Hacker News Reader

Comment by aroch | Hacker News Reader

>with the help of ~100 volunteers who beta tested it and offered feedback [1].

Random testing with no controls, oversight or monitoring is useless.

I'll add to that by saying: a year isn't really a long time and I'd argue not nearly long enough to understand what the long term effects this stuff has on ones health, both positive and negative.

They might have had controls, for all we know. The team shared many but not all details of the process, as is their prerogative.

Rhinehart is an engineer by background, and his blog posts ( http://www.robrhinehart.com ) evince a serious respect for the scientific method. Now that version 1.0 has been finalized and is shipping, I think we will definitely see a lot more testing of Soylent from both inside and outside the organization.

It doesn't matter if their blog does lip-service to the scientific method. No pun intended, but the proof is in eating the pudding, that is, in doing science.

"Random testing with no controls, oversight or monitoring is" how we arrived at the current human diet.

But on many orders of magnitude larger than 100 people.

controls = natural selection, survival of the fittest

oversight, monitoring = culture, language, history

Science has the potential to speed up the process of knowledge acquisition. Our current human diet is the result of thousands of years of trial and error. A scientist attempts to follow cause and effect, minimizing confounding variables that obscure cause and effect.

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_...

How much does the current diet have in common with two or even one generation ago?

Some cultures have retained traditional diets, some cultures have not retained traditional diets.d

Unfortunately, anecdotes are enough for most people; they have no concept of sound science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com