluff food and do you think anything could be done about it?

Sorry, no citable sources, just reading between the lines of "processed food is bad" and the dissatisfying explanations usually given in that context.

What we do know is that animals and humans have a natural ability to balance their diet (by developing seemingly random cravings?) and that this ability is increasingly breaking down in "western civilisation". It is a small jump from that to the idea that market driven "yummy engineering" could be the perfect setup to find the fault lines in our diet balancing instincts.

There seems to be a known link between cravings, especially for ice or soil, and iron deficiency.

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=57792...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08880010590896486

http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/viewFile/358/3...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00029343829...

The OP article says the correlation was only with childhood "socioeconomic status" (SES) and not with current SES.

When I said "SES", I meant "childhood SES".

A twin study to look for a potential common cause between poverty and poor food selection might yield interesting results.

It's not so much poor food selection as poor access to quality and affordable food. You can eat for a lot longer on $10 if you're buying things on the McDonald's dollar menu than if you're buying fresh produce at Safeway or giant.

Pasta costs $1 a pound (if you price watch just a little).

Potatoes often cost less than $0.50 a pound.

I think those are very valid comparisons, potatoes are even more nutritious than anything McDonald's sells.

Sure, you have to cook them both for 10 or 15 minutes, which means you have to have a working stove top, but McDonald's is not more affordable than the grocery store, especially if you are buying things that are only comparably nutritious (rather than for flavor or better nutrition or whatever).

Assuming of course that you have a grocery store in your neighborhood.

It would be an interesting map, to see how many people lived substantially closer to a McDonald's than to a place that sold pasta for reasonable prices. I guess you might have to toss in Subway.

Here, the decent groceries are a bit over a mile away, two are a bit closer than the McDonald's, one is a bit further. 2 Subways beat them all.

I guess such a map would have uninteresting regions where it was more of a choice (rural residential lots).

As maxericson alludes to below, it is not about money, but time. McDs is not really that cheap, even when buying a cheap combo or something from the dollar menu. For a single person you're looking at $5-$7.

Meanwhile, my local grocery store has 2lbs of chicken thighs for $5. You can add some potatoes and onions for another couple bucks. So for roughly the same price a single person could get 2-4 meals. The difference is that for the second meal the person needs time to prepare.

Ironically, I couldn't read this article because I was too poor to pay the Washington Post for a subscription.

Strange, I'm not subscribe and I can see it no problem... Maybe it's a country thing?

I think the article pretty much answered its question about why people growing up poor have hard time regulating their food intake -- it's because their parents weren't smart and/or because these kids weren't taught about sugar overuse and calorie counting.

I'm not sure why the following psychological reasons were offered: formerly poor people lose ability to understand when they are not hungry anymore or that these people have to keep eating because of psychological disorders.

I think really it comes down to this -- people growing up poor (and becoming better off because of better economic conditions) as a group were not taught or concerned about proper nutrition.

What I'd really like to know if the participants knew how to do counting (calorie counting) and how many guys were part of the study. Having only female participants in the first 2 studies is kind of picking very narrow and unrepresentative pool. And females these days count their calories a lot, so it's not surprising they refused to drink soda and instead went for water.

PS: the final study did include men, although didn't state how many.

>higher socioeconomic households

What does this mean, is it a standard definition in the field? Do they just mean "rich" or something else?

This study is dumb. I grew up in upper middle class and have no problem controlling my food intake (I almost have a six pack).

However, whenever there is an abundance of snacks out for eating without any limits, I will go crazy and consume upwards of 2000 calories. I surely would have not been able to regulate my food intake during this experiment, even though I can in general at home.

One reason why we need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income FTW

The timing of the poor people getting fatter seems to coincide with the timing of high fructose corn syrup being introduced.

We had 2 fat kids in my school class.... look around now

Can we get a mod practice to rewrite WaPo's clickbait titles into proper summary headlines?

Absolutely. That's the practice universally (i.e. not for just one publication, but all).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11516590

It just takes a while for us to see them sometimes. You can always email hn@ycombinator.com if there's one we haven't seen yet.

My theory is that many poor families have a lack of self-control/discipline and they pass these habits onto their kids. It's difficult to break out of a family culture when you get older. Especially if this is what you have known your entire life and you have pressure to stay that way.

Just like with money, it takes a ton of discipline to make continued long-term minded decisions rather than short-term emotional ones that make you feel good.

Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone. Humans are complicated.

>lack of self-control/discipline

>long-term minded

I'm not sure how I feel about these statements, but they sound awfully indicting, even if there might be some truth to them. Maybe it's their sweeping nature that makes them seem naive/presumptious.

