• moriquende@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How is choosing to buy a sugared drink instead of water the same as playing a game of chess against a grandmaster? What exactly about it makes your analogy fit?

        • Here’s a few ways:

          Information: does an individual know chess rules? Openings? En passant? Do they want to spend the time and effort to learn? Are they getting their info from reliable sources or are they learning bongcloud and knooks?

          Difference in skill level: the food and diet industries have thousands of specialists on their side with experience in psychology, advertisement, economics, lobbying, etc. Grandmasters can set up traps that new like a good idea to their opponent while thinking 10 steps ahead.

          Complexity: chess and diet are not a single choice, but a series of choices, some of which make later moves more difficult.

          Effort: it takes a long time to learn enough to even put up a decent resistance to a grandmaster, let alone win. It’s more than I’d care to put in. I don’t want to think about chess all the time. That’s called a chessing disorder.

          • moriquende@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So your point is that it’s difficult to resist the urge to buy sugared drinks due to distinct factors such as lack of information about it being unhealthy (which I seriously doubt nowadays) and people being psychologically manipulated through advertisements and making their product economically competitive. I agree some of these factors make it easier to be unhealthy, but I disagree that it’s enough to say people don’t have and make a choice. The choice to be healthy is just a harder one to make than it should.

            • You’re straw manning me. I’m not saying people don’t have a choice. But they’re still going to lose. It doesn’t matter that I have a choice of which piece to move when the point is not to move pieces, but to checkmate. Saying there are choices misses the point.

              • moriquende@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                No it doesn’t because you’re arguing as if choices were dependant on one another. Choosing to avoid a coke one time doesn’t mean you’re now in a bad position to avoid another coke later on. It’s not about winning or losing it’s about building habits and keeping them, which I have agreed is made hard in some people’s environment.

                  • moriquende@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    The point I’m making is that a game of chess has a conclusion, a destiny if you will, in which you’ll lose even if you make a good choice right now. Real life is not like that, your choice to be healthy now does not mean you’ve lost the opportunity to do so in the future, ultimately leading you to your “destiny” of being unhealthy. That is victim mentality and we shouldn’t endorse it. Still, I completely agree that making the unhealthy choice has become easier in recent times, and we should strive to reverse that trend.