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Mizue comments on Is it a good idea to use Soylent once/twice a day? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Replacing food with Soylent is weird. Perhaps in your social circle it's a plausible thing to do, but I'm pretty certain that most people would think it's a bizarre thing to do regardless of what certain geek social circles might think.
In fact, that's my impression of lots of LW-style ideas, such as cryonics and SI-style AI research.
Rationality always works when it is done perfectly. But it's incredibly easy to miss something and come to a weird conclusion by pure rationality. And being partly rational can be pretty bad when irrationality has evolved checks and balances and your rationality bypasses them but is not good enough to replace them. So I'm automatically very skeptical towards anything which is perfectly sensible--here--which people outside this circle of atypical minds would find ludicrous.
Not to mention the name. Yes, I know that in the book it was not made of people, but giving it a name that has negative connotations in the outside world suggests that the idea is insufficiently vetted by the outside world.
1) I don't care if it's weird. In fact, I take pride in doing something that's rational that others think is weird.
2) I think you're right about rationality coming to weird conclusions and that being partly rational is can be bad. But that doesn't mean it's automatically bad. I think you need more evidence than "it's perfectly sensible--here but people outside this circle of atypical minds would find it ludicrous". At the very least, that map is very high level and not very precise.
And also potentially dangerous to your health. The idea of a uniform "human chow" makes sense and has legitimate uses, and we have a paleo precedent in pemmican, which has a reputation for sustaining people in polar environments in good health when they didn't have access to fresh food. But then pemmican uses natural ingredients. By contrast, I worry about ingesting Soylent if the recipes incorporate the wrong stereoisomers of synthetic organic molecules that the body's enzymes won't bind to for metabolism.
Uh, guys. LW didn't invent cryonics. And for some reason it hasn't registered even with most cryonicists that some neuroscientists think that cryonics deserves a second look because they have the tools now to study the integrity of attempts to preserve the brain's connectome. Refer to the website of the Brain Preservation Foundation.