Bramblethorn
Sleep-deprived
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2012
- Posts
- 17,076
You were doing well here until that "but" snuck in. You're taking your own requirements for marriage and assuming they're universal, and like some of the other sweeping statements you've made in this discussion, it's not a good idea to make that assumption.
I missed the part where she refused to have sex with him; I thought the only thing we'd established was that she'd gained weight.
And, yeah, it's certainly common, even typical, that married couples have sex. This does not make it a contract.
I agree that people shouldn't get married (at least not with those vows) unless they intend to make it life-long, and to put in some effort to make that happen. What I don't agree with is your suggestion that this then has to be legally enforced.
Not all morality needs to be legislated.
Re. claim that lifetime warranties never define "lifetime":
I was not being completely serious y'know...
I'm glad to hear that. I had taken you for somebody who was just asserting things they believed to be true without taking the trouble to check that first. It's nice to hear that you didn't intend it to be taken as a statement of fact.
Unfortunately, these nuances don't communicate well over the internet. I think quite a few of us have an expectation - reasonable or otherwise - that people will try to observe Grice's Maxim of Quality.
Perhaps you could explicitly tag the bits where you're saying things that aren't intended to be true?
Read on. Specifically, to 1624.a.1, which says that contracts "not to be performed within a year from the making thereof" are invalid unless in writing. My understanding is that most marriages are intended to last longer than that.
But as you say, this part of the CA code doesn't actually cover marriage in the first place, so I'm not really sure what the relevance is.
To the best of my knowledge, you're right in saying that "love" doesn't strictly have to come into the vows, at least in the USA. IMHO that might be a good thing; "love" is such a variably-interpreted word that it wouldn't be terribly meaningful. Better to focus on how you expect your partner to act on that love - e.g. "in sickness or in health".
Fidelity, OTOH, does make an appearance. For reference, Catholic rites of marriage with and without mass.
http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/order-wedding-with-mass.htm
http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/order-wedding-outside-mass.htm
The priest then questions them about their freedom of choice, faithfulness to each other, and the acceptance and upbringing of children.
Dodging the point. You were asserting that love for a spouse is fundamentally no different from love for a thing, because they're both about getting your own needs meet. I pointed out an aspect of love for a spouse that is fundamentally different to love for a thing: it involves consideration of the spouse's happiness.
As I asked previously: what makes you think that "skinny and fit husband" is high on her scale of needs?
Women in the First World are saturated with the message that Fat Is Ugly and Ugly Is Worthless - just look at the women's magazines in any newsagent and count the stories about weight. It's very hard to avoid internalising stuff like that to some degree; you'd have to go a very long way to find a woman who could gain 80 pounds in three years without feeling really, really unhappy about it.
So it seems like a very unlikely scenario to me. If we're going to entertain it, we might as well go the whole hog and discuss the scenario where she's gained weight because she sneaks out at night and scarfs down live human babies.
That's something of a non sequitur, because Occam's razor isn't about "the odds". Occam's Razor is about choosing the simplest explanation, not necessarily the most likely. In fact, the mathematical framework needed to establish "most likely" wasn't developed until more than three hundred years after Occam's death.
It often happens that the two coincide - depending on how you define "simplest" - but it's far from guaranteed. For instance, if you shuffle a deck of cards and hand them to me, and I deal them out in perfect order, aces to kings, sorted by suits, the simplest explanation is that it just happened by chance, but the most likely explanation is that one of us rigged the deck somehow.
If we're going to talk about "the odds", then you ought to be applying all the relevant information you have, not just the bits that support your preferred theory.
For instance: what are the odds of a "foodie with poor self control" being as thin as she was when she entered the marriage? And how does that affect your calculation?
Somehow I didn't think it would.
No it doesn't. The NSDUH report makes it very clear that it's a 12-month prevalence, not a point prevalence.
I note that you chose to round down for the mental illness figure, but not for the overweight figures...
Dude, it's the very first point in the "highlights" section at the start of the NSDUH report:
In 2012, an estimated 43.7 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year. This represents 18.6 percent of all adults in this country.
If you can't understand the difference between "at any given time" and "in the past year" you probably shouldn't be attempting to interpret health data. Not that this particular distinction makes a huge difference here - the fact that it's a 12-month prevalence is actually a little more favourable to your argument, though not enough to salvage it - but these are very basic concepts, and if you don't have a grasp on the basics you're not going to deal well with the rest either.
Not quite - you're comparing a 12-month prevalence to a point prevalence - but let's ignore that for now, since there's a much bigger flaw coming up...
The figures you gave before were "overweight or obese". The figures for just "obese" are a fair bit lower; assuming you're working from this source, 36.1% for women. (Or 41.4% if you want to go specifically with Hispanic women.)
Still higher than the prevalence for mental illness, but we're getting to that...
This argument makes perfect sense if you assume that people who gain weight as a result of a mental illness would instantly lose that weight as soon as their mental health improves. But only somebody with no understanding of health science would make that assumption.
Fictional example by way of illustration: Bob has a major depressive episode that lasts 2 years and triggers weight gain via overeating/lack of exercise/whatever. By the end of Year 1 he's overweight; by the end of Year 2 he's become obese, 60 pounds above the "normal" range.
Then he gets the depression under control, he starts working on his physical health, and loses 10 pounds a year. (Yeah, some people lose weight much faster, but most of them rebound back above their starting point, as previously discussed.) At the end of year 8 he's just back into "normal" weight, and stays in good health for another two years.
Looking at that slice of Bob's life, the point prevalence of depression is 20% (30% for 12-month prevalence) but the point prevalence of the resulting overweight/obesity is 70%. And that's why simply comparing prevalence of mental illness and overweight doesn't give you grounds to claim that most overweight is not MI-related.
Further reading: http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b3868
So in the end we come to the conclusion that you are most likely to be right if you assume that a fat person does "not" suffer from a mental disorder. Which is the same conclusion as before - only with a lot more words.
...or we come to the conclusion that you're out of your depth with this data analysis.
Me, I usually get paid to do this stuff. Since you're not paying me, and since I'm pretty sure the future of this thread involves you continuing to use statistics as a drunk man uses a lamp-post, I'm going to bow out of the discussion at this point. Have fun.
