For binary contract markets, when the midpoint between the bid and the ask is less than 0.1 or greater than 0.9, you need to have orders both above and under it to earn daily liquidity rewards. This creates an incentive to place bid orders even if you think the market cannot resolve positive.

The systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials also say that vegetables and fruits (and, generally, minimally processed whole plant foods) are good for reducing all-cause mortality and heart disease. It’s not just the cohort studies. (1, 2)

The large cohort studies are great because they have large sample sizes, look at people living in normal conditions, and look at the most important outcomes (all-cause mortality, heart disease) over long periods of time.

The randomized controlled trials are great because they address confounding, directly. They’re smaller, the controlled feeding studies usually look at people in unusual situations, like living in wards, and they look at shorter periods of time. But they address confounding, which is a huge benefit. Causal inference methods can in principle address confounding too, but that is more difficult and we are not at that level.

In practice, systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews of large cohort studies reach mostly the same conclusions. I would agree with not believing claims solely based on correlational studies, but that is not necessary since the randomized trials exist.

I do buy that people have various specific nutritional requirements, and that not eating vegetables and fruits means you risk having deficits in various places. The same is true of basically any exclusionary diet chosen for whatever reason, and especially true for e.g. vegans.

In practice, the only thing that seems to be an actual issue is fiber.

Saturated fat is a big issue! It increases your risk of heart disease, and that’s one of the most important causes of death. Nutrition researchers and physicians and cardiologists have been agreeing on this for 20–25 years and there are systematic reviews of controlled trials. Plant foods other than coconut just have a lot less saturated fat than non-plant foods.

Another big issue is the nutrient density (density relative to energy), particularly in underconsumed nutrients. The minimally processed whole plant foods are more dense overall, relative to energy, in the essential vitamins, minerals, omega−3 and omega−6, dietary fiber, relative to the dietary reference intakes. Food composition databases don’t account for bioavailability, but nevertheless. This is especially true for vegetables rather than nuts, fruits, and grain. If you think eggs have high nutrient density, try beating mushrooms, spinach, broccoli—the most nutrient-dense foods are plant foods. This means plant foods allow you to construct a better diet, even if it doesn’t happen automatically.

The NASEM’s adequate intake for fiber is higher than the recommendations of countries outside North America, yet the dose-response curves just show the health benefits for dietary fiber continuing to get higher until the values are high enough that there is no data to know whether they continue going up. Fiber consumption is low even relative to the lower recommendations.

Protein quality doesn’t seem to be an important concern. All plant foods contain all the essential amino acids. Yes, protein quality is lower overall than in typical animal foods, but that matters little because it’s trivial to meet the recommended dietary allowances for all the essential amino acids by eating beans or tofu, and the systematic reviews support plant protein having better health outcomes than animal protein (the systematic reviews tell you what actually matters, and apparently what actually matters is reducing TMAO levels and saturated fat).

The main actual issues with minimally processed whole plant foods are vitamins D and B12. D can technically be managed with UV-irradiated mushrooms, but they are expensive, so supplementing D is the more likely choice. B12 is not solvable. It is present (and bioavailable) in mushrooms but the quantities are small, so either supplementing B12 or adding seafood (likely the least bad animal food) is necessary.

These lines of argument do have the problem that our health decisions should be based primarily on systematic reviews of dietary patterns, rather than individual foods or individual nutrients, and they should be based on health outcomes and especially the most important ones (all-cause mortality, heart disease, cancer).

Government Food Labels Are Often Obvious Nonsense

Yes, you can get more detailed and accurate data using Cronometer, or foodb.ca for the missing nutrients (and way too much information). Thankfully, most minimally processed foods are covered, so the inaccurate FDA nutrition facts can be ignored. Classification systems like Nova and Nutri-Score also don’t seem worthwhile to me due to inaccuracy and oversimplification.

I do not see what there is in a continued existence of 60-hour weeks that cannot be explained by the relative strength of the income and substitution effects. This doesn’t need to tell us about a poverty equilibrium, it can just tell us about people’s preferences?

I agree with most of this, but as a hardline libertarian take on AI risk it is incomplete since it addresses only how to slow down AI capabilities. Another thing you may want a government to do is speed up alignment, for example through government funding of R&D for hopefully safer whole brain emulation. Having arbitration firms, private security companies, and so on enforce proof of insurance (with prediction markets and whichever other economic tools seem appropriate to determine how to set that up) answers how to slow down AI capabilities but doesn’t answer how to fund alignment.

