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.
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.
I disagree. A random basket of foods, while likely deficient in something or other, will also likely change what it’s deficient in over time, while Soylent by definition will be consistently deficient. Even if regular food vs Soylent were both equally harmful, the harm from the regular food may be less due to the variability of it. Statistics analogy borrowing from Jaynes: total error in an sampling estimate can be broken down as random error vs systematic error/bias—but random errors gradually cancel out as the sample size increases, while systematic errors remain the same. Soylent is all systematic error.
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.)
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”.
Only if you are able to track the deficiency back to its cause. To reuse scurvy, how many realized that their deficiency was of fresh fruits and vegetables? As opposed to bad air or bacterial poisoning or whatever… If you felt the symptoms of rabbit starvation but had never heard of it or been told about it, would you realize what the problem was in your diet before you happened to eat something fatty and noticed your vague hunger was finally satisfied?
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.
We are adapted to obtain nutrients from food. Since we currently lack a good understanding of exactly what properties of food are nutritionally relevant, it seems unwise to replace natural food with artificial food.
Yes, processed foods are quite unnatural. But Soylent is even less natural than processed foods, so this is irrelevant in the present context.
From an evolutionary standpoint, legumes, milk, and grains are “artificial” food, at least for humans. Agriculture is a recent thing. Would you also endorse the Paleolithic diet movement?
(I do actually endorse the paleolithic diet as probably optimal at the moment and I agree with your central point—I just want to point out that even unprocessed modern diets are already rather unnatural.)
Which is an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 years that we’ve been anatomically modern—although who is to say that they didn’t gather wild grains back then, too.
Of course, even 10,000 years is more than enough time for evolution to change us.
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.
I disagree. A random basket of foods, while likely deficient in something or other, will also likely change what it’s deficient in over time, while Soylent by definition will be consistently deficient. Even if regular food vs Soylent were both equally harmful, the harm from the regular food may be less due to the variability of it. Statistics analogy borrowing from Jaynes: total error in an sampling estimate can be broken down as random error vs systematic error/bias—but random errors gradually cancel out as the sample size increases, while systematic errors remain the same. Soylent is all systematic error.
Hmm. I’ll grant that.
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”.
Not to mention, worst case scenario, if you experience a deficiency, you are still in civilization and may switch back to a normal diet.
Only if you are able to track the deficiency back to its cause. To reuse scurvy, how many realized that their deficiency was of fresh fruits and vegetables? As opposed to bad air or bacterial poisoning or whatever… If you felt the symptoms of rabbit starvation but had never heard of it or been told about it, would you realize what the problem was in your diet before you happened to eat something fatty and noticed your vague hunger was finally satisfied?
The wisdom of nature
Not sure how that applies here, even if we disregard the processed foods that many people live on also being quite unnatural.
We are adapted to obtain nutrients from food. Since we currently lack a good understanding of exactly what properties of food are nutritionally relevant, it seems unwise to replace natural food with artificial food.
Yes, processed foods are quite unnatural. But Soylent is even less natural than processed foods, so this is irrelevant in the present context.
From an evolutionary standpoint, legumes, milk, and grains are “artificial” food, at least for humans. Agriculture is a recent thing. Would you also endorse the Paleolithic diet movement?
(I do actually endorse the paleolithic diet as probably optimal at the moment and I agree with your central point—I just want to point out that even unprocessed modern diets are already rather unnatural.)
Although agriculture is only about 10,000 years old, humans have been gathering and eating wild grains for 30,000.
Which is an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 years that we’ve been anatomically modern—although who is to say that they didn’t gather wild grains back then, too.
Of course, even 10,000 years is more than enough time for evolution to change us.