[LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

Qiaochu_Yuan

Rob Rhinehart's food replacement Soylent now has a crowdfunding campaign.

Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.

If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a new blog post.

Rob Rhinehart's food replacement Soylent now has a crowdfunding campaign.

Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.

If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a new blog post.

Factors why I have not and probably will not:

Soylent costs more than my current diet, limiting gains
it is a priori highly likely to fail since we know for a fact that severe nutrition deficiencies can be due to subtle & misunderstood factors (see: the forgetting of scurvy cures) and that nutrition is one of the least reliable scientific areas
his work is even more likely than that to have problems because he hasn't consulted the existing work on food replacements (yes, it's a thing; how exactly do you think people in comas or with broken jaws get fed?)
given #2, the negative effects are likely to be subtle and long-term means that on basic statistical power grounds, you'll want long and well-powered self-experiments to go from 'crappy self-experiment' to 'good self-experiment'*
given the low odds of success (#2-3), the expensive powerful self-experiments necessary to shift our original expectations substantially due to long-term effects and subtlety (#4), and the small benefits (#1), the VoI is low here
my other self-experiments, in progress and planned, suffer from many fewer of Soylent's defects, hence have reasonable VoIs (Specifically: I am or will be investigating Noopept, melatonin, magnesium l-threonate & citrate, coluracetam, meditation, Redshift, and lithium orotate.)
VoI current/planned self-experiments (#6) > VoI Soylent cloning/tweaking (#5)
hence, the opportunity cost of Soylent is higher than not, so I will continue my existing plans

* although see my reply to Qiaochu, at this point Rob isn't even at the 'crappy' level

EDIT: as of June 2015, I would amend my list of complaints to de-emphasize #3 as it seems that Soylent Inc has revised the formulation a number of times, run it by some experts, and has now been field-tested to some degree; most of my self-experiments in #6 have since finished (right now the only relevant ones are another magnesium self-experiment, trying to find the right dosage, and nonrandomized bacopa ABA quasiexperiment); and for point #1, between increasing the protein in my diet and official Soylent lowering prices, now Soylent is more like 2x my current food expenditures than 3x+.

Soylent costs more than my current diet, limiting gains

o.O

8Kaj_Sotala13y

While this is true, I would expect that for many people, the main risk in Soylent would be one of overdosing on something rather than acquiring a deficiency. Soylent at least tries to provide everything that you need, while many people (me included) optimize their normal diet mainly based on criteria like cost and ease of preparation rather than healthiness. And even if we did optimize it for healthiness, your argument is essentially saying that we might very well screw up and acquire deficiencies even if we tried to ensure that we got everything that we needed.... and that argument can be applied to normal diets just as well as Soylent. So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.

7jimrandomh13y

I think you're wrong about that. We have modern chemistry and we have animal experimentation at scale, which means that we can feed animals highly-refined diets to determine whether any essential nutrients are missing from our models. It would be extremely surprising if there were a vital nutrient we didn't know about. On the other hand, there are other failure modes besides forgetting a nutrient, like using an inactive or degraded input, contamination, or for that matter, making half the calories sugar. (Which they, um, did.) I really want a correctly-executed version of Soylent, but I won't be eating anything from the first batches, because these guys really don't fill me with confidence.

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[LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

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[LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

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