I view Soylent the way I view Bitcoin: I’d like for others to use it exhaustively for several years to see what happens, then I’d consider whether I would want to use it myself based on the results. In other words, in some areas I want others to make mistakes as my proxies.
For example, synthetic organic chemicals can come with different stereoisomers in the mix, and I’d like to know how the Soylent recipes account for that, because your body’s enzymes won’t work with the wrong three-dimensional orientations of biologically important molecules.
BTW, Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart, strikes me as an interesting guy, a libertarian who disvalues materialism. The article about him in The New Yorker magazine awhile back mentions that he has studied Buckminster Fuller’s writings and tries to live according to Fuller’s idea of “ephemeralization,” which overlaps with the idea of “dematerialization” in economics. To escape the Malthusian trap and make 100 percent of humanity an economic success in a world with finite resources, you have to redesign humanity’s physical life support to squeeze ever higher performance out of each unit of a given resource. In the limit this process turns the material stuff we need into something ghostlike. Rhinehart apparently views Soylent as a way to ephemeralize food production so that we can cut back on dirt farming and go easier on the environment.
Another BTW: A Marxist takes a dim view of Rhinehart, and of lifehacking in general, in this essay:
I view Soylent the way I view Bitcoin: I’d like for others to use it exhaustively for several years to see what happens, then I’d consider whether I would want to use it myself based on the results. In other words, in some areas I want others to make mistakes as my proxies.
For example, synthetic organic chemicals can come with different stereoisomers in the mix, and I’d like to know how the Soylent recipes account for that, because your body’s enzymes won’t work with the wrong three-dimensional orientations of biologically important molecules.
BTW, Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart, strikes me as an interesting guy, a libertarian who disvalues materialism. The article about him in The New Yorker magazine awhile back mentions that he has studied Buckminster Fuller’s writings and tries to live according to Fuller’s idea of “ephemeralization,” which overlaps with the idea of “dematerialization” in economics. To escape the Malthusian trap and make 100 percent of humanity an economic success in a world with finite resources, you have to redesign humanity’s physical life support to squeeze ever higher performance out of each unit of a given resource. In the limit this process turns the material stuff we need into something ghostlike. Rhinehart apparently views Soylent as a way to ephemeralize food production so that we can cut back on dirt farming and go easier on the environment.
Another BTW: A Marxist takes a dim view of Rhinehart, and of lifehacking in general, in this essay:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/19/solyent-neoliberalism-and-the-politics-of-life-hacking/
Interesting comments!