One thing that seems missing from a lot of these comparisons is the base rate of success for dieting itself.
Most people who “start a diet” never meaningfully lose weight in the first place, or lose a small amount and plateau quickly. The cohort of “dieters who regain weight” is already heavily filtered toward the minority who were unusually successful at dieting to begin with. That selection bias matters a lot when you then compare regain rates.
GLP-1s change that denominator. A much larger fraction of people who start the intervention actually lose substantial weight. So even if regain after stopping is faster conditional on having lost weight, the overall success rate (people who lose and keep off a clinically meaningful amount) may still be higher than dieting alone.
In other words: “people who regain weight after stopping GLP-1s” vs “people who regain weight after dieting” ignores the much larger group of dieters who never lost anything to regain. From a population perspective, that’s a pretty important omission.
You are the third person to mention that the cohort is "dieters who regain weight".
Reading the article and its referenced study, I thought the cohort was "all who were included in the non-placebo group of the RCT" and that the average was taken over all such subjects.
I've tried, can't find any evidence to the contrary. I am wrong and missing some key claim in the study? I would appreciate if you could support your claim.
> Weight regain data are expressed as weight change from baseline (pre-intervention) or difference in weight change from baseline between intervention and control for randomised controlled trials. When analysing and presenting data from all studies, we used weight change from single arm trials, observational studies, and the intervention groups from randomised controlled trials. When analysing data from randomised controlled trials only, we calculated the difference in weight change between the intervention and control groups at the end of the intervention and at each available time point after the end of the intervention. When studies had multiple intervention arms, we treated each arm as a separate arm and divided the number in the comparator by the number of intervention arms to avoid duplicative counting.19
> The results at year eight are heartening. Eight years later and 50.3 percent of the intensive lifestyle intervention group and 35.7 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥5 percent, while 26.9 percent of the intensive group and 17.2 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥10 percent.
The idea of "heartening" by an obesity doctor was that half of people lost a largely imperceptible amount of weight.
This was considered success at the time.
For comparison, to be on the edge of normal weight from the edge of obese is a 16% reduction.
This is not true. You have to procure it and take it consistently over a long period of time, there are side effects, and some people really dislike needles.
I was concerned about this too. Gemini informed me that the researchers "found that even when comparing people who had lost the same amount of weight, the rate of regain was significantly faster in the drug group (GLP-1s) than in the diet group (approximately 0.3 kg/month faster)."
Also, both groups contained those who didn't lose weight. They did not omit dieters who failed to lose weight or those who weren't "super responders."
Contrast this with taking the headline as fact without further scrutinizing it, which happens often. Or, look at the other posts here that are assuming that the cohort was restricted to only those who lost weight.
In an informal conversational context such as a forum, we don't expect every commentator to spend 20 minutes reading through the research. Yet we now have tools that allow us to do just that in less than a minute. It was not long ago that we'd be justified to feel skeptical of these tools, but they've gotten to the point where we'd be justified to believe them in many contexts. I believed it in this case, and this was the right time spent/scrutinization tradeoff for me. You're free to prove the claim wrong. If it was wrong, then I'd agree that it would be good to see where it was wrong.
Probably many people are using the tools and then "covering" before posting. That would be posting it as "fact". That's not what I did, as I made the reader aware of the source of the information and allowed them to judge it for what it was worth. I would argue that it's actually more transparent and authentic to admit from where exactly you're getting the information. It's not like the stakes are that high: the information is public, and anyone can check it. Hacker News understandably might be comparably late to this norm, as its users have a better understanding of the tech and things like how often they hallucinate. But I believe this is the way the wind is blowing.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. What I meant was that, for example, before you might've needed to track down where to find the underlying research paper, then read through the paper to find the relevant section. That might've taken 20 minutes for a task like this one. Now you can set an LLM on it, and get a concise answer in less than a minute.
Google-as-the-new-Microsoft feels about right. Windows 1 was a curiosity, 2 was “ok”, and 3.x is where it started to really win. Same story with IE: early versions were a joke, then it became “good enough” + distribution did the rest.
Gemini 3 feels like Google’s “Windows 3 / IE4 moment”: not necessarily everyone’s favorite yet, but finally solid enough that the default placement starts to matter.
If you are the incumbent you don't need to be all that much better. Just good enough and you win by default. We'll all end up with Gemini 6 (IE 6, Windows XP) and then we'll have something to complain about.
This doesn’t sound very convincing, mostly because the examples don’t really line up with the claim. Apple supposedly struggles “up the stack,” yet many of the best and most-used iPhone apps are built by Apple itself. Google is held up as failing at social, but YouTube is arguably the largest social network in the world. Oracle is described as struggling in apps, yet it’s clearly doing just fine as a massive, profitable enterprise software company. And the IBM example is backwards: IBM didn’t accidentally hand Microsoft the OS layer, it already had its own operating systems. In fact, Microsoft is the clearest counterexample here, it got big by owning the OS and then very successfully moved up the stack to dominate applications with Office.
