Evolutionary signals are useful inasmuch as they retain the same context as they had in the evolutionary environment. In other words we're adaptation executors instead of fitness maximizers.
Our evolutionarily derived pleasure and pain signals are still useful even if they are noisy. They remain useful because the noise is systemic and can be compensated for. Eg, we loved calories back then because they were scarce then but they aren't now; we can note this and compensate. However, we still live a ~20% oxygen environment and going without breathing is bad for us, so we should listen to our lung's signals when they tell us to breathe.
What about stuff like wheat, which is claimed to be both painkiller and gut irritant? It feels better than the alternative, but appears to be actually doing damage / increasing inflammation.
There's also stuff like mate selection- who I find attractive may not be the best person for the relationship goals I espouse. (For example, liking other men in part based on their projected fertility is problematic both because it won't lead to kids and because it's not making best use of that it won't lead to kids.)
Nobody says that human contact is bad, even though many people like it.
Doctors used to say (about a hundred years ago) that human contact with infants was bad, because of the increased risk of infectious disease. Mothers could not resist touching their babies, and so just felt guilty about doing it- but caretakers in orphanages were perfectly willing to minimize contact. Turns out that not touching infants causes a lot of psychological problems! Oops. (Also, mothers make antibodies for pathogens they pick up by kissing / playing with their babies which then get transmitted to the baby through breast milk, so frequent contact can decrease risk.)
Things that people dislike that are bad for them:
Things that people like that are good for them:
If there was a negative correlation between what we liked and what was healthy, we'd be completely unable to survive. Liking things that are bad for us is the exception.
Well, I've got a problem of this type in front of me right now. Does anyone know something about optimal limping? I broke my littlest toe and, although I know I need to keep weight off it as much as I can, I'm not sure how to minimize damage when I walk. My athletic brother said limping at all can cause other muscle strain, and I should go get crutches, but, while I don't have them, is just avoiding pain the right strategy? Do I balance and go with small discomfort in the toe, but a more natural stride?
My felt preference is, I guess, no pain, but honestly I hate walking slowly so much that if I knew it was safe to be less cautious, I'd definitely be moving faster through the discomfort.
Long-distance runners and hikers and soldiers on road marches are often told not to change their strides when they get blisters, because when you have 15 or 20 miles left to go, a lopsided hobble can seriously damage your knees and hip and back.
However, based on your comment, that advice is not meant for you. Since you were able to post this, I assume you're not hopelessly lost in the woods. More importantly you've broken your toe. That is not a blister. For god's sake, get off the damn thing, and get some damn crutches if you haven't already done so and use them. If you're not living on a fishing boat or something, you should be able to find some crutches somewhere. In the meantime, limp or hop or crawl to the bathroom or whatever when you need to, but take care of your foot.
Thanks for the reply. I finally got to see a podiatrist on Friday and now I've got a shoe that lets me walk with a normal stride because the bottom of the shoe is rounded. So it rolls naturally without me bending my splinted foot.
Counterexamples: scratching itches feels good but can damage the skin if overdone, and anyway IME it doesn't help at all with recovering from mosquito bites and similar irritations; and after vomiting you feel thirsty but drinking water immediately afterwards would only make you throw it up too (IME at least). Yeah, and eating a lot when you already are plump enough, but everyone else has already mentioned it.
In all other cases I can think of, it's good advice: for example, I heard that when you have a fever you should cover yourself up when you feel cold (because your body needs your temperature to be higher) and uncover yourself when you feel hot (because your body no longer needs that).
I seem to remember a conversation along the lines of
A: blablabla ... hurts ... blablabla.
B: Yeah, drinking hot water [or something like that] is painful.
A: Actually I meant hurt as in 'harmful', not as in 'painful'.
Me: Well, after all pain receptors evolved for us to avoid damage, so if drinking hot water is painful probably it's because it would damage us.
There certainly is a positive correlation between what people like and what is good for them, for obvious evolutionary reasons, as well as meta-evolutionary ones (we evolved the ability to learn to like previously rewarding experiences). But it's weak evidence and stronger evidence specific to the kind of behavior being discussed will overrule it very easily.
