Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs

A slightly salty critique of rationalism and adjacent cultures.

There is an interconnected set of communities that I interact with regularly on and offline – rationalism, Effective Altruism, AI safety, Progress Studies, and so on. These communities have many common members and many common beliefs, but are of course importantly distinct in ways that I don’t feel like elucidating here. I could probably do a more comprehensive analysis of this bundle and produce a nice Venn diagram, but this would take up undue space, so I exercise my authorial sovereignty and decide not to. Sorry.

What is the underlying belief or value that links these communities? I would say it is something like entertaining possibilities and ideas that are far outside of most people’s personal Overton Windows. It is a willingness to entertain the possibility that the future could be far stranger than most people are able to conceive of. It considers spacefaring and abundance and disassembling Mercury using a Dyson Sphere to harness the energy of the sun. It confronts the immense suffering of people in faraway countries, non-human animals, or even digital consciousnesses, in an attempt to overcome humanity’s perennial scope-insensitivity. It is at its heart a philosophy that embraces the Hugeness and Radicalism of reality, and tries to steward our collective wisdom towards making the world hugely and radically better, while avoiding the often-overlooked ways in which we could make it hugely and radically worse.

I like this philosophy! With the possible exception of my own mortal fear of AI, it is the primary thing that drew me to this cluster of communities and why I’m still hanging around three years later. This is also why I’m extremely frustrated by our frequent inability to live up to this ideal, and often to flagrantly contradict it. My central thesis is that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. We pile our plates with grand philosophies that we can’t always digest, and instead find ourselves embroiled in culture war skirmishes and tired ideologies that we disguise behind a sheen of radicalism. It makes me want to scream.

I’m going to start by harping on one rather outdated example of this phenomenon (authorial sovereignty card again), which is Works In Progress Magazine editor Aria Schreker’s March 2026 essay, Get Sexier. I am aware that this particular discourse train has long-since left the station, but I don’t care. I continue to be ragebaited by it, and the only way to exorcise this ragebaiting demon from my mind is to write about it.

This is one of those occasions where I have to provide a bunch of disclaimers so it’s clear what I’m not trying to do or say. I don’t know Aria personally, and I am not trying to attack her; I am picking her essay as a particularly salient example of a phenomenon I’ve observed more widely. I’m also aware that I occupy a different niche in this cultural cluster from Aria. She doesn’t write about AI safety, and I’m not aware what she believes about it, other than that she is “compelled somewhat” by AI risk arguments. So I’m not on a mission to point out her personal hypocrisy by criticising a frivolous preoccupation with how women ought to hyperfixate on their own sexiness in their final years before AI paperclips us all. She may not share my AI pessimism at all. This isn’t the point.

All that matters for my thesis to hang together (I think) is that Aria is clearly a member of the cluster I’m describing. I imagine most readers will already understand that the Progress Studies and rationalist spheres are closely interlinked, if distinct. But to very quickly trace the through-line: the field of progress studies was founded in 2019 by Tyler Cowen, frequent commentator on AI safety and friendly EA-interlocuter. Works in Progress is partially funded by Cowen’s Emergent Ventures, which is at least AI safety and EA-adjacent enough to be listed in Zvi Mowshowitz’s 2025 Big Nonprofits List. And yes, to pre-empt another objection, I am aware that Get Sexier was written in a personal capacity and doesn’t necessarily represent organisation views at the magazine. But the fact remains that it took up an outsized enough presence in my own discourse circle that for several days, I experienced the whiplash of scrolling a Twitter feed alternating between discussions of AI risk and meditations on the optimal waist-to-hip ratio for an eligible bachelorette. Prominent AI researchers were weighing in. Aria appeared on the Lightcone Podcast to elucidate her sexiness theory. This is the paradox I feel compelled to point out.

The most obvious – but I think reductive – paradox here is that it’s a silly waste of time for a community ostensibly engaged in saving or radically transforming the world to focus on superficial things like maximising one’s aesthetic appeal. This isn’t really my objection though. I don’t think we should forbid people with Grand Missions like saving the world from an imminent AI apocalypse from occasionally indulging in other topics. People should pursue any passion project or stray down any intellectual path they want (rather like I’m doing right now). The better criticism is that the values espoused in Aria’s essay are in such deep, painful conflict with everything I understand this community to stand for that it almost gives me a headache. Her prescriptions are antithetical to anything like social progress, and to faithfully adhere to them would be to fall down a value-minimising sinkhole.

