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Lumifer comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong
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I have very strong priors against this idea. The priors are based on the following:
Now, I'm perfectly fine with experimenting on oneself and willing collaborators. But mass-marketing a "food replacement" to the general population doesn't look like a good idea to me.
This argument "proves too much," as they say. Many of these are also reasons to be afraid of my current diet (especially the fourth; I really don't understand how that's an argument against Soylent instead of for it).
But then you're not asking for money to commercialize your current diet and sell it to the general population with the explicit or implicit assurance that it's all they need to stay healthy, are you?
Besides, we do have a bunch of empirical data (admittedly, much of it confusing and incomplete) on the effect of various foods on human health. I don't think it suggests that something like Soylent is going to be good for you.
Don't these sort of ... cancel each other out?
EDIT: I mean, if we don't know the effects of everything that's in our food right now, how is Soylent any worse?
Only if you think solely in terms of black and white.
We certainly have some idea about what different foods and food components do to us. Sometimes there's a bit more clarity, sometimes much less.
Soylent is worse (in this context) primarily because of lack of diversification. While we don't know the exact details of human nutrition, we know that eating a variety of natural foods is generally OK. That's what humans have evolved to eat, at least. You don't need to know each necessary ingredient as long as you have reason to believe there's some in that diverse pile of stuff.
But Soylent makes a strong assumption: that we know ALL that's necessary for a human to thrive. To flip this statement around, it says that everything that's not in Soylent is not necessary for optimal human nutrition.
That smells of major hubris to me and I'm not going to believe that.
Let's say someone is eating pizza for 20% of their meals. Do you think that replacing pizza with Soylent would result in a worse diet?
Soylent as a supplement and Soylent as a total food replacement are very different things.
Taboo "natural foods" for me, would you?
Foods that have been around long enough that we some idea, possibly simply hermeneuticly, about their effects.
Shouldn't the unit here be the "diet", not the "food"? I mean, physically, what matters is what the body gets out of the whole collection, right?
Evidence suggests that if you're the average person, you've already screwed up your gut flora with antibiotics. Possibly irreversibly.