Comment by supperburg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supperburg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No, just admit that I got you. Show me a single case of a persons skin being green from birth. So are we supposed to think it’s physically impossible for the human body to make its skin green? It is well within the realm not only of physical possibility but also plausibility. A persons cells can manufacture all kinds of molecules, including green ones. Just because something is strange to you and you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it’s physically impossible. The machinery of metabolism is very complex and it controls energy and fat utilization. It’s the machinery that drives the metabolic behavior of the human body, not the laws of thermodynamics. I’m right.

You say you want to see a fat person starve. You also need to see the one million other malfunctions of biological pathways that are responsible for the behavior that we are used to seeing in the human body. There are one million things we have never seen because of the astounding reliability of the human body as a machine. Just because you haven’t seen these malfunctions doesn’t mean that there’s nothing under the hood.

If you want to see an example of metabolic disorder that is even more strange, even more bizarre then look at African sleeping sickness. If you think that it’s too weird for a person to not burn fat, how about a person who cannot make energy of any kind out of what he eats?

> No, just admit that I got you.

You make an incredulous claim, I'm asking you to show evidence for it (just a single case). You refuse to show evidence, and you think that you "got me"? How did you get me exactly? You made claims and refused to back them up. As far as I know, you're just talking hot air.

> The machinery of metabolism is very complex and it controls energy and fat utilization. It’s the machinery that drives the metabolic behavior of the human body, not the laws of thermodynamics.

The human body is not magically immune from laws of physics. That said, laws of physics don't prevent the human body from consuming fat during starvation, so you could be right. Then again, if you were right, there would be a documented case of this happening... but I wasn't able to find one.

> You say you want to see a fat person starve. You also need to see the one million other malfunctions of biological pathways that are responsible for the behavior that we are used to seeing in the human body. There are one million things we have never seen because of the astounding reliability of the human body as a machine. Just because you haven’t seen these malfunctions doesn’t mean that there’s nothing under the hood.

Is it theoretically possible that a human - at some point in history - has had this specific malfunction? Sure! You "got me" there. Now, if my neighbor chats me up next to the mailbox and talks about how they are physically unable to lose weight because of their genes, what do you think is the probability of that being true? Sure, theoretically she may have a "malfunction" that only 1/100000000 humans exhibit, sure. But I wouldn't be money on it.

I didn’t just get you, I dunked on you. If your neighbor says he has more trouble losing weight than other people controlling for calories and exercise, this is very plausible. And it certainly isn’t outside the realm of physical law.

> If your neighbor says he has more trouble losing weight than other people controlling for calories and exercise, this is very plausible. And it certainly isn’t outside the realm of physical law.

Now you're just moving the goalposts. I said this exact thing in the beginning of this thread: "Yes, it will be easier for some people and harder on other people." The point of contention was not "is losing weight harder for some people" (because we agree on that), the point of contention was "is losing weight impossible for some people". If you took a survey of every person on earth, grouped the people who said that it's "impossible" for them to lose weight, and then put them on a diet, how many people do you expect to find for whom losing weight is literally impossible? You can't even find a SINGLE example.

> I didn’t just get you, I dunked on you.

If you take pride in "dunking" on people, maybe you should inspect your values.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com