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!

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!