In the example of food, it's known that many foods exist today which people like but are bad for them. People have to deliberately keep to unpleasant, healthy diets. Even though there is disagreement over which diets are better, there is no disagreement that the diets formed by just eating whatever we like are harmful (ETA:) for many people. The evolutionary optimizations are clearly not working for them. And the different dietary theories explicitly address this: they will say that modern food availability is different from the ancestral environment in certain ways which cause this harmful behavior.
Absent such specific knowledge, it would seem that the prior should indeed be that we instinctively like what is good for us and dislike what is bad for us. But in most practical cases it's easy to imagine that the behavior or stimulus in question didn't exist in the same form in the EEA.
Suppose I am hungry in the jungle, and I encounter an unfamiliar kind of fruit tree. Its fruits are green and fuzzy like tennis balls. I feel a desire to bite one. When I taste it I enjoy the taste. Does that mean it's good to eat? Or does it mean it reminds me of some irrelevant, artificial modern food's taste and also of the fact I love to play tennis? I have no idea, and my caution of new unfamiliar food would win out because I don't trust my evolutionary instincts enough.
Perhaps this heuristic of doing what I like works best in specific sub-fields where it is known to work well. For instance, social relations for some people (like me) are pretty opaque: I'm at a party, should I laugh now, can I start talking to this person, am I dressed right? I can get along fairly well by just doing what feels good, which is presumably a whole lot of complex behavioral adaptation working correctly.
I have no idea, and my caution of new unfamiliar food would win out because I don't trust my evolutionary instincts enough.
Perhaps your caution of new unfamiliar food is itself an evolutionary instinct? Rats exhibit such caution, and they haven't learnt any dietary theories. Faced with new, unfamiliar food, they will try just a little bit. If it causes any sickness, they'll avoid it thereafter. This makes them difficult to poison, since most poisons will make the animal sick if the dose isn't enough to kill.
You're right, it's a poor example because of that. A better one could be made but as it's just for illustration, and is not proper evidence, I'm not bothering to do so.
there is no disagreement that the diets formed by just eating whatever we like are harmful.
Maybe there is serious academic disagreement among academics or researchers or even registered dieticians, but that's not a good cite for it.
Citing a non-dietician selling training on 'permission to eat' at $75 a pop seems like citing a christian faith healer as evidence Christianity is true.
There's Ellyn Satter, who The Fat Nutritionist links to, if you prefer a cite from a person with many letters after her name. I'm not sure how TFN's career is relevant to a free blog post she wrote. It doesn't say "and if you don't agree, consider buying a course of counseling with me". I doubt TFN's credentials are your true rejection. Anyway, the comment I replied to didn't specify "academic".
Ellyn Satter's website nominally supports "eating what you want as much as you want" but glosses the whole "... as long as what you want isn't actually what you want, but instead these other things that you could learn to eat as long as you've got rigorously enforced habits." I should note that Ellyn Satter seems exclusively focused on children, and so a large part of her work seems to be about controlling what they have access to and shaping their desires. It is definitely not advocating limitless access to whatever you want, and is actually very strict about time-based and content-based access to foods.
I guess in the literal sense she advocates 'eating whatever you like', but the modified definition of 'like' that Ellyn Satter uses is not what I'd consider unrestrained.
Also I should note that it is a much better cite.
Satter and TFN both have beliefs about what people want (after adjustment periods or habit formations periods designed to clear away disorded eating patterns etc.). That doesn't mean that they don't really hold the belief that people (adults) should eat whatever they want, as much as they want. If I tell a houseguest they can eat anything they want in the kitchen, I really mean that when I say it, even if I am later shocked to find them eating glass bowls or something and say "I didn't mean anything in the kitchen."
Perhaps I can clarify my objections exploding 'want' into want/like/approve.
To me it feels like Ellyn Satter takes '-want/-like/+approves' food behaviors then transforms the '-like' and '-want' variables into '+like' and '+want'.
