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Vaniver comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a lot of things to say about this attitude, but in brief: the reason we can't cooperate is because it's really easy to criticize things and we feel like we ought to. Otherwise we risk looking gullible and stupid. But looking gullible and stupid is actually not that bad, and in many domains the negative consequences of being wrong are not nearly as bad as, say, in friendly AI.
Do you really want rationalists to be a group of people who aren't allowed to be optimistic?
As someone who is also very interested in food replacements, this is a bad reason to not criticize Soylent. When someone is taking a sloppy approach, they should get called on it- and Rhinehart has been pretty dang sloppy. He forgot iron! I'm skeptical of the quality of his system if it produced that output. Yes, his system is learning from feedback, and so iron is in, as is sulfur. But I hope he doesn't include the 'optionals' that he's listed in his earlier recipe- among other things, he's using Ginseng and Gingko Biloba, which suggests to me he hasn't seen or thought to check this easy summary of the literature, let alone the literature itself. (His reasons for including them seem out of place, given the goal.)