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Here is a reply from soylent.com
https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204197379-California-Proposition-65
In response to
Soylent has been found to contain lead (12-25x) and cadmium (≥4x) in greater concentrations than California's 'safe harbor' levels
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Soylent has been found to contain lead (12-25x) and cadmium (≥4x) in greater concentrations than California's 'safe harbor' levels
TL;DR: Soylent contains safe levels of those heavy metals, but enough that they are required to warn people in the state of California. It's not uncommon for food to have heavy metals at the level.
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
Adding rivers was thinking too small. What we need is planet-sculpting-- getting closer to a planet which is optimized for human beings. I suspect that we'd be better off with more and smaller land masses, but this is certainly open to discussion.
Since the politics might be almost (?) as hard as the physical engineering, perhaps the right thing is to move Venus and Mars to more convenient orbits and optiform them.
There are two major problems with how the earth is currently set up. Only the surface is habitable, and it's a sphere, which is known for having the minimum possible surface area for its volume. A Matrioshka brain would be a much more optimal environment. Although that depends on your definition of "human being".
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
This is a crazy idea that I'm not at all convinced about, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. Criticism welcome!
Rationality and common sense might be bad for your chances of achieving something great, because you need to irrationally believe that it's possible at all. That might sound obvious, but such idealism can make the difference between failure and success even in science, and even at the highest levels.
For example, Descartes and Leibniz saw the world as something created by a benevolent God and full of harmony that can be discovered by reason. That's a very irrational belief, but they ended up making huge advances in science by trying to find that harmony. In contrast, their opponents Hume, Hobbes, Locke etc. held a much more LW-ish position called "empiricism". They all failed to achieve much outside of philosophy, arguably because they didn't have a strong irrational belief that harmony could be found.
If you want to achieve something great, don't be a skeptic about it. Be utterly idealistic.
In other words, laziness and overconfidence bias cancel each other out, and getting rid of the second without getting rid of the first will cause problems?
Puerto Rico?! But Puerto Rico is already a US territory!
We'll make it a double territory.
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
The government picks arbitrary ages for when an individual has the mental capacity to make certain decisions, like drinking alcohol or having sex. But not everyone mentally matures at the same rate. It'd be nice to have an institution that allows minors with good backgrounds and who pass certain intelligence/rationality tests to be exempt from these laws.
I think drinking is also about the idea that it might cause problems to people who aren't fully grown. I don't know if that's true, but I don't think that matters politically.
Why does my idea violate deontological ethics if I get the legal approval of the relevant governments and individuals? Would it violate deontological ethics for me to build a factory in a poor country in which workers are knowlingly exposed to a small risk of death?
Deontology is funny like that. Making a one-in-a-million chance of each of a million people dying is fine, but killing one is not. Not even if you make it a lottery so each of them has a one-in-a-million chance of dying, since you're still killing them.
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
Legalize doping and other artificial human enhancements in sports, but require them to reveal what drugs they are using. Create new sports if you want to encourage specific enhancements.
It would lead to arms races between medical teams and pharmaceutical companies and even if it would harm sportsmen themselves, the fact that new drugs would constantly be invented and perfected would help even ordinary people, because after a while those new drugs and other human enhancements would become available on the market.
Use already existing Paralympic Games to test artificial limbs.
Is that actually illegal or just against the rules? I would expect it would be perfectly legal to start your own, although I could see why people might object if you don't at least limit it to make sure it stays at safe levels. And if you do limit it, you'll have all those advantages you said, but not the obvious one of not having cheaters. It's just as hard to tell if someone's doping more than they should as it is to tell if they're doing it at all.
There are plenty of animals that people are okay with killing and eating that are more likely to be sentient than someone in a coma.
By that standard how about harvesting the organs of babies?
I think babies are more person-like than the animals we eat for food. I'm not an expert in that though. They're still above someone in a coma.
Yeah, and I'm asking, do those experiences "count"?
If organs are going from comatose humans to better ones, and we've decided that people who aren't sensing don't deserve theirs, how about people who aren't communicating their senses? It seems like this principal can go cool places.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them (there will be forms, and an adorableness quotient, and Love Weighting). All that the world would be out is the silent contemplation of the interior of a cell. Clearly a net gain, yeah?
So, are we stopping at "no sensing -> we jack your meats", or can we cook with gas?
It's not about communication. It's not even about sensing. It's about subjective experience. If your mind worked properly but you just couldn't sense anything or do anything, you'd have moral worth. It would probably be negative and it would be a mercy to kill you, but that's another issue entirely. From what I understand, if you're in a coma, your brain isn't entirely inactive. It's doing something. But it's more comparable to what a fish does than a conscious mammal.
Someone in a coma is not a person anymore. In the same sense that someone who is dead is not a person anymore. The problem with killing someone is that they stop being a person. There's nothing wrong with taking them from not a person to a slightly different not a person.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them
A mass murderer is still a person. They think and feel like you do, except probably with less empathy or something. The world is better off without them, and getting rid of them is a net gain. But it's not a Pareto improvement. There's still one person that gets the short end of the stick.
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How good you actually are at solving a NP problem by hand?
I've once had a homework problem where I was supposed to use some kind of optimization algorithm to solve the knapsack problem. The teacher said that, while it's technically NP complete, you can generally solve it pretty easily. Although the homework did it with such a small problem that the algorithm pretty much came down to checking every combination.