Here’s the passage that garnered the most controversy:

Losing weight is easy now. You can either starve yourself with willpower or you can starve yourself with chemical assistance. Unless you spend a lot of time at the gym, exercise probably won’t help very much. Currently I control my weight by eating about once a day. I personally enjoy the practice of self control and self monitoring. If dieting isn’t a hobby you enjoy, just go down to your local Novo Nordisk or Chinese peptide retailer and pick up some appetite suppressants. The side effects are limited and it will probably be the soundest financial investment you ever make.

I don’t have the first-hand experience with peptides to litigate whether they actually make sustainable weight loss “easy”. I have heard anecdotally that they require increasingly higher doses to maintain their effectiveness over time. And, predictably, a quick Google search brings up numerous exposés citing experts warning of adverse effects from imprecise dosing of grey market drugs, including muscle paralysis, scarring, sepsis, rashes, mood swings, and the enlargement of bones and organs. But whatever, I’m not a doctor. Maybe these drugs will become licensed in the future and such ailments will just appear on the back of the bottle as low-probability side effects. Maybe the rationalist-adjacents really have been early to adopt miracle weight loss interventions that the rest of the world are busy hand-wringing about. I don’t actually know whether these things are safe to self-administer as a person with a healthy BMI – but presumably neither does Aria. And the purpose of this chemical assistance is to enable, in her words, not a modest calorie deficit but “starvation”. Even if this is possible to achieve comfortably without the pesky interference of hunger signals, are we sure that people will be at their peak cognitive and physical functioning while consuming far less energy than they would usually require? Aren’t we meant to be part of the community dedicated to solving some of the world’s largest and most urgent problems? Do we want our female contingent to risk impairing their own faculties? Like what are we actually doing?

I can more easily speak to the practice of unassisted self-denial, since, thankfully, the peak of my calorie-restriction days is far behind me. As I argued at the outset, the rationalist-adjacent spaces are preoccupied with value-maximisation. Their conceit is that the world could be so much better than most of humanity is able to imagine. Works in Progress, for example, calls itself “a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world.” But the self-starvation of women in developed countries is one of the most senseless and stupid curtailments of human value we tolerate – and the notion that a woman should reshape her body to achieve self-actualisation and a stable relationship is about as old and tired an idea as exists. I wonder if any of the people breathlessly endorsing the essay have ever attempted it (Aria claims that weight control is a “hobby” of hers. I don’t wish to question her Lived Experience, so if this is true, I feel very confident in calling her an exception to the rule). These lost utils don’t come from sacrificing the momentary pleasure of a sweet treat or a roast dinner. They come from the fact that not eating to satiation is, in my experience, an exercise in wishing away time. Suddenly your life’s purpose is to achieve another day, another week, another month, in an energy deficit. An afternoon spent napping so that you wake up right when it’s an acceptable time to eat dinner feels like time well spent. Your world will become unavoidably and tragically small. You will probably fail at achieving your goal anyway. Innumerable women in the most materially-abundant societies in history are having this experience, at this very moment, for no good reason at all – and this has been true for decades. This is not the worst way in which I have ever suffered, but it is certainly the most needless¹.

A common defence of Aria’s essay and ones like it is “well, we’re just telling the truth. There is empirical evidence to suggest that this is what men find most attractive. Women can take or leave this advice. We’re telling them how to optimise for the particular goal of being maximally attractive to men, but people can make whatever tradeoffs they like”. Firstly, I don’t want to argue about the empirical evidence suggesting that adhering to the standards described in the essay will, in fact, maximise a woman’s attractiveness. This could very well be true, but this is a separate claim to Aria’s advice being reasonable or ethical to disseminate. We should not terminally value truth-telling. Second, it is a very rat-coded, and I think deeply inaccurate, view of human psychology that we can simply accept or reject inputs to our minds at will. I could rationally think that stringent beauty standards are not worth my effort to attain, but still absorb such standards via osmosis simply by existing in a world where everyone keeps pedestalising them.

