3 ms·

This seems like an appropriate place to quote Knuth. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

• tantalor 14y ago
  The field of food preparation has been around for tens if not hundreds of millennia. We've been trying to optimize it for a long time. See also: Invention of Fire.
  • rosser 14y ago
    This optimization is premature in that he's trying to optimize for time and effort when we haven't yet nailed — in terms of fully understanding — the whole "optimal nutrition" thing. Optimizing for performance before you have a fully working implementation is exactly what Knuth was decrying.
    • jessaustin 14y ago
      This optimization is premature in that he's trying to optimize for time and effort when we haven't yet nailed — in terms of fully understanding — the whole "optimal nutrition" thing. Yet every single chef in every single restaurant and every single cook in every single home also optimizes for performance, although not quite as exclusively as Soylent Dude. I think you haven't articulated your actual complaint here.
      • DanBC 14y ago
        > Yet every single chef in every single restaurant and every single cook in every single home also optimizes for performance, No they don't - they often optimise for taste. Some people accidentally get adequate nutrition because they eat so much food, and some of that food is fortified with micronutrients.
        • jessaustin 14y ago
          optimise for taste ...and texture, and price, and familiarity, and ethical sourcing, and religious approval, and cetera, and cetera. Maybe you don't care about halal or free-range, but some people do. Like I said, Soylent Dude is more exclusive in his optimization, but I still contradict the proposition that, "This optimization is premature..." How could it be premature when every human food preparer has been doing it since the invention of fire?
          • rosser 14y ago
            Because his optimization is at the expense of all other considerations. He even admits to being pleasantly surprised that his glop tastes good. That means he'd have consumed it even if it didn't — taste is secondary to convenience. He's taking what we currently believe to be true about the human body's nutritional requirements, dumping that into a blender all chemistry-set-style (it even has oligosaccharides!), and calling it good, because he thinks eating like a human takes too much time and effort. Maybe it will work out for him. I'm certainly interested to see what happens. But if what happens turns out to be some previously unknown (because everyone else has been busy eating at least some actual food) analogue of scurvy or something, I'm not going to be the least bit surprised. I'll probably even have nontrivial schadenfreude. Simply, we do not know enough about nutrition at this point to be making this kind of optimization. It's therefore premature. (Edited)
            • tantalor 14y ago
              Hypothesis: "soylent" contains everything your body needs. If consumption of "soylent" reveals some nutritional deficiency, then you should be surprised, because that means our hypothesis is incorrect! Your expectation should confirm the hypothesis, not negate it.
              • deleted 14y ago
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            • jessaustin 14y ago