Do we find lots of people who crave taking multivitamins (besides kids wanting their sugary ones)? Mine definitely have a characteristic flavor and more iodine than a seaweed snack, but I'm oddly not interested in popping an extra one, yet I'd gladly finish a "family size" bag of chips or ten pouches of seaweed snacks if I refrained from exercising Herculean self-control. Am I a weirdo who is strangely immune to tasty multivitamins?
I think this is somewhat similar to the spoon of sugar problem. We don't crave it because it doesn't contain enough sensory information, or enough unique sensory information. Usually flavored multivitamins are just sweet and genetically fruity and small, so it could just be processed as noise? We're gaslighting our brain to think it's candy.
Couple experiments to try:
- see if someone wants to make a multivitamin with a unique new taste to see if we grow to aquire the taste
- try supplementing something like iodine separately to see if it makes you like the multivitamin less
Anecdotally I heard someone take too many iodine supplements and grow to dislike seaweed snacks. I wonder if the same would happen here.
Interesting theories—I can honestly say that I have never before considered the influence of these three factors on my eating. I am governed by: 1) This tastes good, but too much and I’ll puff up and since tasty food is hard to resist, better not bring it into the house or down the hatch it goes. 2) This tastes gross—no thanks, even if it’s good for me. 3) This is both not too ick AND good for me, I’ll mix it in with stuff that tastes better…(Their might be a fourth category, too, of stuff that tastes good and is good for me but for some reason my body reacts badly to it—like coconut milk, so I have to avoid that, too. And some stuff is pure psychological bias, like salt… ) An interesting read. Thanks!
This is pretty convincing to me at a high level. One complication I kept thinking about is biological preparedness in classical conditioning. My memory from Intro Psych is that conditioning is not fully general-purpose: some stimulus–outcome pairings are much easier to learn than others. The classic example is that food followed by nausea is learned quickly, while food followed by electric shock is much less naturally associated.
So even if taste -> nutrient pathways are learnable, the credit-assignment machinery may be constrained. For example, maybe the body can more readily learn that the taste/smell/texture profile of meat predicts iron but has a much harder time learning that a multivitamin predicts the same thing. A failed test might not prove there is no relevant delayed/governor signal; it //might// only show that the particular cue/consequence pairing is biologically disfavored.
This seems more like assertion than explanation. I'm not sure how ecology falsifies negative feedback...? And sure post hoc rationalization is possible in any model, but cybernetics makes testable predictions.
All-right, that looks like a ecology meta analysis but I'm not seeing any references to the cybernetics literature or anything that falsifies negative feedback principles.
Maybe you can more specifically falsify cybernetics with a piece of literature from the field, and I'm curious how you'd use ecology to do it. Here is Quantitative Analysis of Purposive Systems. Inside are 6 experimental examples, but there are certainly more.
powers, are you kidding? this is not a kiddie clown show. \that’s irrelevant. nothing is a system. pct is way too marginal to prove anything.
you have to grasp evolution provides no functions to retrofit.
just read haraway's first four chapters primate visions or read Odum's failure to launch papers, which are ecological fantssy systems (the ones mentioned in Curtis's "...machines of loving grace") as a basis for cybernetic failure that any layperson like you can grasp
Do we find lots of people who crave taking multivitamins (besides kids wanting their sugary ones)? Mine definitely have a characteristic flavor and more iodine than a seaweed snack, but I'm oddly not interested in popping an extra one, yet I'd gladly finish a "family size" bag of chips or ten pouches of seaweed snacks if I refrained from exercising Herculean self-control. Am I a weirdo who is strangely immune to tasty multivitamins?
I think this is somewhat similar to the spoon of sugar problem. We don't crave it because it doesn't contain enough sensory information, or enough unique sensory information. Usually flavored multivitamins are just sweet and genetically fruity and small, so it could just be processed as noise? We're gaslighting our brain to think it's candy.
Couple experiments to try:
- see if someone wants to make a multivitamin with a unique new taste to see if we grow to aquire the taste
- try supplementing something like iodine separately to see if it makes you like the multivitamin less
Anecdotally I heard someone take too many iodine supplements and grow to dislike seaweed snacks. I wonder if the same would happen here.
Interesting theories—I can honestly say that I have never before considered the influence of these three factors on my eating. I am governed by: 1) This tastes good, but too much and I’ll puff up and since tasty food is hard to resist, better not bring it into the house or down the hatch it goes. 2) This tastes gross—no thanks, even if it’s good for me. 3) This is both not too ick AND good for me, I’ll mix it in with stuff that tastes better…(Their might be a fourth category, too, of stuff that tastes good and is good for me but for some reason my body reacts badly to it—like coconut milk, so I have to avoid that, too. And some stuff is pure psychological bias, like salt… ) An interesting read. Thanks!
Wow Devon, what an interesting specimen! Please report more as you notice more categories.
This is pretty convincing to me at a high level. One complication I kept thinking about is biological preparedness in classical conditioning. My memory from Intro Psych is that conditioning is not fully general-purpose: some stimulus–outcome pairings are much easier to learn than others. The classic example is that food followed by nausea is learned quickly, while food followed by electric shock is much less naturally associated.
So even if taste -> nutrient pathways are learnable, the credit-assignment machinery may be constrained. For example, maybe the body can more readily learn that the taste/smell/texture profile of meat predicts iron but has a much harder time learning that a multivitamin predicts the same thing. A failed test might not prove there is no relevant delayed/governor signal; it //might// only show that the particular cue/consequence pairing is biologically disfavored.
Governors absent the ecology are arbitrary.
Please explain
It's a basic disproof of the cybernetic theory or functionalism. Cybernetic is a post hoc narrative of how anything exists.
This seems more like assertion than explanation. I'm not sure how ecology falsifies negative feedback...? And sure post hoc rationalization is possible in any model, but cybernetics makes testable predictions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12579923/
All-right, that looks like a ecology meta analysis but I'm not seeing any references to the cybernetics literature or anything that falsifies negative feedback principles.
Maybe you can more specifically falsify cybernetics with a piece of literature from the field, and I'm curious how you'd use ecology to do it. Here is Quantitative Analysis of Purposive Systems. Inside are 6 experimental examples, but there are certainly more.
https://www.iapct.org/themes/psychology-mental-health/quantitative-analysis-of-purposive-systems-some-spadeworkat-the-foundations-of-scientific-psychology/
powers, are you kidding? this is not a kiddie clown show. \that’s irrelevant. nothing is a system. pct is way too marginal to prove anything.
you have to grasp evolution provides no functions to retrofit.
just read haraway's first four chapters primate visions or read Odum's failure to launch papers, which are ecological fantssy systems (the ones mentioned in Curtis's "...machines of loving grace") as a basis for cybernetic failure that any layperson like you can grasp
pct is psuedoscience