[n72]

The founder of Soylent clearly believes he's an expert in many, many fields: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331

BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

[welanes]

> BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude?

Got you, brah -

Dilettantism: a person having a superficial interest in an art or field of knowledge without investing the usually required effort. See also: dabbler.

[mhb]

polymyth?

[ghostly_s]

Just plain polymath will do fine, seeing as the last time anyone could make legitimate claim to this title was probably 500 years ago.

[ckozlowski]

I agree with you in principle that they're rather rare. But there's been a few in that time-span.

The most recent that comes to mind? Read about Bruce Dickinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson

[grogenaut]

Reading that I see musician who did a solo album and some other bands, common, who flys planes... common in actors, and is an entrepeneur.. in beer (food), all super common for someone who has made money.

I don't see a broad range here, this sounds super common, how much crap does Michael Jordan or John Travolta have in common with this guy.

I don't see: patents, masters degrees (not too hard), charities, news articles, really anything that shows he's able to just pick up anything quickly.

[alasdair_]

What about someone like Bill Gates? Programmer and businessman, sure but he also knows a fuck ton about infectious diseases and global politics and all kinds of other things.

[_Wintermute]

A fuck ton in this case is probably less than an undergraduate (micro) biologist. Hardly a polymath unless he was producing new research in the field.

[314]

Buckminster Fuller?

[ant6n]

Renaissance dilletant

[nickbauman]

I was going to say "amateurish" but I think your "dilettantism" is spot-on.

[qwertyuiop924]

Ah, what I do with programming. But I'm actually trying to gain deeper knowledge.

[eriknstr]

At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post. This gave me a positive impression at the start of the blog post and I was agreeing with what he said initially, but then it went downhill.

I would not want to get rid of my kitchen and I would absolutely never replace my food with Soylent, especially now that I've heard of all the people getting sick from it. Also, Gawker said [1] that nutritionists say that Soylent is not a sufficient replacement for a real diet.

I do not agree that shopping for groceries is a nightmare. It might be in the big grocery stores in the US but in my country and city most grocery stores are pretty small, so I just drop by there a couple of times a week, pick up some food, pay for it and then I'm on my way home which is practically next door to the closest store (110 meters apart to be exact).

At that point I did not bother to read the rest of the blog post.

[1]: http://gizmodo.com/rob-rhineharts-latest-attempt-to-make-you...

[delecti]

That gizmodo article's only "source" of nutritionists is from this article [1] (another article on the same site). That article's only source of nutritionists is someone who just called them up before Soylent was even on the market, and while none of those nutritionists had examined the product.

Many cats and dogs will eat the same food source almost exclusively for most of their lives without any ill effect. Obviously Soylent is having problems right now, but outright dismissing the mere possibility of a healthy "people-kibble" by those nutritionists seems rather unscientific.

[1] http://io9.gizmodo.com/could-soylent-really-replace-all-of-t...

[ddeck]

In addition, I'd also point out that the term "nutritionist" doesn't even mean anything is most jurisdictions, as highlighted by the following anecdote:

"A demonstration of the ease in which it is possible to become an accredited nutritionist can be seen in Dr Ben Goldacre's successful application to have his dead cat Hettie accredited as a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants" [1]

I'd typically listen to what a Dietitian has to say about nutrition, but not anyone calling themselves a nutritionist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist#Regulation_of_the...

[CodeMage]

> In addition, I'd also point out that the term "nutritionist" doesn't even mean anything is most jurisdictions

That bears repeating. Dietitian actually means something, whereas nutrition doesn't. Dara O'Briain has a nice way of describing the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8

[paavokoya]

   I'd also point out that the term "nutritionist" doesn't even mean anything is most jurisdictions

As someone who is living with someone becoming an accredited "Nutritionist" I can assure you this is not the case. There is an extreme amount of scientific research and cellular biology that is studied. This may not be the case for all nutritionist courses, but to dismiss an entire field because of one case is extremely ignorant.

BUT.. this is Hacker News where coders go to confirm each other's biases about the world at large and remind each other how much knowledge you can have by sitting behind your work desk.

[jamiek88]

Multi choice online testing is not extreme research. A phd is research, a masters is research.

She may well be taking some courses but let's not devalue these words.

A dietitian is at least masters qualified that is what people were pointing out.

[taco_emoji]

A) Maybe you're in a jurisdiction where it actually does mean something? That exception is clearly defined in the sentence you quoted.

B) The claim is not that nutritionists are useless, it's that (in most jurisdictions) the word is useless. The fact that you know a non-useless one does not disprove the claim.

