In Slime Mold Time Mold's half-potato diet community trial, participants have to either:
consume about 50% of their diet as potatoes
or, eat at least one meal a day that is entirely potatoes
or, eat "potatoes by default"
for at least 4 weeks.
This is a little vague, so to be clear, the hypothesis here is that people asked to choose any one of these options (and to switch between those options if and when they want to) will, in some cases, lose a statistically-significant amount of weight over the (variable) period of the study, and the null hypothesis is that they won't. The "in some cases" qualifier allows for a situation in which some people don't get benefit from the approach, due to medical, lifestyle, genetic, willpower or unknown factors, or simply due to not liking the taste of potatoes.
If, as they did with the full potato diet community trial, Slime Mold Time Mold publish multiple output measures - i.e. multiple interpretations of the same question - I will select whichever is most favourable to them, that is still consistent with the letter and spirit of this market. If their results after 4 weeks are negative or inconclusive, I will wait for longer-term results to see if they are better. Either way, I will leave some time before resolving, to allow the conclusions of their study to be challenged.
(As a subject in the study, I will not bet in this market.)
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I don't understand why this would resolve as no? The analysis says:
> People lost 1.7 lbs on average over these four weeks, and that loss is significantly different from zero, t(37) = 2.70, p = .010. Another way of putting this is that 27 out of 38 people (71%) lost at least some weight.
The overall tone is negative because the effect size is very small, but this seems to meet the criteria for this YES resolution for this market?
FWIW this is about the result I expected - my prior is basically that basically any non-trivial dietary changes intended to reduce weight probably work, a little bit, in the short term, but not so much in the long term.