Poor people frequently don't have the luxury of engaging in long-term planning because they are consumed with day-to-day survival. Moreover, being poor itself requires a certain discipline, though not necessarily the kind non-poor people might readily recognize or appreciate.

> poor families have a lack of self-control/discipline

I know you said that was just a theory, but it's a variation on a too-common theme that I - and many others - find offensive. The experiment specifically involved people who have the same current socioeconomic status. Some had been affluent all their lives, while others had become affluent from poorer beginnings. If self-discipline is what allows some to become richer than others, don't you think those who became wealthy by their own efforts might know a bit more about it than those who had their wealth handed to them? Why, then, would they still exhibit this distinct reaction to offers of food? I don't think your theory has any explanatory power at all.

> The experiment specifically involved people who have the same current socioeconomic status

Where did you see that? I can't find it anywhere in the article, the article the article is based on, or the abstract the article the article is based on references.

Self-discipline isn’t binary, it’s fluid. Some people that obtain their own wealth lose the edge they once had that got them there in the first place...and end up poor again.

It also isn’t a guarantee of success (nothing is). It’s a way of stacking the deck in your favor. It’s really one of the only things you can do if you want to move to a better socioeconomic status.

Frankly, I'm tired of this new pervasive idea that the system will always be against anyone that isn't rich and there's no point in even trying if you are poor. Ironically, this victim menality will continue to keep many people in poverty

We now live in an age of free information. There is free Internet access in almost every library in the country and you can learn many new skills from free video tutorials, college courses, and web pages. There are no more excuses.

You didn't answer the question. Instead, you made up something about the "pervasive idea" that "there's no point" etc., which nobody here even remotely hinted at. It's a huge strawman. The "age of free information" blather is even worse. The US is not all of the world. In much of that world, there is no free internet access in almost every library. Even in the US, it's less pervasive and often less truly free than you seem to think, and learning those many new skills requires a certain baseline education that many do not have. Someone would have to be really deep in a privilege bubble to be so totally oblivious to how life is for the truly poor.

But that's not even the point, really. The point is that, even if I were inclined to blame the poor for their own situation as you do, your theory would still have no explanatory value when comparing the previously-poor to the never-poor. Your "theory" is simply counterfactual and illogical. The fact that it's also offensive is just the icing on the cake.

It is true, but not entirely true. Many have grown out of poor.

Here's a thought: this pattern probably applies to other natural human needs as well. That is, developmental scarcity leading to brain re-wiring that compels overcompensation.

It almost sounds Freudian (probably is), but people who lacked love early in life probably tend to try and get more of it later on, and have a harder time being on their own, often feeling more lonely.

It's an interesting connection. Too bad the article veers off into fantasy land so they can posit vastly complicated triggers for the observation.

Isn't making sense of data by proposing possible explanatory frameworks the essence of scientific theory? Are you just anxious to see evidence that could possibly support or deny their theories? Or are you categorically opposed to thinking beyond the most literal interpretation of data?

Where do ideas for experiments come from if not somone's unsupported fantasies?

> Where do ideas for experiments come from if not somone's unsupported fantasies?

They come from small, modest guesses in accordance with Occam's razor. You have got to be able to distinguish between (1) reasonable hypothesis generation and (2) unhinged fantasies with a thousand moving parts unsupported by data.

The fact that a single experiment needs to be an attempt to test a modest guess doesn't mean that this is how every scientist experiences the process of coming up with ideas for experiments. There is nothing about doing science that requires you to refuse to fantasize about the big picture, even if the big picture has a million moving parts (which it always does in social science).

As a physicist, sometimes I sit in my bathtub and fantasize about the possibility that the entire observable universe is a big simulation run by aliens. But I don't publish it in the Washington Post.

The social sciences do not have a good track record when it comes to their unhinged theorizing.

I don't think that this article says anything that could really be called unhinged for a popular exposition of psychology.

Plus, some fields of social science would do better if they existed merely as a way of giving people more accurate fantasies of how the world works. Better than existing as think tanks for political causes.

You may not, but other people do.

---

Bostrom goes so far as to say that unless we rule out the possibility that a machine could create a simulation of a human existence, we should assume that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are living in such a simulation.

“I’m not sure that I’m not already in a machine,” he said calmly. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxie...

---

> unless we rule out the possibility that a machine could create a simulation of a human existence

Even if we rule that out, doesn't the possibility that we are in a simulation still exist? Maybe the creators of the simulation exist in an n-dimensional space, and the reality we experience is a gross simplification of that.

TBH, I find the idea comforting in a weird sort of way, as it gives a structure to everything (e.g. Of course quantum states only collapse when observed - why bother simulating something no one is looking at?).

I don't see any complicated hypotheses in the article. They are all fairly simple and plausible enough to be worth testing.

Maybe it's just the snacks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com