The “biological need” I have in mind is (obviously?) nutrition for eating, and reproduction for sex. Of course it’s an individual need for eating, and a species-level (or gene-level) need for sex.
The biological need to have sex (as opposed to, say, “to reproduce”) is parallel to the biological need to eat (as opposed to, say, “to be nourished”). Soylent doesn’t do anything for that.
The need for nutrition or reproduction exists only in the outside view.
From the point of the inside view, however, there is the need to eat things which will satisfy hunger and produce a feeling of satiation. There is no hardwired instinct for nutrition.
In the same way, from the inside view, there is the need to have sex and the impulse to care for children. Evolutionary speaking, that’s sufficient because birth control is a recent invention.
There is, indeed, no hardwired instinct for nutrition (which Soylent provides) but there is a hardwired instinct for eating tasty food (which Soylent doesn’t provide).
How does the parallel with blow-up dolls go? There is no hardwired instinct for reproduction (which blow-up dolls don’t provide), but there is a hardwired instinct for having orgasms (which blow-up dolls do provide, or at least may help some people with).
there is a hardwired instinct for eating tasty food
There is a strong hardwired instinct for eating food, tasty or not. As I said, the criteria is that it stops you being hungry and makes you feel satiated. Soylent satisfies this instinct.
Whether Soylent provides adequate nutrition remains to be seen.
Soylent provides ideal amounts of every known nutrient. It’s possible that there’s some obscure nutrient that people who live solely on Soylent haven’t gone without long enough to have noticeable effects. Many people guard against this by having a regular meal once a day.
Soylent provides ideal amounts of every known nutrient.
coughbullshitcough
Soylent provides the currently available estimates of the needed amounts of known essential nutrients for an average person of an average metabolism with no metabolic quirks.
I don’t think calling it FUD is a good idea. There is good reason to automatically fear something like this. I just feel like he’s not taking into account the extent to which these fears have already been addressed. If he said this when Soylent was first made, he would have been right. It took a few tries to get it right. Even as it is, there is still room for error.
Do you plan your diet using future estimates of the amounts needed? Do you account for your metabolic quicks? Do you even have enough detail in your plans that these would have an effect?
I don’t know the details, but I’d bet that in the case of not having good estimates for what’s needed, they use the much easier to find amounts for what’s normally eaten. Again, do you have a way of doing better?
Not to restart the Soylent debate again, but yes, I account for metabolic quirks and yes, I think I can (and do) better than Soylent. Soylent is both one-size-fits-all and same-thing-each-day-every-day.
Note that we didn’t talk about criteria and likely have different ones in mind. For example, “Will you die if you eat nothing but Soylent for a couple of years?” is a very different question from “Is Soylent optimal food for me (or anyone)?”.
I don’t think Soylent is optimal, but I do think it would be very difficult to beat
Depends on what you compare it to. For complete-nutrition liquids it competes against a few expensive hospital products. But for food it competes against things like WholeFoods and farmers’ markets—and loses handily (IMHO).
It doesn’t compete against individual foods. It competes against diets. If you went through the work to make sure the diet was perfectly balanced, than it probably wouldn’t be that hard to beat Soylent, although I’m not sure the margin it’s possible to beat it by would do much. I don’t think things like WholeFoods and farmers’ markets would be necessary. On the other hand, if you were trying to make a diet just by looking at a few major nutrients, or worse, whatever you happen to crave, you’re not going to beat Soylent, regardless of the quality of food.
Taken as a single meal, it’s not hard to beat Soylent. After all, Soylent has a third your recommended daily value of calories. Given how much Americans tend to eat, food with less than a third would be healthier.
It doesn’t compete against individual foods. It competes against diets.
No, that doesn’t seem to be true. Let’s take me. I can drink Soylent or I can eat a variety of food, these are the two choices I am facing. There doesn’t have to be any “diet” involved.
Soylent doesn’t compete against individual foods. It competes against food, in all its variety.
Or were you thinking that I meant “diet” as in reducing your food to lose weight or something like that? I guess that is the more common use. Sorry if I caused a misunderstanding.
In any case, the specific choice of foods you use is more important than the set they’re chosen from. It doesn’t seem right to say it competes against a farmers’ market. It competes against specific selections of food that may be from a farmers’ market.
We eat food/have sex for (among others) one or more of the following reasons: 1. fitness purposes (very roughly speaking, ensuring survival/reproduction), 2. hedonic purposes (very roughly speaking, relieving hunger/horniness), 3. eudaimonic purposes (very roughly speaking, enjoying great food/sex). Masturbation (incl. using dolls) only achieves 2, in-vitro fertilization only achieves 1 (well, actually 2 too when you gather the sperm to be used), and protected sex achieves 2 and 3 but not 1; with food the difference between 1 and 2 is less clear-cut, but IIUC foods with much more fructose than fibre can provide energy without really satiating you and vice versa, so we can say that eating dessert when you’re not really hungry (and not trying to gain weight) achieves 3 but not 2. Soylent achieves 1 and 2, so it’s kind-of analogous to masturbating and using the semen for IVF.
