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shminux comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion

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

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Comment author: shminux 21 May 2013 09:45:04PM 4 points [-]

I agree with most of what you are saying, however #2 is likely to be mitigated by his not going on a soylent-only diet. Thus there is a fair chance that many subtle overlooked deficiencies in the product will be masked by the "normal" meals he still eats fairly regularly. In your scurvy example, the minimum level of Vit C required (8-10 mg per day) is far lower than what you get from a typical diet (some 10 times that, apparently), so even if he completely removed it from his product, he'd probably get enough of it from his infrequent non-soylent meals. Though his example of forgetting sulfur is a bit worrying and is evidence against this.

Comment author: gwern 21 May 2013 10:26:40PM *  4 points [-]

Sure. But I'd point out that this observation (that you can hedge your bets) cuts against Soylent as well: while consuming regular food to limit your downside from deficiencies in Soylent should work for overprovisioned substances, you're also limiting your upside since the more regular food you consume the less Soylent you must be consuming.