One libertarian take on how to speed up alignment is that

(1) speeding up alignment / WBE is a regular public good / positive externality problem (I don’t personally see how you do value learning in a non-brute-force way without doing much of the work that is required for WBE anyway, so I just assume that “funding alignment” means “funding WBE”; this is a problem that can be solved with enough funding; if you don’t think alignment can be solved by raising enough money, no matter how much money and what the money can be spent on, then the rest of this isn’t applicable)

(2) there are a bunch of ways in which markets fund public goods (for example, many information goods are funded by bundling ads with them) and coordination problems involving positive or negative externalities or other market failures (all of which, if they can in principle be solved by a government by implementing some kind of legislation, can be seen as / converted into public goods problems, if nothing else the public goods problem of funding the operations of a firm that enforces exactly whatever such a legislation would say; so the only kind of market failure that truly needs to be addressed is public goods problems)

(3) ultimately, if none of the ways in which markets fund public goods works, it should always still be possible to fall back on Coasean bargaining or some variant on dominant assurance contracts, if transaction costs can be made low enough

(4) transaction costs in free markets will be lower due, among other reasons, to not having horridly inefficient state-run financial and court systems

(5) prediction markets and dominant assurance contracts and other fun economic technologies don’t, in free markets, have the status of being vaguely shady and perhaps illegal that they have in societies with states

(6) if transaction costs cannot be made low enough for the problem to be solved using free markets, it will not be solved using free markets

(7) in that case, it won’t, either, be solved by a government that makes decisions through, directly or indirectly, some kind of voting system, because for voters to vote for good governments that do good things like funding WBE R&D instead of bad things like funding wars is also an underfunded public good with positive externalities and the coordination problem faced by voters involves transaction costs that are just as great as those faced by potential contributors to a dominant assurance contract (or to a bundle of dominant assurance contracts), since the number of parties, amount of research and communication needed, and so on are just as great and usually greater, and this remains true no matter the kind of voting system used, whether that involves futarchy or range voting or quadratic voting or other attempts at solving relatively minor problems with voting; so using a democratic government to solve a public goods or externality problem is effectively just replacing a public goods or externality problem by another that is harder or equally hard to solve.

In other words: from a libertarian perspective, it makes really quite a lot of sense (without compromising your libertarian ideals even one iota) to look at the AI developers and say "fucking stop (you are taking far too much risk with everyone else's lives; this is a form of theft until and unless you can pay all the people whose lives you're risking, enough to offset the risk)".

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to say that, but not a lot of sense for a democratic government to be making that assessment and enforcing it (not that democratic governments that currently exist have any interest in doing that). Which I think is why you see some libertarians criticize calls for government-enforced AI slowdowns.

Either I am missing a point somewhere, or this probably doesn't work as well outside of textbook examples.

In the example, Frank was "blackmailed" into paying, because the builder knew that there were exactly 10 villagers, and knew that Frank needs the street paved. In real life, you often do not have this kind of knowledge.

Yes, you need to solve two problems (according to Tabarrok) to solve public goods provision, one of which is the free-rider problem. Dominant assurance contracts only solve the free-rider problem, but you need to also solve what he calls the information problem to know how to set the parameters of the contract.

Oh that’s fun, Wikipedia caused me to believe for so many years that “bad faith” means something different from what it means and I’m only learning that now.

Trillions of dollars in lost economic growth just seems like hyperbole. There’s some lost growth from stickiness and unemployment but of course the costs aren’t trillions of dollars.

They did in fact not go far enough. Japanese GNI per capita growth from 2013 to 2021 was 1.02%. The prescription would be something like 4%.

I disagree total working hours have decreased. The number of average weekly hours per person from 1950 to 2000 has been “roughly constant”. Work weeks are shorter but there are more people working.

As an example to explain why, I predict (with 80% probability) that there will be a five-year shortening in the median on the general AI question at some point in the next three years. And I also predict (with 85% probability) that there will be a five-year lengthening at some point in the next three years.

Both of these things have happened. The community prediction was June 28, 2036 at one time in July 2022, July 30, 2043 in September 2022 and is March 13, 2038 now. So there has been a five-year shortening and a five-year lengthening.