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I find the cultural relativity bit of this the most fascinating. I share your cultural context, and for most of my young life the personality preferences built into this culture felt like facts about the world. Agreeable people were just better, more likeable people, full stop.
After traveling a bit and reading about other cultures I've learned that's not the case, but I still find it fascinating to attempt to "try on" different values. I often need to make an effort to steelman different preferences, as my default (negative) response to cultures/people with different values is so automatic!
I will say though, that I now have a few Dutch friends, and I've grown to love and value their brutal honesty. Their vibe reminds me a lot of your description of French disagreeableness, but with lower emotionality which makes it a slightly smaller gap to bridge from my own culture. I wonder if more exposure to cultures that differ on a single dimension might make it easier to "try on" different values. 🤔
On the general point, as a recently-turned vegan (~1 yr), my spending is roughly the same. Money saved on not buying meat/milk/cheese was basically directly replaced by splurging on expensive stuff like avocados, cashews, faux-cheeses, and fancy salads. All of those are non-essential, but budget wasn't ever my primary motive in choosing foods.
The following thoughts are mostly in response to your last claim around market dynamics and the foods people choose.
A big part of the observed frequency of meat eating is explained by cultural inertia, esp. with the historical signaling function of meat-eating. For a long long time (and still in rural/poor places) owning animals was a primary store of wealth, and killing them to eat them was a very costly display of your fitness. That kind of signal can be culturally baked-in to various food traditions. Fancy restaurants still play this game, with most of the fanciest and most expensive foods being unusual preparations of hard to acquire or raise meat.
Another enormous factor here is subsidies (something like $40b annually in the US subsidize meat & dairy). Meat is sometimes cheaper or comparable in price to replacement vegan foods, but that's not a market outcome. Without those subsidies you'd see a bigger price differential.
It's also note-worthy that, proportionally, many meals with meat have mostly vegan ingredients. Things like steak are outliers, and many meals that contain meat aren't mostly meat.
This site doesn't exist anymore but the described functionality sounded great to me, so I'm building a thing that has the same functionality called Email Notebook.
I originally built it with gratitude journaling in mind, but pre-launch feedback from folks suggested that this tool would be useful for people that wanted to maintain some other kind of journal. There were also some folks that wanted e.g. short story prompts, so I architected this thing to (eventually) support a variety of prompt types. I'll try to make the homepage copy more clear!
There's a trade-off to be wary of here in trying to improve the list only by adding. Making it complete might also make it too long to actually get much use.
Can you optimize the list to keep the most valuable bits while also keeping it nice and short to increase the chance someone will go through the effort of answering the questions?
I noticed in your own use of the template, you only included a few of the sub-questions.
Not OP, but I read their comment about related problems as something more like this:
The system in question likely already has feedback or correction mechanisms that respond to other potential problems - asking about those mechanisms might reveal strengths of the system that can be easily adapted for your purposes. I'm not sure how easy it will be to find these, though, as the best-functioning ones might be invisible if they actually eliminate the other problems completely.
That might not be their intent, but I think it's also a useful consideration so even if my interpretation isn't matched I hope this comment is still useful :)
Is this substantially different from "cohousing"?
There are a huge number of existing projects like this, with a huge variation in the degree of "codependence" from one community to another. https://www.cohousing.org/directory/wpbdp_category/comm/
There are a few people in my social network experiencing "long covid" who were otherwise healthy and young. I think some of the unknowns there provide more than enough reason to take low-cost precautions like getting and wearing masks.
The long term symptoms aren't being talked about much because lots of people are still dying, but also because most of the infections are still really recent so we don't have much data on the long-term.
https://predictionbook.com/ has a skeleton that could be extended with prompts for belief updates. It already has prompts for adjudication of your previous predictions.
#20 reminded me of a bizarre experience where I attempted to pass a hacky-sack through the open windows of a car to a friend of mine, and it disappeared. We looked inside and outside the car for a full 15 minutes before realizing it had landed, balanced, on the narrow handle above the window. We never looked up!
In March-May I didn't interact with anyone in-person outside of my housemates, who were doing the same. One of us went shopping, about once a month, and we made an effort to get most things delivered. We quarantined the mail for 3 days before opening it, etc. We were pretty intense.
Now, we don't quarantine the mail at all (not really worried about surface transmission in general), and we do "go into work" but in our case it's a huge building and 90% of the time we're only in the same room as people in our germ pod. We also frequently host some small gatherings now but it's always outdoors, with some rare exceptions for like a 10-minute tour of our building for just a few people. We shop every 10 days or so, and have added a few "frivolous" trips to the hardware store.
We get burritos several times a week from our favorite food cart, but otherwise prepare all of our own meals now - we used to eat at restaurants 6 or 7 times a week, but indoor and patio dining are still a no-go for us.
I don't expect we'll revert to normal-ish behavior until we have a widespread vaccine, treatment improves significantly, or some other unforeseen turn of events...
Covid has turned out to be something like 5x less severe IFR than many of us were worried about in March, but it still seems bad enough to take a lot of precaution. My personal risk of dying is super low - I'm healthy and 31. However, I'm still being really cautious because of the not-well-understood long-term effects. SARS was really nasty on that front. What evidence convinced you that's not a big deal? If you don't already have evidence for that, then rationality isn't the reason you changed your behavior.
A third explanation for your behavior (besides monkeying and being rational) is that you and others grew tired of bearing the costs of lockdown at similar times. Lockdown got significantly harder for us, psychologically, after about 4 months - it wouldn't surprise me if there's a bell curve in the population for "lockdown tolerance".
Kids (and adults) are only lazy in the context of being made to do things they don't want to do. Kids who aren't subjected to school have lots of energy because they're exploring things they're excited about. Learning is playing for them.
Not OP, but I've done a bit of digging on this. Education research is really in a bit of a bind when it comes to looking at very-different models. The conventional model is so well established and broadly applied that it's really hard to get powerful studies of anything radically different from what you see in public schools today. Nearly all of the energy in Ed departments at various universities is focused there because that's where 95%+ of kids spend their time.
There are a handful of homeschooling studies that differentiate between "unschoolers" and more-conventional homeschooling approaches, but it's so niche that removing confounders is basically impossible.
You also run into the issue that making meaningful metrics for comparison is really challenging. Unschoolers are probably less likely to do well on a pre-calc test, but simultaneously more likely to earn an advanced math degree - the kids who have a proclivity for math get to dedicate a lot more time to it, while the others happily get by with perhaps only arithmetic and algebra.
I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that dramatically more freedom for school-aged kids is a great thing, but my conviction rests mostly on anecdote and personal experience spending lots of time in spaces that are run in a more self-directed way -- the research-backing just isn't there.
You just described Self-Directed Education.
Of particular interest, at least to me, are Peter Gray's optimizing conditions.
You mentioned a few of them: Ample time for play, access to tools. I think the others combine to outline a sort of litmus test for learning environments that conform to our natural ways of learning.
An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is "self-directed education". You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.
These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don't fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their needs.
I think your last point about lack of shared priors is a big one here. The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.
I'm going to try to come to this! Thanks for organizing/posting it.
I'd love to talk about the "What to do about the woo?" section of the paper reviewed recently here - but generally interested just to meet some folks.