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

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

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Comment author: gwern 21 May 2013 09:15:10PM *  37 points [-]

Factors why I have not and probably will not:

  1. Soylent costs more than my current diet, limiting gains
  2. it is a priori highly likely to fail since we know for a fact that severe nutrition deficiencies can be due to subtle & misunderstood factors (see: the forgetting of scurvy cures) and that nutrition is one of the least reliable scientific areas
  3. his work is even more likely than that to have problems because he hasn't consulted the existing work on food replacements (yes, it's a thing; how exactly do you think people in comas or with broken jaws get fed?)
  4. given #2, the negative effects are likely to be subtle and long-term means that on basic statistical power grounds, you'll want long and well-powered self-experiments to go from 'crappy self-experiment' to 'good self-experiment'*
  5. given the low odds of success (#2-3), the expensive powerful self-experiments necessary to shift our original expectations substantially due to long-term effects and subtlety (#4), and the small benefits (#1), the VoI is low here
  6. my other self-experiments, in progress and planned, suffer from many fewer of Soylent's defects, hence have reasonable VoIs (Specifically: I am or will be investigating Noopept, melatonin, magnesium l-threonate & citrate, coluracetam, meditation, Redshift, and lithium orotate.)
  7. VoI current/planned self-experiments (#6) > VoI Soylent cloning/tweaking (#5)
  8. hence, the opportunity cost of Soylent is higher than not, so I will continue my existing plans

* 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+.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 May 2013 11:34:32AM 0 points [-]

Soylent costs more than my current diet, limiting gains

o.O

Comment author: Vaniver 24 May 2013 07:01:41PM *  4 points [-]

My current diet runs me around $2-4 a day; Soylent is ~$10 a day, which is a significant increase. I expect gwern's numbers are similar.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 May 2013 08:52:12AM 0 points [-]

(I was about to ask about the value of the time spent cooking, but it turns out he's already answered that.)

Comment author: Vaniver 25 May 2013 05:36:54PM *  0 points [-]

He has; for me, cooking is about three minutes of effort spread out over the course of fifteen minutes each day.

The main benefit to a Soylent-style diet is that you get all the micronutrients and so on that are normally locked away inside vegetables, which take an inordinate amount of time to prepare and consume, in one quick drinkable source, without any concerns about pesticides or fungi or so on.

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2014 01:11:52AM *  3 points [-]

that are normally locked away inside vegetables, which take an inordinate amount of time to prepare and consume

Use frozen pre-sliced vegetables. They're usually competitive with, if not cheaper than, fresh produce; you save a lot of time preparing them; they taste just as good to me (and better, in instances where it takes a long time to eat your way through a purchase and the fresh vegetables are, shall we say, less than fresh by the time you eat them). You can easily dump them into crockpot recipes, or you can just put them in a bowl, microwave with some herbs/spices and butter, and reheat as necessary.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 July 2014 08:07:44PM 0 points [-]

Agreed. I use frozen vegetables for anything I cook that has vegetables in it, but that's pretty rare. Mostly I eat raw sliced sweet potatoes (where the time is in the peeling and slicing) and microwaved kale (which has gotten much less time consuming now that I buy the precut and prewashed version, rather than bunches).

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2014 10:07:13PM *  0 points [-]

I dislike kale, so no comments there, but why would you peel sweet potatoes? The skin tastes fine and I assume like regular potatoes has a lot of the nutrients in it. When I harvest my sweet potatoes, I just slice them.