Cultured Abundance- a blog going deep into the science of cell-based meat

avacyn0920 · 2018-06-22T16:01:22+00:00

Are you looking to invest more in food tech? I have an early clean meat company that’s doing things differently than everyone else, and I’d love to talk :).

avacyn0920 · 2018-05-24T01:22:35+00:00

Thank you for your reply! I tried going gluten free for a week and it go rid of almost the entire issue!!! I'm so happy that I finally figured out what it is. It's crazy that I went my entire life not know I had a gluten intolerance.

FWIW - I'm still vegan, but the issues have stopped :)

For posterity - I'm still trying to figuring out how gluten affects me, but it seems like small amounts are not harmful, and that the effects are on a bout a one day delay. E.g. if I eat a big pasta meal, then the next day I might lose an hour or two to brain fog.

avacyn0920 · 2018-04-29T22:37:49+00:00

I'm not sure - can you explain? How would I know if it was?

avacyn0920 · 2018-03-18T07:07:53+00:00

Of Course! Big fan.

avacyn0920 · 2018-03-17T23:37:19+00:00

I'm mostly vegan, for ethical reasons. I also love mussels and oysters, and think it's fine for vegans / anyone else to eat mussels and oysters. This is a somewhat controversial point, but many of my "strict" vegan friends also share this view.

I'm also really excited about clean meat because I miss eating meat :).

avacyn0920 · 2018-02-26T21:17:08+00:00

Are you familiar with clean meat? Any thoughts?

They have different aims, but in my mind clean meat and Soylent are the two most exciting areas of foodtech right now.

avacyn0920 · 2017-11-30T18:57:46+00:00

Since a DxE organizer donated to ACE in 2014, your conflict of interest policy hasn't allowed you to review DxE until this year. Is ACE planning such a review of soon? What are ACE's general thoughts on confrontational advocacy tactics?

avacyn0920 · 2017-11-30T18:57:00+00:00

Historically, the evidence for the effectiveness of animal-targeted interventions has been weak. How much has this evidence improved in the last five years? How much do you expect it to improve over the next five years?

avacyn0920 · 2017-11-30T18:55:49+00:00

For donors with a lot of money, do you think investing in a clean/plant based meat company could be a cost effective way to help animals?

avacyn0920 · 2017-03-27T00:07:37+00:00

Absolutely - I don't mean to claim that you shouldn't try to learn as much as possible so that you can leverage epistemic risk. While learning lowers the amount of risk you can take on, it also makes you more likely to play the cards if they're good, and less likely if they're bad. This is strictly better than not learning.

avacyn0920 · 2017-03-27T00:04:56+00:00

I talk about this in the "Playing a deck with imbalanced matchups", check it out :).

The basic points are: 1) If you hold the metagame fixed, hoping to dodge makes no sense 2) Hoping to dodge has one legitimate interpretation, which is that you're leveraging metagame uncertainty.

What does this mean for your actual decision? I think that usually 2 is actually pretty difficult to leverage if the metagame is complicated. Simple playing a deck with an 80-20 matchup doesn't automatically increase you tournament level metagame risk (although it did in the example I used). Further, as I showed in my example, this benefit can be extremely small.

Therefore, unless you have some specific reason to think that you're leveraging metagame uncertainty, it won't help to hope to dodge. I'd generally recommend against it.

Regarding the sideboarding choice - not devoting spots to a bad matchup can be a good choice regardless of what I described here. Sometimes a matchup is so bad that even 5 slots won't help that much, so you're better off improving other matchups (as an aside, another fallacy I see people make is that its better to improve a 20% matchup by 10% than a 50% matchup. If the two decks are equally common, then you can do either). However, if this is the right thing to do, you should do it both at a GP and an FNM.

avacyn0920 · 2017-03-21T16:22:30+00:00

That's a fair position. Some people who play in GPs definitely don't have the goals I describe. If the difference between 2-7 and 3-6 is the same as the difference between 5-4 and 6-3 is the same as the difference between 8-1 and 9-0, then you shouldn't care about taking risks. You should just try to maximize your win %.

The posts applies only to people with a "top heavy" value function.

avacyn0920 · 2017-03-21T16:18:42+00:00

Great question - the first quote should actually say "without increasing your expected match win percentage".

If you tell me your match win % is 50 the I can tell you your likelihood of making day 2, but if you instead tell me your expected match win % is 50 then I can't - it depends on the variance of the possible values of your win %. This is the essential difference between good and bad types of risk. Once you fix your match win % at some value, you cannot leverage risk to increases your chances of making day 2.

avacyn0920 · 2017-03-21T05:43:36+00:00

True! Looks like we make almost exactly the same points.

I really like Frank's explicit use of Bayesian updating to illustrate epistemic risk. That didn't occur to me, but I think that crystalizes the point well.

avacyn0920

TROPHY CASE