They seem to have similar average BMI and the Swiss seem to have an even lower obesity rate. 

Belgium seems lower obesity rates than France but slightly higher average BMI.

Andorra has lower obesity rates but a significantly higher average BMI.

The UK, Spain and Germany are doing worse than France. 

A bit of chatting with Gemini suggests what Belgium, France and the Swiss share is a strong market culture so food is more fresh.

Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available. 

If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance. 

But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?

To me, the colloidal silver situation feels strange. It seems that it was used as an antibiotic in the past but we don't have good studies that tell us whether or not it works as an antibiotic. If there would be good evidence that it doesn't work it would likely be on the Wikipedia page.

Health authorities warn about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and how important it supposedly is to have new antibiotics that work through different mechanisms. At the same time, they don't fund the studies to see whether colloidal silver works as an antibiotic, probably out of some combination of it not being patentable and otherwise being a low-status idea.

For most practical purposes, if I need an antibiotic I would rather use one with a well-understood risk profile, so using colloidal silver as a home treatment seems a bad idea.

In what sense did the BSL levels failed consistently or catastrophically?

Even if you think COVID-19 is a lab leak, the BSL levels would have suggested that the BSL 2 that Wuhan used for their Coronavirus gain-of-function research is not enough. 

It seems like the US military would be the ideal institution to study this. They could effectively control the diets of soldiers, where diet control is usually a problem for most studies.

Historically, the US military is also quite willing to fund research theses that mainstream academia despises like NLP's Fast Phobia cure helping soldiers with PTSD. 

In Germany, we are talking about building pipelines for hydrogen transport. Would those hydrogen tubes dual use so that you can transport a lot of hydrogen with them as well?

You can make an argument that current dating apps aren't metaverse-based but that doesn't mean that this is an inherent feature of dating apps. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/match-group-details-plans-for-a-dating-metaverse-tinders-virtual-goods-based-economy/ sounds to me like something everyone would call metaverse.

Cryptopeople never succeeded in convincing a general population that owning expensive NFT is a positive signal. It was maybe perceived as a positive signal for a few nerds but saying "I payed 100k for an NFT" at a date was for most women more a signal for bad judgement than a positive signal.

They also lacked a way to get the NFT displayed automatically in social interactions, the way a virtual good in a dating app can be displayed. 

Virtual worlds make it easy to display virtual goods during social interactions. If the social interactions within the virtal world are high stakes then users are okay with paying more to increase their status in the virtual world.

I'm not 100 percent sure but I think I heard about the Chinese example from the early days of WeChat and it was the first business model that really worked for them.

In the Chinese example, signaling wealth was a very useful signal and thus that worked in a straightforward way.

If you on the other hand, have a virtual LessWrong conference (and currently such a thing is even planned) then I don't primarily care about the wealth of people I'm speaking with. If some users on the other hand had a badge that they could have only brought if they were at a CFAR workshop, I might be inclined to be more likely to chat with people who have the CFAR badge.

At a virtual EA global conference, EA charities could sell virtual goods that participants could then wear. I would expect that it would be a positive status signal at a virtual EA global conference if someone wears a virtual good that they brought for 100,000 dollar from AMF. People at EA global are th Bere for professional networking and the fact that someone essentially donated that money to AMF is a sign that they are a valuable person to network with.

Different virtual world events will have different qualities that are worthy to signal and you are going to have similar dynamics as meatspace fashion being an "insider" can mean that you know how to signal to other "insiders" that you are an insider by chosing the virtual goods you wear.

The kind of people who put Black Lives Matter on their twitter profile, might buy a Black Lives Matter virtual T-Shirt that's sold by the Black Lives Matter foundation. Then you also have marketing agencies that will pay influencers to wear certain virtual goods and in some scenarios that will make it a good social signal to wear the current goods that the influencers wear. It's all about how much signaling matters within the virtual world. 

A lot of the reason why Second Life isn't a big part of the economy is that Second Life doesn't matter in general. It has few users and little social significance.

In China you had dating apps where people could signal their wealth by buying the most expensive virtual good available. The number I found via google is USD 67.5 billion as the global virtual goods market in 2021.

People pay a lot of money for luxury fashion items. Whether those have a physical representation isn't the main point.

I think a (slightly cartoony) real life example is servants. Rich people today are richer than rich people in Victorian times, but fewer rich people today (in developed countries) can afford to have servants.

It's not really a question of developed countries. Singapore is a developed country and it's much cheaper to hire servants over there. 

Western ideas of equality and migration policy are what's making servants more expensive.

It seems like the technology you would want is one where you can get one Adderal box immediately but not all Adderal boxes that the store has at the premises.

Essentially, a big vending machine that might have 10 minutes to unlock to restock the vending machine but that can only give up one Adderal box per five minutes in its vending machine mode.

Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting

That sounds like the technique might encourage customers to buy non-prescription medication in the pharmacy along with the prescription medicine they want to buy.