Comparatively, I feel like TFN takes '+want/+like/-approves' food behaviors then transforms the '-approves' variable into '+approves'.
Ellyn Satter's stuff is all about behavior and desire modification, but everything I've read of TFN emphasizes approval more. In both cases you end up with '+want/+like/+approves', which is a better result psychologically. But TFN just gets that, while Satter's approach gets that and a better result physically as well. I think TFN would disagree of the original quote, while Satter would agree with caveats.
I've skimmed the linked site. It seems to describe a way to modify eating behavior resulting in people both eating healthily and being happy about it, rather than repressing their desires for food, obsessing over diets, and suffering psychologically.
I'm not an expert on the subject; I don't know what different methods exist to achieve this kind of result and what is each method's rate of success.
My original statement that "there is no disagreement" was wrong, I should have qualified it. Some people remain healthy all their lives while just eating whatever they like. Others may be able to achieve such a state through some behavioral modification technique. Still others may remain unhappy with healthy diets. For some there may not be a healthy diet at all: for instance people suffering from obesity, which may be associated with "bad" diet, but which in some cases no dietary changes can effectively fix.
The correct statement should be that the diets formed by just eating whatever we like are often harmful, and in some of these cases no healthy diet can be found that the person likes and can adhere to without any effort.
There are fat (obese) healthy people. There's evidence that exercise is a better correlation for health than BMI or fat %.
A follow-up question would be whether exercise screens off being obese, i.e. whether going from obese to thin tends to make you healthier even if you're already exercising. My guess is yes.
My guess is no, especially if you figure in the risk of getting an eating disorder-- as far as I can tell, dieting is a gateway behavior for getting eating disorders.The risk isn't terribly high, but the health effects of eating disorders are very negative.
In any case, rather few people achieve a substantial stable weight loss, so it's hard to tell.
A person's feelings on something is medium to strong evidence of something being at least not the opposite. If you take all possible things that could happen to a person, the vast majority of them that are bad would give a negative or neutral response, and those that are good would mostly give a positive or neutral response. As an example, almost all sensations would elicit the accurate response.
There are exceptions, like food, but they are fairly rare in comparison to how many things the body gets right, or at least not wrong.
Relevant: Only to first order. An obvious counterexample is fast food, which people like a lot but generally regard as bad. Same for candy and sugar. A controversial one is porn, which we also like a lot but many people consider bad for you. (Not so many on LW, perhaps.)
Irrelevant: My first reading of "felt preference" was "preference for felt", the material; I was really confused when your post didn't at all mention how someone's taste in cloth would indicate something useful about them. Perhaps I need some caffeine.
(Not so many on LW, perhaps.)
The qualifier is probably redundant. For example, simulated child porn (with no actual children harmed) would probably raise hackles of more than an occasional LWer.
I posted recently that "I tend to assume that things people hate are bad for them. CR may be an exception, but it's plausible that evolution would usually select for warnings that one is hurting oneself."
I think this points at an interesting question. If you know that people like a behavior, or dislike it, or love it, or hate it, does this tell you anything about whether the behavior is useful?
I expect that most people reading this question have a handy list-- one that comes quickly to mind-- of things which are good for people but that they resist. There's a tremendous amount in the culture (and perhaps more from somewhat different angles at LW) about people's reflexive preferences being wrong.
However, there's a lot where people's preferences are assumed to be in line with what's good for them that doesn't get much attention. I believe this is because there's a fascination with the drama of self-denial, but that might be a topic for a different post.
For example, people hate long commutes. I've never heard anyone say that long commutes are good for people.
People generally dislike being low on sleep.
Rather few modern people think that liking sex is a problem in itself. (Note a cultural shift-- anxiety about pleasure has been moved from sex to food.)
Nobody says that human contact is bad, even though many people like it.
And there's no cultural consensus that hating spam is bad, even though hating spam is a spontaneous response.
It's implausible that evolutionarily developed pleasure and pain should be completely out of line with well-being. On the other hand, it's a noisy signal. Should it be taken at all seriously?