Yeah i don’t take calorie counting all that serious, might be useful to people who plan their meals more closely but i can’t be bothered. Still it’d be interesting to see that data while walking around
So…I’m not pigging out, I’m just doing my part to fight gender stereotypes?
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I disagree with every statement made against the cupcake estimate.
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I would think the obvious answer would be to program in a toggle from the outset, but yeah, marketing folks rarely consider who or what their enticement grenades impact, only that they make an impact. I mean, how hard is it to code in a toggle?
Yup.
Related: myself and a few colleagues once threatened to strike because of a class we were supposed to teach, which involved an assignment using self-conditioning via food reward and denial.
University psych students tend to be (a) disproportionately female, and (b) disproportionately prone to mental illness. In any given psych class, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ve got at least one person with an eating disorder of some sort.
Once we forced the supervising professor to change the rewards to something that wasn’t food-related, the class went ahead.
As to why this is such a sensitive thing: clinical psychs who specialise in eating disorders tend to talk about a “rule of three”. By that, they mean that roughly 1/3rd of their patients recover, 1/3rd survive but remain chronically ill for the rest of their lives, and 1/3rd die.
But are those African millibiscuits or European ones?
OK. I’ll oblige.
I never eat cupcakes. Does it mean I cannot walk? 
You smear cupcakes all over your face?
If this isn’t the icing on someone’s cup of cake, I don’t know.
BTW, I take your comment seriously, @Wanderfound, but I still don’t find it bewildering that someone with an eating disorder would be affected. Maybe I’m not empathic enough. But I simply can’t get my head around it.
But then, I prefer muffins. I simply don’t like the icings, and actually don’t know anyone who does except my friends form the US. Weird.
I am afraid i have been sort of lazy about fighting gender stereotypes.
This will stop now!
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Not being a teacher or involved in psych i don’t know, but this doesn’t sound ethical to begin with. But i’m glad you guys fought back against such a thing.
To be honest i much more prefer muffins as well, i have a big dislike for icings. And i grew up outside of the US so that’s likely it as you mention. I like cakes/deserts that have fudge or something like that but if its too sweet i just scoop it off.
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It was the assignment for the first specialised behaviourism subject, introducing them to operant conditioning techniques.
In previous years, we’d had them train rats to lever-press in return for food rewards (usually apple juice or beer). But we stopped doing that for logistical and ethical reasons, and this was the Professor’s proposed replacement.
So it was unethical to do the experiment on rats so he proposed doing it on people instead? I’m about to have a BF
The ethical issue with the rats had nothing to do with the experiment itself. Training a critter to press a lever in return for a tasty snack doesn’t present much of an issue outside of full-throttle animal liberation circles.
There’s a continuous and increasing push to minimise the number of animals used in laboratories. Because of this, the rats we used for the undergrad class were usually “recycled” animals that had already participated in other experiments, and were otherwise due to be culled.
However, that meant that these rats had complicated histories, which made them even more difficult to train than usual [1]. Particularly when that training is done by semi-skilled undergrads in a room full of other semi-skilled undergrads, most of whom are making all sorts of noise.
So, eventually we dropped the undergrad rat class. That didn’t actually do anything to reduce the number of animals used, and it was a shame to lose the chance to give students realistic hands-on experience, but it reduced some logistical hassles and got the ethics board off our backs for a bit [2].
.
[1] Which was actually kinda useful from a pedagogical PoV. Part of the purpose of that class was to deliver the message that “this laboratory behaviourism stuff is nowhere near as simple and straightforwards as the textbooks make it look”. Cadaver anatomy classes are based in similar reasoning; real bodies are nowhere near as consistent and easy to navigate as the anatomy books would have you think.
[2] I take experimental ethics and animal welfare very seriously. However, University ethics boards appear to be almost entirely populated by bureaucratic fools who have no understanding of what they are regulating. This leads researchers to treat the ethics process as an obstacle to be surmounted rather than a useful process to participate in. Reform is required.
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It’s Ellen von Unwerth for Italian Vogue, according to this blog.
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YESSS! Added to my Instagram.
But now I’m realizing that commission might be way beyond my means. I hope prints are available.
