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gwern comments on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.