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

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

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Comment author: Lumifer 23 May 2013 02:50:06PM 1 point [-]

Don't these sort of ... cancel each other out?

Only if you think solely in terms of black and white.

We certainly have some idea about what different foods and food components do to us. Sometimes there's a bit more clarity, sometimes much less.

Soylent is worse (in this context) primarily because of lack of diversification. While we don't know the exact details of human nutrition, we know that eating a variety of natural foods is generally OK. That's what humans have evolved to eat, at least. You don't need to know each necessary ingredient as long as you have reason to believe there's some in that diverse pile of stuff.

But Soylent makes a strong assumption: that we know ALL that's necessary for a human to thrive. To flip this statement around, it says that everything that's not in Soylent is not necessary for optimal human nutrition.

That smells of major hubris to me and I'm not going to believe that.

Comment author: MugaSofer 23 May 2013 05:43:52PM *  0 points [-]

Taboo "natural foods" for me, would you?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2013 04:36:15AM 0 points [-]

Foods that have been around long enough that we some idea, possibly simply hermeneuticly, about their effects.

Comment author: MugaSofer 24 May 2013 09:44:24AM -1 points [-]

Shouldn't the unit here be the "diet", not the "food"? I mean, physically, what matters is what the body gets out of the whole collection, right?