In three sentences you brilliantly summarized my problem with those who vehemently advance the idea of “purely positive” dog training. They deny that dominance exists and then, in the name of altruism, demand that everyone adopt their chosen ideas and methods.

I wonder at what point social signaling becomes as useful as psychoanalysis or Marxism in explaining things…

The Harvard degree gets you in the door. But after Harvard, there are jobs to do. The legacies eventually wind up living off their trustfund money. The rest, no matter what their other problems, all do turn out to be good at something. It may take them a while to find it, but eventually they do.

You get more from an education than a credential.

Personally I am also convinced that if by some mechanism you made the poor and the rich swap places, within ten years a lot of both would be right back where they were before the switch. Not all, by any means, but a lot.

Education matters. Diplomas have some value, but much less than education.

In social transactions, it certainly seemed that when you’re fat, you’ve pretty much used up the margin available for concessions. If you contradict received wisdom or are unattractive in any other way, you’re pretty firmly marginalized. It is also clear that you’re not a high-status person to associate with, the last kid chosen for the team (though people will gladly put you to work on a solitary basis with little reward). “Making your own fun” is imperative, and some of that may involve food.

Secondly, apart from the dominance issue (and on the receiving end, it registers in large part as “I know what you should do; why the heck don’t you do it and stop bothering me with looking at all that flesh”): None of these provisions make a bit of difference for most well-motivated fat people, and may be counterproductive. I didn’t have dessert more than once a month for decades. I didn’t have sugared sodas. Meals out were grilled fish. I cut back the fat to almost zero for years.

Nada.

What worked was (no drugs, no tormenting starvation)
– a serious relationship with a kind gastroenterologist who knew what he was talking about, and combined Western medical knowledge with [more significant impact] other traditions;
– a gradual, gentle mental shift to minuscule portions — smaller than most normal eaters — and a self-education as to what worked experientially;
– using every trick I could find to postpone hunger and stretch food, including many from Seth Roberts’ ShangriLa diet;
– a gradual shift, via small portions, to enjoying and anticipating nourishing, flavorful, well-seasoned food, quite high in non-processed fat, tracking very approximately the Paleolithic diet. This is usually available in good restaurants. Fast food I found impossible, but planning ahead and carrying good food is not difficult.

Condescending programmatic attitudes from anyone who has his own, non-fat, excesses or failings; and irrelevant coercive measures involving soda, vending machines, fatty foods, forcing questionable information, etc., simply alienate the struggling, which I have to think is part of the us/them purpose, partly to alleviate the fear.

I suspect that some of the “medical statistics about obesity” are overblown, conflated with other factors, or otherwise misleading for this same reason. Fat seems to serve as a disgusting archetypal horror for many people, especially in this culture, and that confuses the issue of the real health and social needs of those who would like to be more normal in this way. On the other hand, if you’re dealing with those who lack the necessary interest in salvaging their own well-being, well, there’s where identifying one’s own biases is an indispensable first step in knowing what, if anything, to do about it.

The value of diplomas is obvious. The value of education is less so.

I would rater say: The value of diplomas is obvious. The value of schooling is less so.

IMO education is very valuable but schools test/grade humans/signaling far more than they educatate. IMO If schools focuased on delivering useful knowledge and skills, they would be very different than they are.

NAAFA would disagree.

ps tormenting fatties isn’t necessarily about signaling dominance. some of us are environmental activists.

In response to the second post, I agree I was being overly simplistic. I was attempting to draw a critical eye toward the notion that whether or not one achieves academics success has to do with one’s priorities and work ethic. Of course, people who achieve academic success work hard for it. And surely many people who don’t are lazy or have misplaced priorities. But I suspect we overemphasize these aspects of the situation, so as to elevate the status of the academically successful. I did not mean to pigeon-hole all the reasons why one might not succeed academically. I meant only to suggest that it often has more to do with other things than laziness or poor values.