For me eating alone is a special privilege of being an adult that I enjoy sometimes and has its benefits. Regular eating alone might actually make me a healthier eater in the long run.
I recommend both eating alone and also eating with company of course but pls. don't pity yourself. If you do then it will be easy for others to think there's something to pity about you.
I don't think it's a straw man. Just maybe the closest to what you're thinking is a slippery slope, but it didn't seem like the parent was trying to refute the author's argument.
The author does deal with the concern:
"I recognize that NASA cannot push a system to launch more frequently than it is capable of, because this could mean overrunning the budget or, worse, cutting corners on safety. Instead, future systems should be designed so that they can be rapidly prepared for launching by small teams.
This would not only increase NASA’s ability to send up innovative payloads but also make launching systems more reliable. After all, the more a rocket is flown, the better it can be understood and the safer it becomes. Frequent launchings would also reduce costs per flight in the long run."
The controlling of people's fear in your usage is also known as manipulation. You're right that it works quite well since it takes advantage of the emotion parts of our psyche that are more fully evolved in us than the newer rational thinking parts.
In this case, how do you know the act isn't phony? If you know that person is sometimes phony, you'll be left wondering whether anything they do for you is insincere, including buying lunch. I couldn't accept it if I smell something off about their intentions.
"And, like its prequel, Spent’s almost monomaniacal focus on sexual selection to the exclusion of other evolutionary processes is its greatest weakness."
I almost always intuit this when reading layman's books on evolutionary psychology. As if the work tries to reduce too much stuff down to sexual selection.
Perhaps it's something it shares with the social sciences in general. I mean, whatever it is that really draws me in but ends up disappointing me with a hint of a dirty feeling.
You seem defensive. Don't you believe it's better to be physically fit and energetic than not, or do you argue that fitness and health is truly irrelevant to your role as an employee?
You could suppose that there is an unfair cognitive bias at work (see /beauty premium/) which could favor one candidate over the other. But think about how an interviewer would consider the physically fit you versus the physically unfit you. This is the real point, not how you compare to someone else.
I recommend both eating alone and also eating with company of course but pls. don't pity yourself. If you do then it will be easy for others to think there's something to pity about you.