Robot Baby
I’m not a big fan of the infant-robot simplification, as I mentioned back on January 30th. That is, in our minds it is easy to tell simple stories that are psychologically gratifying—and probably false. One of these is that every story has two sides: on the one is a person or group that is capable of feeling and emoting, but incapable of acting. This side is represented by the helpless infant. On the other is a large human entity that is only capable of action but has no ability to feel, whether for itself or others. This side is heartless, represented by the robot.
Arnold Kling distills the idea as put forward in the book The Mind Club, 2016:
[Daniel] Wegner and [Kurt] Gray see a baby and a robot as occupying opposite ends of the spectrum of incomplete minds. The baby lacks the ability to plan and make choices. The robot lacks the ability to feel sensations and emotions.
Most arguments that simplify the world into modern contests between the Little Guy and the Big Corporation follow this basic pattern. They are psychologically satisfying because they wrap the story up beautifully and adorn it with a bow. And they are probably false. They deny agency to the one side, and humanity to the other. Since we’re dealing with real people rather than mythical beasts, that seems improbable no matter how psychologically satisfying. It’s too black and white, too Manichaean. The model makes for good fiction, but is not helpful for most analysis.
One place where I often come across the view is in the science and research discussions regarding diet and health. It’s usually the hapless patient who is like an infant, made and kept sick by the likes of the unfeeling robots of Big Pharma and Big Food. Yet I must concede that while the robot-baby model is too simple, it often feels like it’s close enough to be true. In its own way, the Big Pharma/Big Food robot cannot seem to help itself other than to cause harm without caring that it does so. And the helpless baby patient cannot escape the robot’s sphere of harm.
The Australian orthopedic surgeon Gary Fettke had had enough of amputating diabetics’ limbs and extremities. He began insisting that his patients change their diets to try losing weight, to try controlling their diabetes, which got him into trouble with the Australian medical association, who told him he wasn’t a dietician and shouldn’t be making diet recommendations. He had personally experienced revolutionary health improvements from going off carbs. The extra time he had on his hands while his license was suspended, he and his wife filled with researching the history of the plant-based diet recommendations. They were scrutinizing the robot.
As they learned, the recommendation to reduce meat consumption in favor of grains had originated well over a century earlier with several dedicated Seventh-Day Adventism (SDA) adherents, whose intentions were salvation for the populace along with health. These SDAs believed that eating meat led to sin and therefore needed to be restricted. Over the subsequent decades, these SDA activists gained political influence in the United States enough to influence government dietary guidelines. The Kellogg brothers’ legacies have kept the objectives in place. As Fettke says, SDA holdings in grain agriculture worldwide are substantial, and they have played an outsize role in developing the plant-based meat alternatives such as Beyond Meat.
The whole story is colorful and surprising. The podcast with the Irish engineer and low-carb proponent Ivor Cummins covers some of the more unexpected parts of the tale:
The diet recommended in most modern countries with modern medical systems, thus, was originally meant to protect us from sin. The scientific research to support the theory came along after the fact. Meanwhile, the low-fat, high-carb diet has been imposed on us helpless babies by an evangelizing robot, you might say. Which is not to claim that any of this conclusively proves or disproves the utility of that diet or any other: it makes for an interesting story on its own nonetheless.
Y'all are quite into this diet thing. Cool. Me, not so much. Sadly, never been all that health conscious, or even conscious period, if you want to believe what a few people who know me have to say.
But my wife is into healthy eating, feeds me well, and I go along with it, if for no other reason than to just get at least *something* to eat. But I'd be less than candid if I didn't admit that if I were on my own and left to my own devices, I'd probably just adhere to the following diet...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oEb5frTYsc
How to play the trump card. Pun intended.