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Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

There's some evidence that Ozempic improves general impulse control, e.g decreasing alcohol consumption [0], which the article mentions.

Also, as Tyler Cowen writes [1], this is probably going to translate into big improvements for animal welfare:

> People lose weight on these drugs because they eat less, and eating less usually means eating less meat. And less meat consumption results in less factory farming. This should count as a major victory for animal welfare advocates, even though it did not come about through their efforts. No one had to be converted to vegetarianism, and since these drugs offer other benefits, this change in the equilibrium is self-sustaining and likely to grow considerably.

So overall, widespread Ozempic adoption seems like progress to me.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/28/1194526...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-20/animal...

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I had a short conversation with an agronomist friend of mine. Crop prices are in the dumps right now, and I was wondering if it's because of these drugs. He said this is being openly discussed.

What percentage of the population is on GLP-1 drugs right now?

Well "According to KFF polling from May 2024, 6% of all adults report that they currently are taking a GLP-1 drug, and 12% report that they've ever taken a GLP-1 drug".

Is 6% enough to affect crop prices? Presumably some ag economist can weigh in. Note it would only be a reduction per person, not a full 6% reduction in consumption.

This matches experience with dieting and impulse control, without these drugs even. Two days of junk food and the food brain is SCREAMING in my head. So I just don't do it. It's also way more obvious when I mess up, that it makes my body feel bad.

But when I say food brain, it's everything. I want to vape, I want to have more coffee, then more beer, then some cannabis to go to sleep. Wake up and hit the dopamine cycle again. I have to take care of myself and ask "why am I doing this, could I just not, and if so I must not".

Eating animals and animal welfare are two entirely different things. We could all be vegetarians and still be intentionally or unintentionally intolerably cruel to all other life on this planet.

> big improvements for animal welfare

Is it? It might reduce the amount of animals killed, sure, but it won't improve the well-being of the ones that are still raised.

While this entire chain of thought seems a bit far fetched, I think the reasoning here is that if you lower the demand for meat, you don’t have to resort to factory farming.

When was the last time you saw profitability increase, even remain stagnant, when demand declined?

Let's be real. If demand for meat declines, producers will have to double down on "factories" in order to remain solvent.

Yes, I agree. As I said, that entire argument is far fetched at a few different points, this being one of them.

Anecdotally, I disagree.

I went through a period of vegetarianism (for health reasons, not directly for ethics), and once I started eating meat again, 1. I eat a lot less, which 2. means that I can be much more intentional about sourcing it.

Right now the bulk of the meat that I eat at home throughout the year comes from 1 or 2 animals that are locally sourced and butchered (normally I share a portion of a pig and a cow), and the occasional wild caught fish. The meat is tastier, and I can go see the actual animals at the farm if I so choose. They are not factory farmed, and the price per pound is about the same as buying industrial meat at the grocery store since I am buying directly from the farmer, and paying a local processor for their services.

As things wane in popularity it might be true that they become more of a commodity, or it might be true that they become more of a niche product where people care more.

I would like to think that if meat consumption becomes more of a treat than an everyday thing, that people would treat it as such, and go out of their way to eat something that tastes better.

Food for thought?

I would hope this happens, but merely having fewer animals alive in factory farming conditions would be a welfare gain from me because I think a factory farmed animal's life falls below the "life is worth living" threshold. YMMV.

It also reduces the number of animals that suffer if the suffering is more important to your ethics.

Maybe. There is some evidence that the decline in fertility rates are associated with overweight and obesity. Social and biological factors leave having children more difficult when one is outside of a "normal" weight range. If everyone is on Ozempic, they might have more children, requiring more overall food and harming even more animals in the process.

> If everyone is on Ozempic, they might have more children, requiring more overall food and harming even more animals in the process.

It's reported it reduces a series of impulsive behaviours. Would it extend to sex? If people are less willing to have sex, maybe broad consumption of the medicine will further drop fertility rates.

Maybe. If more people are less willing to have sex, does that harm the animals (meaning humans) who still seek it/want more of it?