FWIW the article is from 2016 (although, if the article was discovering some real underlying force it shouldn’t be invalidated by the passage of time). Apple Maps was quite bad when it was released, I forget when that was exactly, but maybe it was recent enough in 2016 to be top-of-mind?
IIRC it was released somewhere in the iPhone 4/5 transition (2011ish?). It was so abysmal for a road trip I took that I went to Android and haven't looked back (they also removed Google Maps for a bit, and the web version wasn't suitable). It wouldn't have been top of mind for me in 2016, but I wouldn't have been surprised at somebody telling me Apple maps sucked.
exactly. it took longer for Apple to fix its Maps app - and to this day their email app is nowhere as good as most third party apps. Even iMessage is lacking features that WhatsApp and Signal built 5 years ago. (And iMessage is clearly their best app.)
eh, maybe. Sure Google bought Youtube, but the whole making it social came later. Apple spending a lot of time refining them is exactly the point. They did go up in the stack (given that they started out as home computer builder quite a bit). Word first came out for MS DOS, so definitely going up in the stack.
I don't think anyone at Google thought building a social network would be easy, and Page knows Google planned and did spend a huge amount of money on the failure.
Google just that it was necessary and possible, not that it would be easy. I suspect that many other up-the-stack adventures by other companies were similar.
I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method. The paper referred to does not. It uses a special US dataset for states and a much smaller global dataset for every other country, then treats the results as if they measure the same thing. This setup almost guarantees that US states look unusually good. The authors present this as evidence, but it mostly reflects differences in survey design rather than real differences in wellbeing. In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
In case others are wondering what the one simple question is (called the Cantril Ladder):
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
Personally feels a little more convoluted than just asking "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
I have done survey methodology research and fully agree, almost assuredly when you see questions worded in a seemingly "convoluted" way like this, the reason is that there was exhaustive research that found this wording was the best balance of reliability and validity.
There is also a lot of value in a question that works well enough, that you ask consistently over long stretches of time (or long stretches of distance). Maybe it's not perfect, but the longitudinal data would be worthless if they updated the wording every single year.
Although I'm no survey expert, the thing I'd like to bring to everyone's attention is how easy it is to not take into account people that have a degree of numeric or math illiteracy... which I guess they are the main target demographic that is included by these questions (and I can also guess that they make a worryingly large part of the demographic, because our systems are rarely inclusive).
In my experience, having met people from multiple countries during the time I've been living abroad, what I have noticed is that — in this world filled with inequality — it is a privilege to be able to have a good grasp in scientific subjects. And, for lots of different factors, people have setbacks or trauma that make it difficult to learn a subject that is either boring or painful to them.
So, yes the questions are a bit convoluted, but they help paint a mental image for probably the majority with a thing that they may be closely familiar with: stairs... Plus, it probably helps statisticians get a better signal to noise out of the questions, too.
I agree – I'm sure social psychologists and psychometricians have been thinking about this since forever, probably since even the dawn of modern psychometrics. Cross-cultural and cross-language validity would likely be particularly problematic with something more detailed, especially once you get entangled with things like how anger is expressed and conceptualized, the role of positive outer expressions of affect like smiling, etc.
It's easy to overlook the importance in outlining a process for evaluating each rung in the ladder.
Adding this nuance to the question serves to invite deeper thought and avoid assigning a motivation-based rating (like when you give the Uber driver 5 stars when what you felt was actually just "satisfactory").
A more basic rating question can invite other kinds of influence, such as a motivation in how they'd like their life to be perceived rather than how they genuinely feel it to be.
In surveys with less nuance the data tends to correlate around the extremes.
Yep. There are some implicit cultural expectations around "best possible life" which vary from country to country, but it's not quite as much a "is the word in your local language we've rendered as happy closer in meaning to satisfied or ecstatic?" question, and it's also less about short term emotions on the day of the survey and much more about satisfaction with life opportunities, which is generally more relevant for international and longitudinal comparisons...
Happy have so many definition that I like the question better, it is much less ambiguous than "happy".
My happiness changes depending on many external factor and varies by hour and days, but the answer to the former question aren't going to change quite as often, would have probably provided the same answer over the entire year.
What an interesting question. It would seem intuitively that a population with a limited band of socioeconomic mobility must answer 10 and one with a wide band of mobility must answer 0. I wonder whether that is true.
I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?
Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.
There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
Your question is likely to be interpreted as you asking the person's current MOOD hence different answers on different times are likely. While you are thinking of a less changing wider concept.
The social context is important too, there is a social stigma around admitting that you are not happy which will play into this question too.
I'm a Finn. I personally interpret that survey as Finland being the least unhappy place. There's a social safety net, health care is taken care of, you know your life won't get destroyed by the slightest misfortune, you get a good education for free, your surroundings are generally safe and well maintained, you feel safe & are fairly certain nothing bad will happen, there are people around you who share your values, life is good.
