I think this market does a good job of demonstrating the pitfalls of futarchy. By making this market I demonstrate that I'm the type to research and plan things out before doing them, which means that in the universe where I do this, I'm already aware of what's going to happen and have calculated that I likely won't regret it. This market should probably be <30%.

What this market appears to be measuring is "how bad is alpha-gal syndrome", and I suspect that's how most people are betting. But what it's actually measuring is "how reckless is Isaac", totally independent of the badness of the disease.

cc @bens relating to previous discussion.

@IsaacKing This is a genuinely new thought to me and I might not express myself well here.

I think that the market is currently quantifying the difference between your imagination of living with a life-altering allergy and the reality of living with a life-altering allergy.

There are some things that can’t be comprehended unless you have done them, and I think this might qualify.

What the fuck don’t do this.

No offense but please just be normal and follow any vegan plan like Veganuary or by PETA or howdoigovegan or any resource list or

Probably you can get used to a lot more foods than you think if you go at it slowly

Or just take as many necessary supplements I guess

@Lilemont Agreed, but I love how unhinged this is.

I'm not currently veg(etari)an, but one of my vegan exes was adamant that they could taste a nasty oil-slick "cow udder" taste in all milk products and one day it just clicked in my head and it's one of those things that's very hard to untaste. Probably the easiest way to ditch cheese imo.

Can you pre-register that if it kills you, that counts as you regretting it, so that a mod can resolve in the future?

@Nick6d8e lol 💯

@Nick6d8e Oh yeah that's fair

You have to have some real reason instead of an external reason (e.g. animal suffering, climate change).

Instead of infecting yourself with a disease (only negative consequences), it took me like 5.5 years to transition from lactovegan to vegan since milk was unavoidable for that long, but for me veganism was the logical conclusion of my existing beliefs:

1. I don’t eat cows (from birth) =>

2. I don’t eat mammals (by the time I was 8 or so) =>

3. I don’t eat gelatin/large animals, have an aversion to honey (bee vomit)=>

4. I don’t eat chicken/seafood/eggs (dislike idea of eating blood/muscles) =>

5. minimize cheese consumption (avoiding rennet), aversion to mushrooms (maybe they eat animals)=>

6. avoid confectioners glaze, shellac, DATEM, glycerin, mono/diglycerides/etc. since they come from animals

7. vegan (just the logical conclusion of the belief that eating anything that’s closely related to you is bad and cow's milk is essentially blood/pus that it needs to pasteurized) since it would be inconsistent to avoid all those animal products and have an exception for milk=>

8. the final step is probably avoiding fungus and becoming truly plant based and maybe even algae/seaweed cause the ocean's too fishy but then it’s more about ideological purity than feasiblility since most plant foods are in some form contaminated (either due to processing or just realities of farming / how prevalent small life is)

Just go vegan it’s not that hard, but yeah it’s definitely a multi step process where you need to develop an increasingly stronger aversion to ingesting dead animal cells than whatever “flavor” it provides.

Maybe start with the aversion to cannibalism and expand that to primates and then rats and then mammals (ungulates, cats, dogs) then invertebrates (if you find octopus or eating bugs disgusting) and so on (see https://www.onezoom.org or https://timetree.org to find the MRCA between humans and [insert animal you have an aversion to ingesting orally] and then ponder whether all animals that descended from MRCA are deserving/safe/clean/[insert reason] enough of being eaten by you)

until you realize the animal kingdom is too disease ridden/unsafe to eat due to food poisoning and other risks (even if that isn’t technically true due to advancements in food safety, developing the aversion is what keeps you vegan instead of it being a chore/fad diet that’s dependent on external motivation (selflessness for animals/the environment) and suppressing an internal desire to eat animals (selfish desire for taste)). The best way to stop a selfish desire is to have a counteracting one (in my case, it’s the (potentially overstated) belief that all animals are disgusting/disease ridden which overrides the desire to eat food that tastes good)

Anyways that’s just what it took for me to stop wanting to eat cheese/milk chocolate/other desserts.

TL;DR have some rational basis for avoiding X products that becomes ingrained into your belief system (similar to culture/religion)

—

I also just heard about alpha-gal last week. Personally, I’ve never been convinced by the argument that shrimp suffering is the biggest moral sin that humans do an we should spend millions (still killing them, but “humanely”). I guess that’s just a part of the zeitgeist of Bay Area/EA / whatever ideology is disproportionately held by users of Manifold.