This gets into a deep philosophical question people spend too much time arguing about. In short, some would argue suffering is multiplied by the number of sentient beings that experience it, others would argue only the average "amount" of suffering matters. You can end with some absurd paradoxes if you take either to their extremes.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

> The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

I think such paradoxes demonstrate we probably need a completely different approach than anything we've done so far.

Utilitarianism feels to me like Mill & Bentham discovered basic arithmetic and didn't even realise there was more to maths than that.

It is perhaps simply the case that such things are inherently paradoxical. There is nothing in the stars that says ethics should obey PnC!

You see a paradox and say "well that's not right, we should do something about it." This has been the story since Kant, but for his part, everyone seems to forget that he doesn't ultimately "solve" his antinomies, he just leaves them as conclusions, "effects of pure reason."

It seems way more unreasonable to assert that, in fact, there is some consistent, complete ethical framework out there, but we havent found it yet, than it is to just accept that some kernels of truth or sense are not formalizable in the classical sense.

I don't know what you mean by PnC, and the Wikipedia disambiguation page didn't help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNC

> It seems way more unreasonable to assert that, in fact, there is some consistent, complete ethical framework out there, but we havent found it yet, than it is to just accept that some kernels of truth or sense are not formalizable in the classical sense.

We can prove that complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible. An equivalent proof for ethics would itself be useful.

However, we do not need to concern ourselves with infinite sets etc. for ethics the way we do with natural numbers, as there's only relatively (in mathematical terms) small number of real people to interact with or influence the lives of.

We may not be able to reach an optimal outcome with even a limited n, if it turns out to be akin to P != NP. But even knowing that, would itself be useful.

The problem I have with Utilitarianism isn't any of these things, it's that it's simply trying to maximise how much utility there is in the world, then immediately tripping over itself because the terms "utility", "maximise" and "the world" aren't well-defined, and the way it is introduced is simply adding up.

I'm curious about the paradoxes, if you have any on hand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

Mere addition, as mentioned by the other user is the primary one I was referring to, but breaking different approaches to utilitarianism only requires one to take them to their extremes.

If average welfare of humans is all that matters, then one happy human living alone in the universe is the equivalent of a million happy humans.

If sum of "welfare" is all that matters, then you can argue an exceptionally large number of people being tortured indefinitely is better than a happy person.

> In short, some would argue suffering is multiplied by the number of sentient beings that experience it

Factored by how cute the animal is. As a producer of plants for human consumption, it's quite obvious that orders of magnitude more animals are harmed in that process than are ever harmed in traditional meat production. But they're mostly ugly insects, so nobody cares.

Sounds like you're valuing <mean harm per animal> over <integral of harm over all animals>?

I don't get why that would be a better measure?

I suppose thinner people do probably walk their dogs more often…

Naltrexone will do the same thing. For alcohol, opioid, or binge eating control. Improve T3 and helps with blood sugar, and its orally bioavailable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naltrexone#Controversies

That sounds speculative and would require some deep research to find if it's even happening.

I think it's equally plausible that the US increases food exports rather than lower production. Especially as production is subsidized.

If this increases food stability around the world, then in general it's a good thing.

This said, obesity is exploding everywhere else in the world too, so it's not just a US problem.

> There's some evidence that Ozempic improves general impulse control

What if it makes us get a better control over our consumption behavior in general?

Wouldn't some large companies have a problem with that and fight it?

>There's some evidence that Ozempic improves general impulse control

While remaining on the drug.

I expect your impulse control will be even worse after getting off of it, but I don't have a study to back that up.

How long till we become voluntary Voyagers [0] ?

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9664108/

I think the assertion that "eating less usually means eating less meat" is probably false (though I couldn't read the article cuz paywall).

The first article talks plenty about why: people are eating less of the the things that are addictive to them, such as alcohol and cookies, which are a major source of calories.

Yay, more dependence on the people that are causing the problems to begin with!

I swear covid was a personality test. If you came out of the last 4 years and are looking for more dependence on government and pharma… well, the horseshoe is a V I guess.

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