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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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While this is true, I would expect that for many people, the main risk in Soylent would be one of overdosing on something rather than acquiring a deficiency. Soylent at least tries to provide everything that you need, while many people (me included) optimize their normal diet mainly based on criteria like cost and ease of preparation rather than healthiness. And even if we did optimize it for healthiness, your argument is essentially saying that we might very well screw up and acquire deficiencies even if we tried to ensure that we got everything that we needed.... and that argument can be applied to normal diets just as well as Soylent.
So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.
I sympathize with this argument, but the obvious counter-argument is that lots of people have eaten normal diets and have been observed not to, for example, die of scurvy. (On the other hand, they have been observed to, for example, get heart disease.)
That's true. But then again, once you consider that "normal diets" is really composed of countless of different combinations of foods ranging from "fast food only" to "making a constant effort to be trying out new foods all the time", you could also use this as an argument for Soylent being probably safe. As in, "out of all the countless possible combinations of nutritional intakes that people live on, most don't lead to anybody dying of scurvy, so if we specifically construct one new diet for the express purpose of providing everything that one needs, it doesn't seem like it should kill you if all those diets that weren't constructed with that in mind don't kill you".
Not to mention, worst case scenario, if you experience a deficiency, you are still in civilization and may switch back to a normal diet.
Only if you are able to track the deficiency back to its cause. To reuse scurvy, how many realized that their deficiency was of fresh fruits and vegetables? As opposed to bad air or bacterial poisoning or whatever... If you felt the symptoms of rabbit starvation but had never heard of it or been told about it, would you realize what the problem was in your diet before you happened to eat something fatty and noticed your vague hunger was finally satisfied?