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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

>I do not understand the negativity surrounding Soylent.

Someone gives free publicity to you and you compare their healthy skepticism to Vitalism. Seriously?

No one is upset that you're trying to make something new. No one. More power to you. But here is what pisses people off: The neverending strawmen. The constant jabs at other diets and other approaches. The smugness in every blog post. The assumption that you've mastered in a matter of months what you think others have failed at for years. And the certainty you'll have revolutionized the world in no more than a decade.

People don't like that kind of arrogance.

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I don't really care about the constant jabbing, smugness, or strawmen.

I am angry with Rhinehart because he has the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor for that matter.

>>I am angry with Rhinehart because he have the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor for that matter.

Can you point me to a food manufacturer that uses the scientific method to support their ridiculous claims?

Or have you not seen the fine-print on the vast majority of food packaging along the lines of "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA"?

Can you point me to a food manufacturer that uses the scientific method to support their ridiculous claims? Or have you not seen the fine-print on the vast majority of food packaging along the lines of "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA"?

Your point is?

I thought my point is rather clear. You said you are angry at Rob because he "[has] the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor."

What I am telling you that, if that is the case, then you need to be angry at pretty much every food manufacturer ever. Because they also do not use scientific method or any type of rigor when they make claims about their products.

There is nothing to interesting to say when you and I are in agreement about how the food industry sell food.

There's a number of blogs and writers who take the nutritional supplement manufacturers to task for their outrageous claims.

Furthermore, saying "They can get away with this because everyone else gets away with this" is kinda silly.

Can you point me to a food manufacturer or anyone that says you should consume their product to the exclusion of all other nutrients?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMwCfTBjLaw

QED.

I'm confused, are you saying this in support of Soylent? If so, it's right up there with this quote from the article:

> We do not yet know what the ideal diet for a human is, but our present understanding permits us to easily design a diet that is far superior to what most people are eating.

If your bar for quality and benefits is the existing food industry then you've already massively failed. The existing food industry, especially in America is completely fucked. Of course you can trivially manufacture a healthier diet than what most people eat, because most people eat a lot of industrially processed foods engineered to fool your senses and get you addicted so that they can sell you more over-priced rehashed versions of the same subsidized farm grains at an obscenely profitable markup.

That's not evidence that we are anywhere near having a clue how to manufacture an ideal diet from raw chemicals. The fact that he keeps painting this picture that diet is just a list of chemicals and pays no attention to how the body metabolize is dangerously reductive. Animal metabolism is nowhere near as simple as the simple and isolated chemistry and physics on which he bases his reasoning. When anyone raises these issues he sticks his fingers in his ears hand-waves it away with accusations that people want him to fail for pseudo-religious emotional reasons.

Well, I for one don't want him to fail, the goal is noble and could be widely beneficial. However it will never be achieved by someone who is so willfully ignorant about the complexity of the problem he is facing.

I always found it strange that for a food product with a wildly successful kickstarter that "The Team" didn't have one person onboard with a nutrition or food sciences background.

honestly, speaking as a biochemist, odds are I'd trust them less. Not saying that good ones don't exist, but a lot of people with "that background" are kind of clueless.

I don't. That's what this whole 'disruption' meme is: an outside force of some kind swoops in and brings some sort of knowledge that those in their filter bubble couldn't see.

That's what this whole 'disruption' meme i

I'm pretty sure thats part of it but I'm also pretty sure you'll find most "disruptive" teams have some domain experience in there somewhere.

As a fellow hacker who has spent a significant amount of time trying to understand how diet, exercise, and nutrition work - especially within my own body - I can confirm the Soylent campaign's "know it all" attitude is off-putting.

But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.

At least for those we can't or haven't been trained to see through it, cockiness does help sell. This article was posted here a few weeks ago. It widened my perspective considerably:

"... the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence." [1]

[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/08/why_do_so_many_incompetent_m...

Also, IMO the elephant in the room of Soylent is that not all bodies, metabolic systems, are identical. We are a species in transition, not some kind of stable, predictable system. We experience a level of mutations between generations - which is how we stumbled onto larger frontal cortex and physical diversity. Yet, we perversely hallucinate that we are all identical and have identical needs.