But analogies are like ropes: if you pull them too far they will break down.
Oh dear. It’s funny how an inferential distance can pop up in the simplest things.
OK, let’s me get explicit then.
The main parallel between Soylent and blow-up dolls lies within the concept of impoverished experience.
Food and sex have the capability of being very rich, deep, complex, engaging, intense experiences. There is potential for much, from simple sensual pleasures to complicated philosophies. It seems a waste to give up on such richness in favor of satisfying only the lowest, crudest demands of your body so that it would just shut up and go away.
On the other hand, I get the impression that Soylent is mainly intended to substitute junk food, rather than gourmet meals, so, hoping this rope doesn’t snap if I pull it this far… Are blow-up dolls better or worse than low-end prostitutes? Meh. What is it to me? De gustibus non est disputandum. Let the market decide! (Of course we don’t know the market will locate the optimal result, because imperfect information/externalities/irrationality/etc., but if anything I’d expect these to favour the junk food.)
There is a strong hardwired instinct for eating food, tasty or not. As I said, the criteria is that it stops you being hungry and makes you feel satiated. Soylent satisfies this instinct.
Do you only ever buy the cheapest available food that stops you being hungry and makes you feel satiated? Why or why not?
Granted, some preferences may not be “hardwired”, but it doesn’t make them any less real.
Avicenna’s medical encyclopedia (available in Europe starting in the High Middle Ages) lists dozens of birth control methods, many of which probably even “worked”.
If birth control had been as widespread as it is among present-day non-religious WEIRD people, the time since ancient Egypt to today would have been more than enough.
Yes, it’s also interesting to look at the reasons why it wasn’t widespread for much of the time in question.
My guess is that memetic evolution suppresses birth control faster than genetic evolution can adept to it. Periodically we get outbreaks, like present-day non-religious WEIRD culture, where the suppressing memes collapse due to events in the larger memetic ecosystem.
The “biological need” I have in mind is (obviously?) nutrition for eating, and reproduction for sex. Of course it’s an individual need for eating, and a species-level (or gene-level) need for sex.
The biological need to have sex (as opposed to, say, “to reproduce”) is parallel to the biological need to eat (as opposed to, say, “to be nourished”). Soylent doesn’t do anything for that.
The need for nutrition or reproduction exists only in the outside view.
From the point of the inside view, however, there is the need to eat things which will satisfy hunger and produce a feeling of satiation. There is no hardwired instinct for nutrition.
In the same way, from the inside view, there is the need to have sex and the impulse to care for children. Evolutionary speaking, that’s sufficient because birth control is a recent invention.
There is, indeed, no hardwired instinct for nutrition (which Soylent provides) but there is a hardwired instinct for eating tasty food (which Soylent doesn’t provide).
How does the parallel with blow-up dolls go? There is no hardwired instinct for reproduction (which blow-up dolls don’t provide), but there is a hardwired instinct for having orgasms (which blow-up dolls do provide, or at least may help some people with).
Seems almost exactly opposite to me.
There is a strong hardwired instinct for eating food, tasty or not. As I said, the criteria is that it stops you being hungry and makes you feel satiated. Soylent satisfies this instinct.
Whether Soylent provides adequate nutrition remains to be seen.
Soylent provides ideal amounts of every known nutrient. It’s possible that there’s some obscure nutrient that people who live solely on Soylent haven’t gone without long enough to have noticeable effects. Many people guard against this by having a regular meal once a day.
coughbullshitcough
Soylent provides the currently available estimates of the needed amounts of known essential nutrients for an average person of an average metabolism with no metabolic quirks.
Grandparent’s comment is perhaps optimistic, but yours is downright FUD. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I don’t think calling it FUD is a good idea. There is good reason to automatically fear something like this. I just feel like he’s not taking into account the extent to which these fears have already been addressed. If he said this when Soylent was first made, he would have been right. It took a few tries to get it right. Even as it is, there is still room for error.
Would you care to explain what is wrong in what I said?
Do you plan your diet using future estimates of the amounts needed? Do you account for your metabolic quicks? Do you even have enough detail in your plans that these would have an effect?
I don’t know the details, but I’d bet that in the case of not having good estimates for what’s needed, they use the much easier to find amounts for what’s normally eaten. Again, do you have a way of doing better?
Not to restart the Soylent debate again, but yes, I account for metabolic quirks and yes, I think I can (and do) better than Soylent. Soylent is both one-size-fits-all and same-thing-each-day-every-day.