But to return to my central thesis, which is the deep inconsistency of this kind of discourse with stated EA/ rationalist/ progress-y values: I really don’t think the moral calculus of espousing these beauty ideals checks out – even in a world where they perfectly match male preferences. Aria’s advice isn’t about getting laid or attracting the jealousy of other women or becoming a covergirl. It is about finding a husband. If followed, it would presumably result in a preponderance of marriages where the man’s attraction is contingent on his wife’s constant low-level discomfort. Another of Aria’s prescriptions is to “never get a breast reduction, no matter how big and painful they are”. Imagine being a woman whose marriage is dependent on maintaining the proportions of a “pin-up doll” while suffering 24/7 back pain. The man in question, who is supposedly his wife’s soulmate and life partner, not only endorses but requires this ordeal for his attraction to survive. I think this is incoherent. I am not even sure if such relationships can authentically exist, let alone be net-positive for anyone involved. I’d challenge anyone to argue that a world populated with marriages like these is a better one.

What I love about EA and progress-type ideologies is their sincere search for the peaks and troughs of human experience, and their efforts to avoid the moral red herrings that can leave tremendous value on the table or even perpetuate tremendous harm. This is why I was so frustrated by seeing our community saturated with discourse about the uncompromising pursuit of aesthetic beauty, which looks to me like one of the oldest red herrings in the book. In our stubborn efforts to say true-but-unpalatable things (which, by the way, are often presented as if they are original or taboo insights despite actually repackaging the same tired ideas that have dominated our culture since time immemorial), we risk making the world straightforwardly worse.

I promised this wouldn’t be an Aria hit-piece, but Get Sexier is such a perfect epitome of all my gripes here that I don’t feel the need to analyse any other cultural artefacts as deeply. Still, I’ll broaden this thesis out further. It’s very hard to live up to purported value that transcends the pettiness of our inherited scripts to really inhabit the true Hugeness and Radicalism and Weirdness of everything. People in the rationalist and adjacent communities, despite claiming to at least attempt this, fail repeatedly and egregiously. In the name of radical truth-seeking, they have been known to discuss the differences in IQ between demographic groups, despite some believing in the imminent arrival of a superintelligence that will dwarf our collective IQ anyway. They hand-wring about the falling birth rates in the face of transformative technologies that will either ensure we are the last generation of humans or provide technological solutions to all of the problems posed by an ageing population. They cannot extricate themselves from their own parochialism. They bite off far more than they can chew.

One might ask why this matters. Shouldn’t people be able to indulge their unfashionable convictions on the way to ensuring a positive transition into our post-superintelligence future or other such radically transformed world? Can’t people write about whatever the hell they want? Well of course they can. I’m not in the business of litigating what people ought or ought not to say. But at least one downside to this reflexive contrarianism is that it is likely making our community unnecessarily aversive to newcomers who are otherwise onboard with our Overton-Window-defying efforts to make the world a better place. I consider myself a “normie” who transitioned into AI safety because I am convinced by the arguments for catastrophic risk, and because I have the cognitive capacity to embrace all the attendant weirdness required to imagine strange and unfamiliar futures, both dystopian and utopian. But I find myself frequently repelled by the package of other ideals it feels like I am inheriting through my membership of this community. I feel alienated by a Twitter feed populated with AI risk arguments that are interspersed with assertions that I ought to starve myself to reach peak attractiveness, or that falling birth rates are my responsibility to fix by rearranging my thirties around childbearing. I can only imagine how repellent this cluster of ideas might be to others.

Maybe this all sounds a bit woke-coded and pearl-clutchy. This isn’t just an appeal to the effect of “Hey guys, can’t we all be a little more sensitive, because some of us might have a history of food issues or be triggered by discussions of race or have feminist convictions that you’re flagrantly disrespecting!!”. I don’t necessarily think such an appeal would be unreasonable, but my point is more that if we really embodied our stated values, I think we’d consider entertaining ideas of the flavour I’ve criticised here patently ridiculous. I’m still here, three years on, because I’m convinced we can think bigger – I’d just love it if we proved it more often.

I’ll end this blog with a plea that anyone reading it eats more cake.

1. I’m not saying people should never lose weight for aesthetic reasons or to be more attractive, and I’d be lying if I said I never pursue this. I’m taking issue with the extremity of Aria’s advice that women “starve” themselves.