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Vaniver comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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The blog post is full of great one-liners, like "Surely our minds can find more enjoyable activities than chewing." The guy comes across as very earnest and attempting to be rational about his invention, which is a welcome departure from your usual fad diet pusher.
That said, the OP is unduly optimistic and uncritical. The odds of a dietary breakthrough of this magnitude being missed by the meal-replacement manufacturers are not high, though it is, of course possible.
As far as I can tell, the big insight behind Soylent is "there are people willing to eat this stuff all the time," rather than "it's possible to build food from the molecules up." The odds of a marketing insight like that being missed seem relatively high.
Not necessarily even 'all the time'. Just substituting for any meal that wasn't above average in terms of quality would be nice (health benefits, saved time, probably additional second-order effects).
The benefit versus traditional dietary supplements is explicit design for consumption in isolation. (That's ignoring all of the unfortunate experimental errors observed here, of course.) There are medical products that fit that bill, but they aren't marketed towards consumers and are therefore much more expensive (if purchasable at all).