Let name this "the typical body fallacy"

This is a salient point. Think about how writing software for one platform (much less highly optimizing it for that platform) doesn't guarantee cross compatibility. Soylent might work for a group of 20 something white males in California, but what about folks from other walks of life?

Then the recipe will adapt, simple as that; just like code does.

He's not trying to make this a highly optimized formula, he's trying to make it a widely used base platform with the minimal required pieces that work across platforms.

I think there is enough overlap between people we can find a common formula that will work for 90% of people on a 90% of meals basis (regular food already does this).

Yes, the current formula probably will not survive contact with the broader reality, but then he'll just make a v2.

And until v2 happens? What is with malnutrition, or possible worse effects?

When it comes to my body, my health and these subjects, I tend to err on the side of safety, instead on the side of something, that is "scientifically tested" like soylent.

I know, with our food industry nowadays it is, that we are the rats in the longtime testing lab.

But that is the reason, I changed my foodsources. And it is the reason I would never buy soylent.

The other reason is, that I really see more in food, then giving fuel to my body. It is an experience of cooking, of creating, of being creative, an experience of taste, of texture, a social experience and so much more.

So there you have the two reasons. The missing scientific rigor/testing. The arrogance, to believe, what he did is best for all and better then everything till now. And my personal take on food.

Seems to apply to just about every social movement in the context of any problem domain, really. People are far too cavalier about universalizing their own needs and preferences.

> IMO the elephant in the room of Soylent is that not all bodies, metabolic systems, are identical.

This is directly addressed in the article.

I don't get what his goal is. As best as I can tell, Ensure is the product he's trying to create, and it's been on the market for years.

Well... that logic would have told all the "micro brewers" of recent years to just pack it up because Bud Light is already at the store.

Microbrewers compete on taste, or on producing varieties of beer that are not reduced-calorie pilsners.

I have not seen a solid explanation of how Soylent is distinct from Ensure. Rhinehart claims: "No MRP has been designed to be a sustainable source of nutrition", but this is not true. Ensure and medical liquid meal replacements can be used. He even admits as much (and contradicts himself) when he says further down "patients have lived for many years on synthetic diets in a medical setting"

Is he competing on cost? So far Soylent doesn't seem cheaper, and I don't see how his formula can compete on cost with a larger, more developed business with greater capital resources and infrastructure.

The taste of Soylent is described as "inoffensive", so I don't think he's competing on taste

So, unlike microbrewers, it's not clear how soylent goes up against products like Ensure. And I don't think the company has clearly laid out the advantages of Soylent vs. Ensure.

Let me rephrase: That logic would have told all the "micro brewers" of really recent years to just pack it up because Samuel Adams is already at the store.

And since when did "that is already available" prevent anyone from having a go at it anyway?

Rhinehart means sustainable from an environmental perspective in this argument.

The main things he wants to do to differentiate is to make it cheaper (ensure complete is $9.00, at walmart, for 1400 calories; his current goal is $5.00 per day, around 2400 kCal), scalable (recipe will be open sourced once complete), and environmentally sustainable (things that can be manufactured on a billions of servings scale).

Cheap stuff you can chug instead of eating a meal? Every meal? Just point me to it.

Rhinehart means sustainable from an environmental perspective in this argument.

I agree. I think the products are similar in composition. Ensure is a bit expensive - $10-$20/day, and I think he is targeting closer to $5/day. The "convenience" marketing strategy is also a differentiator. If he is successful and creates a new market, I am sure other food companies will offer similar products.

Ensure has more sugar than I would personally want. It is designed to be palatable so old people in nursing homes will actually drink it. Soylent seem to lean toward better nutrition instead of palatability.

> The smugness in every blog post. The assumption that you've mastered in a matter of months what you think others have failed at for years

Who tried to make permanent, complete meal replacement and failed?

I'd be pretty surprised if no one has created a complete meal replacement before, but really I was getting at how every blog post seems to be about how Soylent is not just convenient, but nutritionally superior to other diets.

Perhaps Rhinehart doesn't feel that way, but it's the vibe I get.

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