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shminux comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong
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The blog post is full of great one-liners, like "Surely our minds can find more enjoyable activities than chewing." The guy comes across as very earnest and attempting to be rational about his invention, which is a welcome departure from your usual fad diet pusher.
That said, the OP is unduly optimistic and uncritical. The odds of a dietary breakthrough of this magnitude being missed by the meal-replacement manufacturers are not high, though it is, of course possible.
As far as I can tell, the big insight behind Soylent is "there are people willing to eat this stuff all the time," rather than "it's possible to build food from the molecules up." The odds of a marketing insight like that being missed seem relatively high.
Not necessarily even 'all the time'. Just substituting for any meal that wasn't above average in terms of quality would be nice (health benefits, saved time, probably additional second-order effects).
The benefit versus traditional dietary supplements is explicit design for consumption in isolation. (That's ignoring all of the unfortunate experimental errors observed here, of course.) There are medical products that fit that bill, but they aren't marketed towards consumers and are therefore much more expensive (if purchasable at all).
I have a lot of things to say about this attitude, but in brief: the reason we can't cooperate is because it's really easy to criticize things and we feel like we ought to. Otherwise we risk looking gullible and stupid. But looking gullible and stupid is actually not that bad, and in many domains the negative consequences of being wrong are not nearly as bad as, say, in friendly AI.
Do you really want rationalists to be a group of people who aren't allowed to be optimistic?
I want rationalists to be a group of people who are as optimistic as the situation warrants.
Sure, and of course the problem in practice is figuring out what level of optimism the situation warrants. Sometimes you're not going to be optimistic enough and sometimes you're going to be too optimistic. If you're afraid of being too optimistic because you think it will make you look gullible and stupid, then you'll probably end up being too pessimistic instead, and that is also bad.
And right now, this product is in its pre-early adoption stage. There is little need to criticize the product, since the formula will most probably be tweaked and updated after its first public release. Unless there is some question about the utility of the idea, or the capability of the inventor, I think optimism is warranted.
As someone who is also very interested in food replacements, this is a bad reason to not criticize Soylent. When someone is taking a sloppy approach, they should get called on it- and Rhinehart has been pretty dang sloppy. He forgot iron! I'm skeptical of the quality of his system if it produced that output. Yes, his system is learning from feedback, and so iron is in, as is sulfur. But I hope he doesn't include the 'optionals' that he's listed in his earlier recipe- among other things, he's using Ginseng and Gingko Biloba, which suggests to me he hasn't seen or thought to check this easy summary of the literature, let alone the literature itself. (His reasons for including them seem out of place, given the goal.)
I like chewing. I would like something like soylent, but in a form I can actually eat.
Chewing is like sex, you enjoy it more when shared, so leave it for social occasions.
I tried lifeboat rations once. They're supposed to be nutritionally complete at least in the medium term, but I wouldn't recommend them -- I can best describe the taste as yeast-flavored Powerbar.
"How does it compare to Slim-Fast" seems a relevant question here.
You can't drink only Slim-Fast indefinitely. The jury's still out as to whether the same is true of Soylent.