It’s not like a disagree that animal suffering is bad, but I just don’t find it a convincing enough argument to change human behavior since speciesism is rational for humans to care most about

1. Themselves

2. Family/Friends

3. Their communities

4. Humanity as a whole

5. Primates/Mammals/Intelligent Animals

6. All Animals (weighted by capacity for consciousness/sentience)

7. All living things (on earth)

8. Alien life / Machine Life (sci-fi delusions imo) - for its own sake rather than for its capacity to help humanity

9. Something arbitrary like entropy in the universe

   —-

   all that to say, infecting your self with a tick bite / disease is sacrificing 1 for 6 which is definitely something you should regret (from my perspective), but I don’t know why people truly believe in EA (I guess it’s an alternative to religions that serve humans which people realized can be flawed, so they wanted something more objective like minimizing suffering)

TimeTree :: The Timescale of Life

@ChinmayTheMathGuy I think veganism is on net good for the world so I don't want to try to talk you out of it, but this really reads like debilitating OCD, in fact it's indistinguishable to me from essays about OCD, it might be good for you to look into evaluation.

@ChinmayTheMathGuy It definitely seems like a some of your choices are more based on subjective decisions than logic or whatever. This is not a bad thing! Maybe just consider that it is not a human universal to build up aversions to things in this way.

As an example, I cannot comprehend at all a desire to avoid eating fungi. They can eat animals, but plants also eat animals that have been previously digested and some just eat animals directly.
Also, avoiding algae and seaweed because the ocean is "too fishy" definitely goes further than ideological purity

This is part of what I'm confused about Futarchy. People are putting liquidity on the line for a hypothetical that may not resolve given the liquidity they put on the line. How do bettors get incentivised to bet given this contradiction?

@MarySmith I think a different implementation would probably address your concerns but people are degenerate gamblers.

just carry alpha-gal test strips or smt if there is too much research to do. You dont want to become allergic to cancer treatments and vaccines

Would eating Kosher solve your problem? Most animal products are not Kosher. Although you might still get fish gelatin

@AhronMaline Checking if the label says “kosher” is the same amount of effort as checking if the label says “vegan”, but it’s not actually guaranteed to actually be free from animal products if it’s kosher. Either way, if market creator can’t be bothered to check if labels say “vegan” they’re not going to be bothered to check if labels say “kosher”!

@JayDH the difficulty of veganism is that there are loads of products which are 'accidentally' vegan. So checking just to see if there's a vegan label or not would result in you being far far more restrictive than the diet necessitates

As someone with allergies, they suck and limit me. You have to be out of your mind to willingly induce more allergies on to yourself.

Not sure if your vegan diet extends to avoiding animal-derived vaccines, but if not you should make sure you have all of the ones you want before infecting yourself because gelatin-based vaccines cause problems if you have AG.

Mad vegan biologist to engineer a superspreader variant of this when?

Looks like there's a ~1.5% chance I'd also end up allergic to algae-derived products.

https://alphagalinformation.org/carrageenan/

...why would you want to do this? if the problem is that you have so little self-control that you'd eat meat without something to force you, then... idk, find a dominatrix? don't infect yourself with an incurable disease!

wait I accidentally bought NO instead of YES. you'll regret it. corrects error.

i misread it as will he actually infect himself with it. yeah this is not happening (would be pretty crazy imo), why trade on a market that'll N/A

@ZaneMiller I already successfully avoid the foods I want to avoid, the problem is that I don't have time to check every new item I encounter. This way I'd be notified without needing to do anything.

Plus, it provides a more socially-acceptable reason to refuse non-vegan items.

@IsaacKing if the People Who Determine Social Acceptability understood decision theory they'd call that a threat

@IsaacKing isn't researching new items way way way less of a hassle than getting allergic reactions?

@ZaneMiller Depends on how bad they are

@IsaacKing From my research it doesn't seem more socially acceptable than being vegan. Also, the allergic reactions are super delayed so waking up in the middle of the night and needing to go to the hospital just tells you that you ingested something with mammal product the day before.

@IsaacKing Just sin tax yourself with a little money every month to your preferred animal advocacy charity/ies