Everything has been pivoting into a kickstarter campaign. He is trying to turn this into a business.
Which is all very weird. There are a number of "nutritionally complete" meal supplements on the market. I do not understand why this particular one, with rather quackish supporting claims, gets attention here.
I think if you thought about it for a moment you would realize that he is appealing to the concept of hacking. In this case, hacking diet, something everyone on this site can relate to. This is why it gets attention.
I'm on the fence as to whether I'll to wait and see how this turns out, with his volenteer base or to even hit up the Kickstarter to try it myself, as I personally am at a pivot point where I could change my diet significantly and benefit. If Soylent proves the easy route, so be it.
I think if you thought about it for a moment you would realize that he is appealing to the concept of hacking
Absolutely. Timothy Ferriss has made good bank doing something similar, hacking various aspects of his life.
What earns criticism, though (this is a discussion board, and we aren't here to blanket applaud everything), is the pseudo-science: The "I ate a normal meal and my cognitive process degraded, etc". There is zero scientific validity to those claims, and they give it the rank stench of snake oil (again, exactly like energy bracelets, good aura, or the tactics of the anti-immunization crowd). It may be entirely well-meaning, but such are a million quack remedies and claims.
Well, since he hasn't actually made the kickstarter page we can't tell his true intentions, however the statements he has made previously are that the purpose of the kickstarter campaign is to fund a larger study than the limited local volunteer population he's currently using. The goal is of course to eventually make a commercial product ASSUMING that the research doesn't uncover some kind of insurmountable problem. So yes, this is still research, but the hope is that given some more time it might eventually lead to a product. I know I'm certainly hoping for it, and I'd probably contribute to the kickstarter in the hopes that it bears fruit, and I believe it will based on the results he's achieved so far.
At the end of the day, this is all still experimental, caveat emptor and all that, but everything I've seen so far suggests to me soylent can't possibly be any worse than the garbage served at any number of fast-food restaurants every day.
As for the "nutritionally complete" meal supplements, I think that you can find your answer in the last word of that, "supplement". None of the various "food shakes" that are available commercially are designed to be truly nutritionally complete, rather they're designed to include some of the vitamins and minerals that tend to be lacking in the average diet. Further they tend to be a "one size fits all" affair which out of necessity will be less than optimal for nearly everyone in an attempt to be marginally useful to everyone.
It's probably more like he's trying to turn it into something that can sustain himself while he works on something he's passionate about, which happens to take the form of a business because there aren't many other choices at the moment.
Could be a sham. He's (as far as anyone can tell) dogfooding though, which is, in this case, behavior you'd expect from either a very dedicated sham, or someone who wants to make sure something that they think is a potentially very good idea isn't going to make people terribly sick in three months time.
Everything has been pivoting into a kickstarter campaign. He is trying to turn this into a business.
Which is all very weird. There are a number of "nutritionally complete" meal supplements on the market. I do not understand why this particular one, with rather quackish supporting claims, gets attention here.