jimrandomh comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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Factors why I have not and probably will not:
* although see my reply to Qiaochu, at this point Rob isn't even at the 'crappy' level
EDIT: as of June 2015, I would amend my list of complaints to de-emphasize #3 as it seems that Soylent Inc has revised the formulation a number of times, run it by some experts, and has now been field-tested to some degree; most of my self-experiments in #6 have since finished (right now the only relevant ones are another magnesium self-experiment, trying to find the right dosage, and nonrandomized bacopa ABA quasiexperiment); and for point #1, between increasing the protein in my diet and official Soylent lowering prices, now Soylent is more like 2x my current food expenditures than 3x+.
I think you're wrong about that. We have modern chemistry and we have animal experimentation at scale, which means that we can feed animals highly-refined diets to determine whether any essential nutrients are missing from our models. It would be extremely surprising if there were a vital nutrient we didn't know about.
On the other hand, there are other failure modes besides forgetting a nutrient, like using an inactive or degraded input, contamination, or for that matter, making half the calories sugar. (Which they, um, did.) I really want a correctly-executed version of Soylent, but I won't be eating anything from the first batches, because these guys really don't fill me with confidence.
I agree food-replacements should be doable in theory and that the existing products shouldn't be too terrible, but Soylent does not seem to be drawing well on the existing knowledge.
Personally, I'd like a good Soylent too. It'd be useful for my self-experiments, since it'd help tamp down variability from my diet and increase the statistical power. But Rhinehart is doing it all wrong.