Diet calories are an example of anti-reification: an abstraction made real via a non-abstraction. A measure of homeostasis shifts in a complex dissipative system that rhymes enough with a unit of literal energy to be approximated by it. Like using pulse rate to measure time.
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I follow a bunch of people who get REALLY mad about diet calories being used as though they were like literal calories. It’s hilarious because they’re so right they’re wrong. Anti-reification in a complex system is something like a fractal-hermetic heuristic. “As above so below.”
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This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this conflation of real and homeostasis “calories” is a GOOD thing and one of the ways we can make sense of complex systems. The trick is to recalibrate the 2 calories when dynamic regimes change.
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This is actually a common procedure in designing feedback controllers for complex systems. You have a family of tuned simple linear laws that overlap along the nonlinear range of system behavior. Kinda like automatic gears in a car give you a smooth acceleration response.
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Replying to
People who believe that counting calories works for weight loss tend to be better at losing weight than those who don't.
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what gets measured, gets managed
this is less about the metric, more about the attention paid
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Partly true (Hawthorne effect) but not entirely. You do need some local correlation between measure and management.
well, sure, *less* about the metric
point is, when you weight cottage cheese, you lose weight, not because you know how many calories are in it, but because you put some back in the container
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