I suppose you could spin it "Look how healthy our rats are and there is nothing in this warehouse but Soylent! Testing on rats, check!"
But this made me a bit sad.
I think Soylent is great, it is disruptive, it is more palatable than nutraloaf it could be a great alternative for folks who just need food to live, and it could provide a fascinating 'control' group for various Microbiome projects. But clearly these folks aren't exactly "experienced" as Jimi Hendrix might say.
Here is the challenge, there is a crap ton of knowledge about how to do things that isn't taught in school or on the web or in books. You learn that by 'apprenticing' at a company or organization which is already doing something like what you want to do, and getting the history of all the things they had to overcome and avoid "in the old days." It isn't nostalgia, it is education through experience. That is what experience is. And the only way to get it, is to experience it. It was sad for me when I realized this, I could be smarter than my manager at the time and yet he could be a better manager because he had experienced more issues and overcome them (or at least seen the solution to them) to have a much better sense of what would be an important problem and what would be a minor problem. I could put any situation I wanted in front of him and he had an answer to the "big problem" / "small problem" classification, but he could not express that as an algorithm I could learn from.
So when people come out of college and start companies the next day I tend to cringe a bit as there is a lot of stuff they are going to learn the hard way. That is doubly true when you're doing multiple disciplines (food prep + nutrition + distribution + marketing + regulation + Etc.) and having run a business of type A won't prime you to run one of type B, other than to help you recognize where you need subject matter experts.
One wonders why the first hire at Soylent wasn't someone who had 5 years or more setting up and running a food production line. I don't know but I have heard folks in similar situations say "How hard could it be?"
A laymen thinking they have a sufficient understanding of biochemistry to "hack" the human body isn't only naive, it's unethical. There's a reason we license people to become dieticians.
When a lawnmower breaks, you hit it really hard with a hefty wrench until it starts working again. Maybe even take it apart, clean it, and put it back together again. Worse case, you buy a new one and find yourself out a few thousand dollars.
Percussive maintenance doesn't work on humans. When humans break, they die.
Maybe not as violent, but a bad diet can quickly lead to disease. We never see it in the affluent West but micronutrient disease was and still is a pretty big problem -- you are getting enough food energy, so while you're not starving, you're still dying from your diet.
Yeah, I agree that there's a lot that we don't know about the human body, and I disliked any claims by Soylent that overreached in this way.
But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human.
I think my main problem with the backlash is with the argument that boils down to "We don't know, so let's not risk it". I don't see why we can't try it, and then monitor and react. If I started using Soylent and then 30 days down the road I was feeling ill, I'd probably stop using it first thing while exploring other causes.
"But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human."
We really, really don't. You could be excused for thinking we've got it all figured out if you listened only to news reporting on nutrition studies, but there's so much contradictory information out there that it's difficult to know which end is up.
For example: Soylent, according to the story, is partially fish oil. Did you know that there's a study out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that strongly suggests that fish oil supplementation increases the incidence of aggressive, fatal prostate cancers? What was once a nutrient panacea is likely now contraindicated in men.
Does this mean that Soylent shouldn't be using fish oil? Hard to say. I doubt that even the creators have any idea.
The backlash is "We don't know, and you dumbass without a degree are trying to figure this out without any formal training".
I welcome doctors, researchers, and people who know what they are doing to experiment with the human body. But when a computer science major armed with nothing but a few textbooks in body chemistry claims that he has "figured the body out", I am going to assume otherwise.
Does he have any cooking experience? What is his medical background?
Its not so much that "we don't know", but "the creator of Soylent clearly doesn't know", and yet he wants us to believe that he does.
You have failed to understand the analogy. Hitting things with a wrench is how I fix things. Hitting things with a wrench is not analogous to eating Soylent, hitting things with a wrench is analogous to the medical care required when you break yourself.
The fear is that Soylent, used as hyped, has the potential to break a human.
Breaking yourself, or much worse, others, is a far more serious than breaking a machine. That sort of relaxed attitude towards health is exactly why I would not trust a product like this from people like this.
Soylent really should not be banking on "it is difficult to kill a human", and neither should you.
This is exactly the relaxed attitude I am talking about. Soylent, used as hyped, should not need to be proved hazardous. Soylent, used as hyped, should be shown to be safe.
Going back to lawnmowers, it would be like not wrapping the handle with leather for comfort because we can't prove that it's safe for the lawnmower. We think it's safe, we're pretty sure from our understanding that it's safe, but we can't prove it.
I say give it a try. Let's wrap the handle, observe in operation, and then react when we have more data.
Back to your hyper-relaxed "the human body is no more complicated or serious than a machine" thing?
I can't believe I have not made myself clear on this already, but I'll give it one more go: You can fuck around with lawn mowers because breaking one typically doesn't fucking kill somebody.
If you break your fucking lawnmower, you buy a new one. You don't get to buy another human.
Such a lazy attitude towards human safety is positively chilling. Have you learned absolutely nothing from the horrors seen over past centuries of people treating human lives like any other test subject?
It's only a problem if it harms a human suddenly and irreversibly. I'm guessing that anyone who was suffering problems from a dietary change would have time to correct.
Show me some evidence or even some indication that Soylent will result in an irreversible and sudden decline in health.
I'm guessing that you won't, or can't.
Your argument is "We don't know, so let's not risk it". The risk here is minimal. If it fails to live up to the hype, it's reversible.