Things that for example the article author's favorite USA does not have. But of course a Murkin' can't accept that. I fully expect him to gripe that somehow the Corruption Perceptions Index is also somehow unfair to his favorite country too, and just cannot be right.
And maybe check what Finland is doing with its military and what happened around World War II before saying that USA pays "most of our defense".
What's really rich is Americans deciding they no longer like their self-assigned World Police role, and managing to blame their supposed allies for that. Never underestimate the quality of Russian psyops, I guess.
What Finland had during WW2 is not relevant to the value the US has provided all Western countries by making shipping lanes safe for the last 75 years.
These are America's choices. And it's America's choice whether to wield these in world-leading competitiveness or as ossified self-serving bureaucracy.
Other countries make other choices about where to do world-leading R&D (that Americans can take advantage of as lower prices). Chinese solar, for example.
Yes, and now they're starting to choose differently. Which is a shame, because shaming a country for acting in the worlds self-interest is a very strange thing to do.
I am yet to be convinced that 4000 data points are sufficient to extrapolate how happy 2.8B people are in the world. (India and China) Especially when it deals with a complex topic as happiness without taking any cultural differences into account.
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
One way to interpret this is not as the author's endorsement of the other report, but as a demonstration of how fragile these happiness rankings are to perturbations in methodology / definition.
Apropos to that: I wish the author had said more about critically evaluating tweaks in methodology and definition.
(For example, he cites Blanchflower and Bryson because he prefers positive affect as a measurement of happiness – but doesn't note that Blanchflower and Bryson pool data for 2008-2017, so in terms of rankings they may be measuring something meaningful but different.)
> I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method.
The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
> In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
"Pick a random number between 1 and 10" is also a clear and consistent method, and also not particularly meaningful.
The point I took from the article is that we should stop paying attention to this meaningless metric. I didn't read it as a request to replace it with another metric.
I would like to rewrite it, replacing desires with hormones, since they are the drivers for desires, when young one could jump a wall, risking his/her life to see the one we desire, then in their fifties on a nude beach everybody looks and feels mundane.
The defining experience of our age seems to be biochemical hunger.
We're flooded with hormones that tell us to crave more, even when we already have more than we need.
We're starved for balance while stimuli multiply around us.
Our dopamine peaks and crashes without reason; our cortisol hums in the background like faulty wiring.
We live with a near-universal imbalance: the reign of thin hormones.
These thin hormones promise satisfaction but never deliver. They spike and vanish, leaving behind only the impulse to chase the next hit.
Philosophers once spoke of desires that change the self; today, our neurochemistry is being short-circuited before the self even enters the conversation.
A thick hormone is slower, steadier. It reshapes you in the process of living it—like the oxytocin that comes from trust, or the endorphins that build with persistence.
But thin hormones—those dopamine flickers from notifications, likes, and swipes—do nothing but reproduce themselves.
They deliver sensation without transformation, stimulation without growth.
Modern systems have perfected the art of hijacking our endocrine circuitry.
Social media fires the neurons of connection without the chemistry of friendship.
Porn delivers the hormonal spike of intimacy without the vulnerability that generates oxytocin.
Productivity apps grant the dopamine signature of accomplishment with nothing actually achieved.
We’ve built an economy not of meaning, but of molecules.
And none of it seems to be making us more alive.
Imagine that, the United States is attempting to pervert truth into utter and complete lies. It's almost as if this is the only brand the United States has left.
At this point in my life if I see something with United States looks good compared to the rest of the world I just immediately assume it is a lie. Because the United States is nothing but lies and greed anymore. We cannot even claim innovation as a central motivator anymore.
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources.
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
> Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies,
As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter.
You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you.
‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office:
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Brazil (1985)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Fight Club (1999)
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
- The Thing (1982)
The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s.
What if the goal of writing about how “AI is bad for the environment” (because of the energy and water it uses) is to identify gullible people and on-ramp them into a lifetime of media manipulation?
OTOH, what if the goal of downplaying the environmental risks is to try to make people gullible and stop caring and spend more of their money now and ignore the consequences, as industrialization has been doing for a couple of centuries?
I don't know how much a fully laden "large plane" weighs, but it's nowhere near 450,000 tons. Which means that the claim it releases 450,000 tons of CO2 on a single flight is clearly bollocks.
This advise against quitting you find everywhere is just wrong. Sure you should give it a fair shake, but if you are on a dead end, never quitting means never winning. If something doesn't work, it's possible you should just stop doing it and try something else.
I donno, I've come across or read about fair number of people who worked on a crazy idea for a very long time, as if they were planning to throw their life away chasing that idea. Some had a breakthrough and ended up being a huge win. But I'm sure there are many many more who just ended up nowhere. So, I guess it's a gamble.
I feel seen
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