Experiment: Belief-wallet analysis 🧐

Which beliefs are correlated with more wealth? Some on-chain "research"

Today did an experiment:

1. I collected all the addresses who rated the post “God exists” (50 responses) and “Ivermectin is safe and effective for treating and/or preventing COVID-19” (26 responses)

2. I looked up their wallets on zerion.io, which shows combined balance on multiple chains

These are tiny sample sizes and completely embarrassing attempts at “analysis,” but you can start to see what kinds of fun can be had with the data created through normal use of Ideamarket:

Atheists had nearly 60% more money.

• Users who rated "God exists" above 50 had average holdings of $4,142.18

• Users who rated "God exists" below 49 had average holdings of $7,133.81

People who feel certain had about 15% more money than their less confident counterparts.

• Users who rated "God exists" exactly 100 had average holdings of $4,740.25 (~$600 higher than average theists)

• Users who rated "God exists" exactly 0 had average holdings of $8,856.06 (~$1,700 higher than average atheists)

People who believe “Ivermectin is safe and effective for treating and/or preventing COVID-19” had over 100x more money.

• People who rated that statement below 49 had average holdings of $61.31

• People who rated that statement above 50 had average holdings of $6,918.20

DeSci

Our friends at CureDAO are crowdsourcing clinical research by aggregating health data shared by their users to find correlations between foods, conditions, behaviors, etc.

Ideamarket lets us add beliefs.

• What beliefs are most strongly correlated with [reduced anxiety]?

• What health problems do [people who believe x] most frequently have?

• What do people with the [highest overall mood] most frequently believe?

The above “experiment” was done with a sample size of 50 for the God post, and 26 for the Ivermectin post. Imagine what we could do with thousands of ratings, on thousands of posts, on every topic.

Cheers,
—Mike

PS — The philosophy nerd in me loves this for a few reasons. William James’ notion of Pragmatism (short explainer video from me) suggests we determine truths by seeing which beliefs bring us into the greatest harmony with reality. DeSci for beliefs could be a first foray into “Quantified Epistemology” — measuring the material effects that beliefs themselves have on our health and happiness. A “science of pragmatism.”

PPS — I used Google Sheets, but upcoming tools like Holder.xyz will make this much easier.