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MarsColony_in10years comments on Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015 - Less Wrong
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MealSquares (the company I'm starting with fellow LW user RomeoStevens) is searching for nutrition experts to join our advisory team. The ideal person has a combination of formally recognized nutrition expertise & also at least a casual interest in things like study methodology and effect sizes (this unfortunately seems to be a rare combination). Advising us will be an opportunity to improve the diets of many people, it should not be much work, you'll get a small stake in our company, and you'll help us earn money for effective giving. Please get in touch with us (ideally using this page) if you or someone you know might be interested!
I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now. However, 2 questions:
Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?
What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?
I've been using MealSquares regularly, without realizing that that you guys were LWers or EAs. As such, I've been using mostly s/Soylent because of the cost difference. (A 400 Calorie MealSquare is ~$3, a 400 Calorie jug of Soylent 2.0 is ~$2.83, 400 Calories worth of unmixed Soylent powder is ~$1.83, and the ingredients for 400 Calories worth of DIY People Chow are ~$0.70. All these are slightly cheaper with a subscription/large purchase.)
I ask, because if you happen to be interested in similar EA causes to me, and expect to eventually donate X% of proceeds, then I should be budgeting my expenses to factor that in. If (100%-X%) * MealSquaresCost < soylentCost, then I would buy much less soylent and much (/many?) more MealSquares. I'd be paying a premium to Soylent in order to add a bit more culinary variety. (Also, I realize this X isn't equal to the expected altruistic return on investment, but that would be even harder to estimate.)
/chokes on his foie gras X-D
Someone gave you a downvote. If it was on my behalf or on the behalf of Soylent, then for the record I thought it was funny. :)
Yep, that's what we've been doing. (We've been providing free MealSquares to some EA organizations, but we haven't been donating a significant portion of our profits directly.)
At least 10%, hopefully significantly more.
We've been trying to focus on growing our business rather than evaluating EA giving opportunities. If we actually do make a lot of money to donate, it will make sense to spend a lot of time thinking about where to give it. And we'll try & focus on identifying opportunities that we have a comparative advantage in (opportunities that are more suited to large donors, like funding a new organization from scratch).
I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable. I would much rather people buy it because it's good for you, convenient, tasty, etc. As you point out, we are less than 10% more expensive on a per-calorie basis than jug form Soylent. Would you say that you are not interested in paying more for a healthier product, not convinced that MealSquares is better for you, something else?
In retrospect, I think that would make me uncomfortable too. In your position, I'd probably feel like I'd delivered an ultimatum to someone else, even if they were the one who actually made the suggestion. On the other hand, maybe a deep feeling of obligation to charity isn't a bad thing?
Based on my (fairly limited) understanding of nutrition, I suspect that any marginal difference between your products is fairly small. I suspect humans get strongly diminishing returns (in the form of increased lifespan) once we have our basic nutritional requirements met in bio-available forms and without huge amounts of anything harmful. After that, I'd expect the noise to overpower the signal. For example, perhaps unmeasured factors like my mood or eating habits change as a function of my Soylent/MealSquares choice, and I wind up getting fast food more often, or get less work done or something. Let's say it would take me a month of solid researching and reading nutrition textbooks to make a semi-educated decision of which of two good things is best. Would the added health benefit give me an additional month of life? What if I value my healthy life, here and now, far more than 1 more month spent senile in a nursing home? What if I also apply hyperbolic discounting?
I've probably done more directed health-related reading than most people. (Maybe 24 hours total, over the pasty year or so?) Enough to minimize the biggest causes of death, and have some vague idea of what "healthy" might look like. Enough to start fooling around with my own DIY soylent, even if I wouldn't want to eat that every day without more research. If someone who sounds knowledgeable sits down and does an independent review, I'd probably read it and scan the comments for critiques of the review.
Thanks for the explanation. I wrote up some of the details of our approach here. Nutrition is far from being settled, and major discoveries have been made just in the past 50 years. Therefore we take an approach that's fairly conservative, which means (among other things) getting most of our nutrients from whole foods, the way humans have been eating for virtually all of our species' history. We think the burden of proof should be on Soylent to show that their approach is a good one.
I think many people would run the equation the other way -- buying from a company that gives a potion to charity is a way to pressure competing companies to do the same. In other words, MealSquares give consumers a way to put pressure on the industry. Of course, there are a lot of ways that that model could be flawed, but you're hardly abusing the people who make that choice.