Note that we didn’t talk about criteria and likely have different ones in mind. For example, “Will you die if you eat nothing but Soylent for a couple of years?” is a very different question from “Is Soylent optimal food for me (or anyone)?”.
I don’t think Soylent is optimal, but I do think it would be very difficult to beat, unless they did leave something out or something like that.
Comparing Soylent to a blow-up doll is at best a huge exaggeration.
Depends on what you compare it to. For complete-nutrition liquids it competes against a few expensive hospital products. But for food it competes against things like WholeFoods and farmers’ markets—and loses handily (IMHO).
It doesn’t compete against individual foods. It competes against diets. If you went through the work to make sure the diet was perfectly balanced, than it probably wouldn’t be that hard to beat Soylent, although I’m not sure the margin it’s possible to beat it by would do much. I don’t think things like WholeFoods and farmers’ markets would be necessary. On the other hand, if you were trying to make a diet just by looking at a few major nutrients, or worse, whatever you happen to crave, you’re not going to beat Soylent, regardless of the quality of food.
Taken as a single meal, it’s not hard to beat Soylent. After all, Soylent has a third your recommended daily value of calories. Given how much Americans tend to eat, food with less than a third would be healthier.
No, that doesn’t seem to be true. Let’s take me. I can drink Soylent or I can eat a variety of food, these are the two choices I am facing. There doesn’t have to be any “diet” involved.
Soylent doesn’t compete against individual foods. It competes against food, in all its variety.
That’s what a diet is, isn’t it?
Or were you thinking that I meant “diet” as in reducing your food to lose weight or something like that? I guess that is the more common use. Sorry if I caused a misunderstanding.
In any case, the specific choice of foods you use is more important than the set they’re chosen from. It doesn’t seem right to say it competes against a farmers’ market. It competes against specific selections of food that may be from a farmers’ market.
We eat food/have sex for (among others) one or more of the following reasons: 1. fitness purposes (very roughly speaking, ensuring survival/reproduction), 2. hedonic purposes (very roughly speaking, relieving hunger/horniness), 3. eudaimonic purposes (very roughly speaking, enjoying great food/sex). Masturbation (incl. using dolls) only achieves 2, in-vitro fertilization only achieves 1 (well, actually 2 too when you gather the sperm to be used), and protected sex achieves 2 and 3 but not 1; with food the difference between 1 and 2 is less clear-cut, but IIUC foods with much more fructose than fibre can provide energy without really satiating you and vice versa, so we can say that eating dessert when you’re not really hungry (and not trying to gain weight) achieves 3 but not 2. Soylent achieves 1 and 2, so it’s kind-of analogous to masturbating and using the semen for IVF.
But analogies are like ropes: if you pull them too far they will break down.
Oh dear. It’s funny how an inferential distance can pop up in the simplest things.
OK, let’s me get explicit then.
The main parallel between Soylent and blow-up dolls lies within the concept of impoverished experience.
Food and sex have the capability of being very rich, deep, complex, engaging, intense experiences. There is potential for much, from simple sensual pleasures to complicated philosophies. It seems a waste to give up on such richness in favor of satisfying only the lowest, crudest demands of your body so that it would just shut up and go away.
OK, thanks, I get your point now.
On the other hand, I get the impression that Soylent is mainly intended to substitute junk food, rather than gourmet meals, so, hoping this rope doesn’t snap if I pull it this far… Are blow-up dolls better or worse than low-end prostitutes? Meh. What is it to me? De gustibus non est disputandum. Let the market decide! (Of course we don’t know the market will locate the optimal result, because imperfect information/externalities/irrationality/etc., but if anything I’d expect these to favour the junk food.)
Do you only ever buy the cheapest available food that stops you being hungry and makes you feel satiated? Why or why not?
Granted, some preferences may not be “hardwired”, but it doesn’t make them any less real.
Primarily because it is inconvenient.
I’m not convinced that’s true. I believe something resembling condoms, made of cotton or animal intestine, goes as far back as ancient Egypt.
Avicenna’s medical encyclopedia (available in Europe starting in the High Middle Ages) lists dozens of birth control methods, many of which probably even “worked”.
And chemical methods via plants going even further back, by analogy to modern and recent hunter gatherers.
Evolutionary speaking, pharaonic Egypt is recent.
If birth control had been as widespread as it is among present-day non-religious WEIRD people, the time since ancient Egypt to today would have been more than enough.
Yes, it’s also interesting to look at the reasons why it wasn’t widespread for much of the time in question.
My guess is that memetic evolution suppresses birth control faster than genetic evolution can adept to it. Periodically we get outbreaks, like present-day non-religious WEIRD culture, where the suppressing memes collapse due to events in the larger memetic ecosystem.