Why? They know it's wheat. Why should they be able to track arbitrary characteristics of the wheat? It's like asking them to track which wheat is grown on Tuesdays, or which wheat is grown by Jews. Their system wouldn't be set up for it.

Supermarkets where I come from do check characteristics of ingridients like pesticide content. They generally care about providing quality products.

If a supermarket wouldn't do quality management of their suppliers I would consider that bad.

Containing peas is a subcase of a general requirement "list all ingredients". It certainly implies that consumers do and should care about the ingredients.

Information provision is not about whether people should care about it but whether they do. In this case plenty of people do care about.

But anyway, that's fighting the hypothetical.

I don't see the point of why pointing out that a given example doesn't work is bad. Don't make fictional examples that wouldn't work in reality in the first place, if you want to train reality based reflexes.

Being in touch with reality is a lot more valuable than being in touch with hypotheticals.

for instance "this produce comes from a company whose owner has had an abortion".

Let's say a business owner asks prospective employees whether they had an abortion and refuses to hire people who had. Do you think that courts would allow that? No, they wouldn't. They would likely argue that it's a protected characteristic.

As I said above, I don't think information about categories that belong to protected characteristics should be required.

But even if you would actually engage with what I'm saying and pick a characteristic of the grower that isn't a protected characteristic, that's not about the ingridients of the food. GMO's do contain different proteins that otherwise wouldn't be in the product.

The compliance costs include the costs of tracking the wheat through the processing chain just in case it's using GMO wheat Monday and non-GMO wheat Tuesday.

I think businesses that sell food products should already track in detail what kind of wheat their suppliers provide.

because they would assume that labels are only for things the consumer is supposed to care about .

No. If I look at the ingridients list of the Thai-Soap it tells me that it contains peas, but it's not something I'm "supposed to care about". I'm not buying Thai-Soap based on whether or not they contain pea's and the obligation to provide that information doesn't imply that the government thinks I should care about it.

Would you favor the idea of putting labels on food stating whether it has any ingredients that were picked by illegal immigrants?

That's like the some US states requiring taxes for illegal drug sales. I don't think that trying to enforce labeling is the most straightforward way to deal with something that's illegal.

There are issues with compliance costs that make it hard to force disclosure of all information. The compliance costs fo writing GMO wheat instead of wheat on a ingridient box are little.

I would be happy if the companies would have a choice to put up a scan code that provides all relevant information in exchange for not having to write things on the label.

I'm theorizing that the VCs believed that the fact that the big companies did not make any such product proved there was no profitable demand for it, because the market worked.

That doesn't look like a viable hypothesis because if it were true, such people would not be VCs at all.

Generally speaking, you seem to expect perfection in business agents. Clearly, this is not so in reality. "The market" is not each individual agent, it is the sum of them all. Moreover, the market works by self-correcting which implies that there are a LOT OF MISTAKES being made all the time. The market is successful because it provides negative feedback to those who make mistakes, so on the average it does what it does quite well, but it would be an error to think that each individual decision is optimal.

The market failure is that competition has not driven the cost down close to the cost of production.

Nope. Reality is primary, theories are secondary. In real life the markets drive the price down to the cost of production only occasionally. If your theory says they should, it's the theory that needs to be adjusted.

"Market failure" in this case means competition has not driven the price down to a socially-optimal level.

If I check out your own source by going to that link, Amazon provides a link to Medique 10133 Alcalak Sugar Free Tablets, 100-Pack, for $10.23. Furthermore, this seller easily found with Google has the same"$30 bottle" available for $4.29.

I think the cup holders in cars argument was refuted by this comment to your original post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2a/the_cupholder_paradox/8nre

And more generally and perhaps more importantly, this one: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2a/the_cupholder_paradox/8nsg

No good arguments, or the weight of the arguments for X are greater than the weight of the arguments against X?

Say you are a strong believer and advocate for the Silicon Valley startup tech culture, but you want to be able to pass an Ideological Turing Test to show that you are not irrational or biased. In other words, you need to write some essays along the lines of "Startups are Dumb" or "Why You Should Stay at Your Big Company Job". What kind of arguments would you use?

It's easy to talk now about it, harder if you actually lived in Germany at that time and had to really fear the SS.

Indeed. I remember an IT project manager telling me the German people should have stood up to Hitler and stopped him. I pointed out that she was not even prepared to tell her manager the truth about the state of her project (running later than advertised of course).

All she had at stake was the size of her end of year bonus.

I remember reading about a man who voted against Hitler in the referendum to make him dictator. He was severely beaten, his house was burned down, and he wife and daughter were gang-raped.

GiveWell should have book/movie/podcast/video game awards (like the Hugo award) open to voting for anyone who has given money through GiveWell in the past year.