Pablo_Stafforini comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 21 May 2013 07:09PM

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Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 22 May 2013 01:18:38PM 4 points [-]

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.

The wisdom of nature

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 22 May 2013 02:54:20PM *  0 points [-]

Not sure how that applies here, even if we disregard the processed foods that many people live on also being quite unnatural.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 22 May 2013 03:06:05PM *  2 points [-]

We are adapted to obtain nutrients from food. Since we currently lack a good understanding of exactly what properties of food are nutritionally relevant, it seems unwise to replace natural food with artificial food.

Yes, processed foods are quite unnatural. But Soylent is even less natural than processed foods, so this is irrelevant in the present context.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 24 May 2013 09:49:24PM *  0 points [-]

From an evolutionary standpoint, legumes, milk, and grains are "artificial" food, at least for humans. Agriculture is a recent thing. Would you also endorse the Paleolithic diet movement?

(I do actually endorse the paleolithic diet as probably optimal at the moment and I agree with your central point - I just want to point out that even unprocessed modern diets are already rather unnatural.)

Comment author: Prismattic 25 May 2013 01:29:07AM 0 points [-]

Although agriculture is only about 10,000 years old, humans have been gathering and eating wild grains for 30,000.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 25 May 2013 01:50:50AM *  1 point [-]

Which is an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 years that we've been anatomically modern - although who is to say that they didn't gather wild grains back then, too.

Of course, even 10,000 years is more than enough time for evolution to change us.