[yuy910616]

Tangentially, I wonder how people mentally model "too-good-to-be-true"?

"Everything is a tradeoff" is almost a core belief for me, but in the same time, in technology, the "too-good-to-be-true" events does turn out to be real every once a while (I'm using technology here as a general concept).

I do understand GLP-1 does have some downsides, like cost, or in my own experience, nausea. But the tradeoff seems negligible compare to the upside. Part of me feels like that there is some hidden trade-off somewhere that we're not discovering, but part of me also wonders if it's a once in while technology jump, where it is just better.

Anyway, I guess I'm just a bit wary to throw away the "everything is a tradeoff" mental model that has worked quite well for me.

[malfist]

Would you also categorize antibiotics as too good to be true because the trade offs are relatively minor?

[dopylitty]

Antibiotic tradeoffs are enormous. They can completely and permanently ruin your microbiome.

Giving them to children has been linked to many conditions such as obesity, allergies, and asthma [0]. They have saved countless lives from infections but their use and overuse has undoubtedly contributed to significant and widespread health problems.

0: https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/42/4/489/5045017

[punkybr3wster]

That’s a bit of a straw man. While the benefits of antibiotics are certainly untold millions of lives saved, we’re only now understanding their long term impacts on our gut biome. Let alone their overuse in factory farms.

There are considerable numbers of people who have severe complications with antibiotics, and their overuse over time has left us in a position where the functional pools of antibiotics keeps getting smaller and smaller and the pool of superbugs gets more and more virulent.

Who knows the long term ramifications of this new class of weight loss drugs. This smells to me like the Prozac craze in the 90s when everyone was on it or giving it to their kids. Or the olestra boom until everyone was literally crapping their pants.

Or tangentially, the over proscribing of novel opioids. Look what that has wrought in our society.

Could this new class of drugs be helpful, absolutely. Do we know the long term issues, nope. I think there are people who can use this therapeutically and there are others who use it as a quick fix because they have no self control. In a lot of ways it also feels a little ironic to look at fiction like the food indulgent scenes of “Hunger Games” and South Park and see that happening for real.

[edanm]

> "Everything is a tradeoff" is almost a core belief for me, but in the same time, in technology, the "too-good-to-be-true" events does turn out to be real every once a while (I'm using technology here as a general concept).

Every once in a while? Our lives are better in so many tangible ways than they were even 100, 200 years ago.

Just for a start - instead of 50% of children dying before the age of 5, we're down to tiny fractions of a percentage.

[kilotaras]

> "Everything is a tradeoff"

But sometimes things we're trading off are less relevant and so the equilibrium changes e.g. losing weigh is hard, because humans evolved in low-calorie environment and being able to stock fat was important.