I was thinking of iatrogenic transmissions, yeah (and prions have been a long term psychological fear of mine, too...so I perhaps crawled too much publicly available information about prions to be a normal person)

I wonder if there are any instances of FFI transmitted through the iatrogenic pathway, and whether it is possible to be distinguished from the typical CJD, and whether iatrogenic prions could become a significant issue for healthcare (more instances of prion diseases due to aging population could possibly mean more contaminated medical equipments, and the possible popularisation of brain-computer interface might give us some problems too) given the difficulty of sterilising prions.

Maybe the sample size is too small for us to know.

How much do we know about the presence of prion diseases in other animals we frequently consume? 

A quick search shows that even fish have some variant of the prion protein and so perhaps all vertebrates pose a theoretical risk of being the carrier of a prion disease, although the species barrier will likely be too high for prions of non-mammal origin. 

I'm quite concerned about pigs.

Apparently pigs are considered to be prion resistant as no naturally occurring prion diseases among pigs have been identified, but it is possible to infect them with some prion strains under laboratory conditions.

A prion disease in pigs could be very bad for two reasons:

1: Pigs are often fed with leftover food from human consumption, this can become a potent vector of prion diseases between pigs.

2: Pork brain, spine, tongue, etc are frequently consumed in some parts of the world, this would make some humans exposed to a large amount of prion protein, if such an illness spreads between pigs.

Fortunately, nothing of this sort happened with pigs yet, and we have been consuming pork brain (and feeding pigs with leftover food) for centuries without known issues (but I doubt pre-modern people would've noticed the pattern, since the incubation period can be very long) so maybe pigs are resistant (enough) to prions that pork is very safe.

"Infectious" means "transmissible between people". As the name suggests, fatal familial insomnia is a genetic condition. (FFI and the others listed are also prion diseases - the prion just emerges on its own without a source prion and no part of the disease is contagious. This is an interesting trait of prions that could not happen with, say, a disease caused by a virus.)

Can someone catch FFI from coming into contact with the neural tissues of a patient with FFI? 

I suspect it's possible that FFI genes cause the patient's body to create prions, but can those prions lead to illness in a person without the FFI gene? If yes, then FFI would still be "infectious"  in some sense, I suppose.

I like your last point a lot, does it mean that governments/institutions are more interested in protecting the systems they are in than their constituents? It indeed seems possible and can explain this situation.

I still wonder if such thing happens on an individual level as well, which can help shed some light.

My assumption is that promises are "vague", playing $99 or $100 both fulfil the promise of giving a high claim close to $100, for which there is no incentive to break.

I think the vagueness stops the race to the bottom in TD, compared to the dollar auction in which every bid can be outmatched by a tiny step without risking going overboard immediately.

I do think I overcomplicated the matter to avoid modifying the payoff matrix.

"breaking a promise" or "keeping a promise" has no intrinsic utilities here.

What I state is that under this formulation, if the other player believes your promise and plays the best response to your promise, your best response is to keep the promise.

" in this case, "trust" is equivalent to changing the payout structure to include points for self-image and social cohesion "

I guess I'm just trying to model trust in TD without changing the payoff matrix. The payoff matrix of the "vague" TD works in promoting trust--a player has no incentive breaking a promise.

This is true. The issue is that the Nash Equilibrium formulation of TD predicts that everyone else will bid $2, which is counter-intuitive and does not confirm empirical findings.

I'm trying to convince myself that the NE formulation in TD is not entirely rational.

If Alice claims close to $100 (say, $80), Bob gets a higher payoff claiming $100 (getting $78) instead of claiming $2 (getting $4).

I would assume Kelvin users to outnumber Fahrenheit users on LW.