> Show me some evidence or even some indication that Soylent will result in an irreversible and sudden decline in health.
> If it fails to live up to the hype, it's reversible.
Once again, demanding evidence that something is unsafe instead of providing evidence that it is not, then in the same breath taking that it is not for granted.
Is that all you are wired to do? It's like what I'm saying is going in one ear and coming out the other.
To be fair, it is "startup hackathon culture" to think like this.
If you build software that doesn't work, people get pissed off and yell at you on web-forums... but in the great scheme of things that's not a big deal.
The main downside is that once you leave software, startup culture becomes incredibly dangerous. If you build an airplane that "doesn't work", people die. If you build a train that "doesn't work", the train crashes into a building and people die. If you build a bridge that doesn't work... people die.
And of course, when it comes to Soylent... if you build a food process that can be infested with diseases, or leave out important dietary nutrition in a particular diet... people can die.
We have all this discussion talking about the diet side of things, but little discussion on the practicality of storage, or whether or not it needs to be refrigerated.
Absolutely agree, it definitely is "startup hackathon culture".
Well, that combined with typical SV engineer hubris. Being bright in your field and well paid does not mean that you can be the master of any field. Some engineering disciplines require tighter tolerances. Some fields, particularly those that use human subjects, have much tighter ethical and safety requirements.
It seems as though being immersed in SV startup culture for too long can render somebody literally unable to comprehend the notion of more stringent requirements and regulations existing.
That's the thing, absent any negative information a dietary change shouldn't need rigourous proof. Unless there's any indication that Soylent will do irreparable damage from day 1, I see no good reason for an individual not to try it and monitor their progress. If it doesn't work for them, then they can stop using it. How hard is that? How is that breaking anyone?
I don't treat human life lightly. You're just treating a dietary change too heavily.
> It's like what I'm saying is going in one ear and coming out the other.
I was just about to say the same of you. I'm done here.
Mono-nutrition is known to have negative health effects.
And there is clear evidence of trial-and-error that has resulted in short-term health effects due to initial versions of Soylent. Longer term effects would not have been identified and so remain a very high risk.
From wikipedia:
Modifications to the ingredient list have occurred in response to results incurred in testing, for example: the first version of the formula omitted iron, which caused Rhineheart to report his heart had begun to race.[8] In other early experiments, intentionally induced overdoses of potassium and magnesium gave Rhinehart cardiac arrhythmia and burning sensations.[8] After the early recipe had stabilized, Rhinehart found himself suffering from joint pain due to a sulfur deficiency. Methylsulfonylmethane was added to address this problem
> Unless there's any indication that Soylent will do irreparable damage from day 1, I see no good reason for an individual not to try it and monitor their progress.
You are demonstrating a very basic failure to analyze risk, understand the variety of medical risks that can be posed by experimental diets, and indeed understand the concerns that other people are raising (the concern is not that you will die after drinking it three times in a row.....).
the human body can adapt to bad nutrition for a long time. Everything will be fine until its not.
What if Soylent increases the risk of some form of cancer or some long term damage to the liver of other organs ? You wont know until its too late.
You want people to prove that Soylent is bad, but instead the Soylent team needs to proof that Soylent is good! And a couple of dozen reviews from people using it for a month does not prove anything.
The human body isn't a machine. It is a more complex thing that includes many machines. There are so many features of the human body that we can not examine and that we don't even know where to look...
The real question is "Soylent is perfectly optimized... for what?" Soylent may be optimized for "meeting the models of nutrition that we have." Yet, those models may be like using an FAQ to run a nuclear reactor. I'm not trying to fear-monger. I think Soylent is a great experiment. I wish I had to guts to carry out the reporter's month-long experiment.
That sounds like a winning long term strategy if the opposition makes decisions solely to maximize short term profit. Don't overestimate the opposition. Bad money pushes out good.
But this made me a bit sad.
I think Soylent is great, it is disruptive, it is more palatable than nutraloaf it could be a great alternative for folks who just need food to live, and it could provide a fascinating 'control' group for various Microbiome projects. But clearly these folks aren't exactly "experienced" as Jimi Hendrix might say.
Here is the challenge, there is a crap ton of knowledge about how to do things that isn't taught in school or on the web or in books. You learn that by 'apprenticing' at a company or organization which is already doing something like what you want to do, and getting the history of all the things they had to overcome and avoid "in the old days." It isn't nostalgia, it is education through experience. That is what experience is. And the only way to get it, is to experience it. It was sad for me when I realized this, I could be smarter than my manager at the time and yet he could be a better manager because he had experienced more issues and overcome them (or at least seen the solution to them) to have a much better sense of what would be an important problem and what would be a minor problem. I could put any situation I wanted in front of him and he had an answer to the "big problem" / "small problem" classification, but he could not express that as an algorithm I could learn from.
So when people come out of college and start companies the next day I tend to cringe a bit as there is a lot of stuff they are going to learn the hard way. That is doubly true when you're doing multiple disciplines (food prep + nutrition + distribution + marketing + regulation + Etc.) and having run a business of type A won't prime you to run one of type B, other than to help you recognize where you need subject matter experts.
One wonders why the first hire at Soylent wasn't someone who had 5 years or more setting up and running a food production line. I don't know but I have heard folks in similar situations say "How hard could it be?"