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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen is possible and has been done[0], and isn’t the same thing as “breathing without oxygen”.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Messner

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Ok interesting, but I still wonder if that’s really analogous to choosing to eat less food?

That the person who did it has their own Wikipedia page makes me think it is probably harder.

It seems 200 people did it so far, around 4% of all climbers (at some point of time) :https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/climbing-everest-adria... probably more of the 5k could have done it if they wanted to do it (and prepare longer for it).

Also interesting! I am still unsure though how losing weight is like climbing mount everest without supplemental oxygen. Can you clarify that part?

It is about the usage of 'just'. So while in the first case people think the just is justified, the before mentioned data indicates that only a few people manage to 'just' do it. The order of percentage of ppl beeing able to do it is the same as something which seems very hard to do (the everest thing). So while objectively they are comparable it shines light on that the usage of 'just' is bad in both cases while the subjective perception is very different. Not sure if I can make it clearer.

Edit:maybe I was thinking to complicated in this reply. The analogy is: you have two different things which can be achieved through doing a specific thing, but doing this thing is hard in both cases so using the word 'just' is not appropriate which is easier to see in the example.

Yes. The odds of someone climbing without supplemental oxygen vs achieving and maintaining weight loss are comparably low, presumably because they are very difficult, and cannot “just” be chosen so simply.

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