Hmm. I'll grant that.
[link] Are All Dictator Game Results Artifacts?
http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2013/05/are-all-dictator-game-results-artifacts/
You walk into a laboratory, and you read a set of instructions that tell you that your task is to decide how much of a $10 pie you want to give to an anonymous other person who signed up for the experimental session.
This describes, more or less, the Dictator Game, a staple of behavioral economics with a history dating back more than a quarter of a century. The Dictator Game (DG) might not be the drosophila melanogaster of behavioral economics – the Prisoner’s Dilemma can lay plausible claim to that prized analogy – but it could reasonably aspire to an only slightly more modest title, perhaps the e. coli of the discipline. Since the original work, more than 20,000 observations in the DG have been reported.
[...]
How much would participants in a Dictator Game give to the other person if they did not know they were in a Dictator Game study? Simply following me around during the day and recording how much cash I dispense won’t answer this question because in the DG, the money is provided by the experimenter. So, to build a parallel design, the method used must move money to subjects as a windfall so that we can observe how much of this “house money” they choose to give away.
And that is what Winking and Mizer did in a paper now in press and available online (paywall) in Evolution and Human Behavior, using participants, fittingly enough, in Las Vegas. Here’s what they did. Two confederates were needed. The first, destined to become the “recipient,” was occupied on a phone call near a bus stop in Vegas. The second confederate approached lone individuals at the bus stop, indicated that they were late for a ride to the airport, and asked the subject if they wanted the $20 in casino chips still in the confederate’s possession, scamming people into, rather than out of money, in sharp contradiction of the deep traditions of Las Vegas. The question was how many chips the fortunate subject transferred to the nearby confederate.[...]
In a second condition, the confederate with the chips added a comment to the effect that the subject could “split it with that guy however you want,” indicating the first confederate. This condition brings the study a bit closer, but not much closer, to lab conditions, In a third condition, subjects were asked if they wanted to participate in a study, and then did so along the lines of the usual DG, making the treatment considerably closer to traditional lab-based conditions.
The difference between the first two treatments and the third treatments is interesting, but, as I said at the beginning, the DG should be thought of as a measuring tool. Figure 1 shows how many chips people give away in the DG in the three treatments. In conditions 1 and 2, the number of people (out of 60) who gave at least one chip to the second confederate was… zero. To the extent you think that this method answers the question, how much Dictator Game giving is due to people knowing they’re in an experiment, the answer is, “all of it.”
Link to paper (paywalled).
Not sure how that applies here, even if we disregard the processed foods that many people live on also being quite unnatural.
Did you see this summary? (The actual description of the system starts on page 9.)
EDIT: Also, the list of papers citing that article may provide papers with further detail. For example, that list contained Question analysis: How Watson reads a clue, which goes into considerably more detail about the question analysis stage.
If a person is interested in Soylent for sake of saving money, then a similar product that costs more than ordinary food is automatically known not to work.
I sympathize with this argument, but the obvious counter-argument is that lots of people have eaten normal diets and have been observed not to, for example, die of scurvy. (On the other hand, they have been observed to, for example, get heart disease.)
That's true. But then again, once you consider that "normal diets" is really composed of countless of different combinations of foods ranging from "fast food only" to "making a constant effort to be trying out new foods all the time", you could also use this as an argument for Soylent being probably safe. As in, "out of all the countless possible combinations of nutritional intakes that people live on, most don't lead to anybody dying of scurvy, so if we specifically construct one new diet for the express purpose of providing everything that one needs, it doesn't seem like it should kill you if all those diets that weren't constructed with that in mind don't kill you".
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
While this is true, I would expect that for many people, the main risk in Soylent would be one of overdosing on something rather than acquiring a deficiency. Soylent at least tries to provide everything that you need, while many people (me included) optimize their normal diet mainly based on criteria like cost and ease of preparation rather than healthiness. And even if we did optimize it for healthiness, your argument is essentially saying that we might very well screw up and acquire deficiencies even if we tried to ensure that we got everything that we needed.... and that argument can be applied to normal diets just as well as Soylent.
So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.
Well, there's this:
http://swarma.org/thesis/doc/jake_224.pdf
The following is an extract from the typewritten script of a BBC radio broadcast entitled ‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said To Think’, recorded in January 1952. In response to the introductory remarks
We’re here today to discuss whether calculating machines can be said to think in any proper sense of the word. ... Turing, ... [h]ave you a mechanical defini- tion?,
Turing replies:
I don’t want to give a definition of thinking, but if I had to I should probably be unable to say anything more about it than that it was a sort of buzzing that went on inside my head. But I don’t really see that we need to agree on a definition at all. The important thing is to try to draw a line between the properties of a brain, or of a man, that we want to discuss, and those that we don’t. To take an extreme case, we are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t a brain, and so it can’t think.’ I would like to suggest a particular kind of test that one might apply to a machine. You might call it a test to see whether the machine thinks, but it would be better to avoid begging the question, and say that the machines that pass are (let’s say) ‘Grade A’ machines.
[...]
Well, that’s my test. Of course I am not saying at present either that machines really could pass the test, or that they couldn’t. My suggestion is just that this is the question we should discuss. It’s not the same as ‘Do machines think,’ but it seems near enough for our present purpose, and raises much the same difficulties.
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The one post I sent to OB was rejected. (Which it deserved to be, since in retrospect it was pretty poor.)