Are there topics that need to be addressed for the LessWrong audience that aren't covered in the usual literature?

I would personally be interested in a discussion of unusual financial decisions in the pursuit of unusual goals, somewhat along the lines of Early Retirement Extreme - for example, how does your financial outlook change if you don't plan on buying a house or having a family, if you're willing to invest a large percentage of your income rather than spend it, if you're optimizing for efficient charity, etc.

My observations suggest that criticism in general is common.

unless there's a reason why Soylent isn't in that reference class.

All of the other diets involve food?

Depends on what you mean by "optimistic that this will work." Presumably Eliezer at least thinks this is positive expected value (and so do I). That doesn't have to be because he assigns a high probability to it having positive value, it could be because he assigns a moderate probability to it having moderately high positive value or because he assigns a low probability to it having extremely high positive value, etc.

When computing the expected value, keep in mind that Soylent displaces other food, so the actual cost (assuming the project meets its funding goals) is not $65 but $65 minus however much Eliezer would otherwise have spent on food in a week. For me, and I suspect for Eliezer as well, this number is more than $65, so Eliezer can think that the expected value of replacing his food with Soylent is somewhat negative and still think it's a good idea to try it for a week. Soylent instead of other food also saves food preparation time in addition to saving money.

I'm surprised by all the discouraging comments.

Really? Ah, you're new around here. This is fairly common.

This blog is very annoying. First, for some reason you guys keep writing posts and deleting them or something; I got several RSS notifications for posts that subsequently didn't exist. Second, no comments means no opportunity to give feedback, even of the writing variety. For example, I don't understand the Parable of the Unstoppable Mad Man. The author writes like it's obvious what the mad man is, but I'm genuinely confused. (The typo in the third sentence didn't help either.) And what's the deal with the prisoner? I don't get this post at all.

Do you guys really think writing with no feedback is a good idea? (Requiring emails for comments is a deadly trivial inconvenience. You'll end up only getting feedback from the loudest people, which doesn't seem to correlate at all with the most useful feedback.)

I would love to read this! This seems extremely high value.

The other commenters who are saying that this information is available elsewhere have a point, but not, I think, a particularly strong one. There's nothing wrong with explaining something that someone else has already explained. Some pointers to the existing literature might be helpful, though.

This argument "proves too much," as they say. Many of these are also reasons to be afraid of my current diet (especially the fourth; I really don't understand how that's an argument against Soylent instead of for it).

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.

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.)

You think the algorithms that power the human mind understand either the halting problem or the incompleteness theorem enough to develop intuitions about free will?