[jmcdiesel]

Most dogs and cat's however are domesticated and have been eating a mostly single-source diet for many many generations... some adaptation has occurred. There is a reason they don't give zoo animals kibble (aside from the herbivores who naturally focus on a single food source, and the pellets are made from that food source). Lions don't get kibble, and they don't even get a single kind of meat, they rotate their food, because if they dont, the lions become depressed and sluggish and sick. We're meant to eat a variety of food - the variety stimulates our internal biome which has more effect over us than just how we digest our food - our gut is basically a second brain and has a direct effect on our mood and our brain chemistry, and can even influence our thinking process (this is how when you eat something that makes you sick, you naturally avoid that thing for a while)

[angus-prune]

This isn't remotely true.

Look at the wiki article on dog food [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_food#History] - diets for dogs have been ad hoc and varied for thousands of years. I'd argue that it is only with the advent of kibble (in the late C19) and canned cat/dog food (in the early C20) that pets started eating single-source diets.

I do not think that this is enough time for adaption, and any selective breeding has been focused on other attributes rather than diet.

[DanBC]

> Many cats and dogs will eat the same food source almost exclusively for most of their lives without any ill effect.

Where "without any ill effect" includes tooth decay, obesity, and death from kidney damage among others.

[GrinningFool]

> Where "without any ill effect" includes tooth decay, obesity, and death from kidney damage among others.

Tooth decay: giving your dogs something hard to chew on is essential if you don't relish the idea of brushing your dogs' teeth. If they're not gnawing on actual bones, their teeth aren't get cleaned. Hard chew toys are a good substitute. The only dog I've had with tooth troubles didn't like chewing hard things.

Obesity: that's not a result of an unvaried diet, that's a result of eating too much and/or not enough exercise for the amount of food being given.

Kidney damage: I find it's surprisingly hard to find unbiased information around this that isn't published by pro- and anti-commercial dog food organizations. Even within that subset, documented facts seem rare, and articles read more like scare advertisements to encourage $PREFERRED_FEEDING_METHOD[1]. Anecdotally: after six dogs and three cats that have all lived somewhat to significantly longer than the breed average life span while being fed largely the same food for their entire lives... kidney troubles have never been a problem for us.

1.The closest to consistent info that I could find were statements that high vegetable protein content can cause kidney troubles in older dogs. Even these only showed up on a) "Feed your dog all natural" blog-type-things, b) specialty dog food sellers/manufacturer sites, c) copy lifted from these places largely verbatim and deposited onto other sites.

[tomcam]

> kidney troubles have never been a problem for us.

Congratulations on your robust good health! How about your pets?

[delecti]

Certainly not all cats and dogs experience all of those things. All you've done is highlighted the possibility for a nutritionally unsuitable meal source. Obviously it's possible to construct a food which does not meet our nutritional needs, many Americans have managed that themselves. That does not however dismiss the existence of pets which live long and healthy lives, or the possibility of an analogous fodo source for humans.

[cyphar]

Pets that live long and healthy lives do not eat a single form of "kibble". Obesity and health problems in pets is a very well known issue (talk to any vet and they'll tell you all about it) and it's mostly due to overfeeding by owners and not enough variety in diet. Doesn't that sound eerily familiar to the problems with human food consumption?

There are so many health problems in the tech industry, why are we creating more and making businesses out of it?

[m_coder]

I often hear testimonials from owners who say "I have been feeding this food for 14 years and my dog looks great!" I think that there could be such a thing as a good enough people kibble the same as I believe that many dogs live healthy and happy lives eating one kind of dog food all their lives. This is not to say that I believe all dogs could eat the same exact kibble all their lives and be perfectly healthy. Full Disclosure: I have owned a pet store for the last 8 months after getting tired of programming.

[Avshalom]

In addition to what other people said: changing dog food is often accompanied by horrible diarrhea, up through the mid 90s dog shit turned bone and grew hair and canine coprophagia is usually attributed to insufficient nutrition. So you know: dog food, we're still figuring it out.

[ceejayoz]

> At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post.

I'd note that he got anemia early on in his Soylent journey because he forgot iron was a basic nutrient.

[dpcx]

I'd note that many people in my social circle and family forget that iron is a basic nutrient. It happens. People forget that sodium is as well, especially with all of the talk about how bad salt is for you.

[pjlegato]

Presumably the Soylent guy ought to be held to a higher standard of knowing what "basic nutrients" are, as he actively promotes himself as an expert on the topic and encourages people to buy his drink full of "all basic nutrients." If your friends and family aren't doing that, their ignorance is excusable.

[eip]

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/not-just-bad-for-horm...

[datashovel]

I thought it was sulfur:

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570

[epalmer]

I love grocery shopping and cooking. It provides mental relief from the day's grind. The sites and sounds at a good grocery store are stimulating. Wegmans comes to mind.

[arcadeparade]

The prion disease rumours circulating on Twitter about Soylent are really disturbing.

[computerphage]

Prion disease has a case-fatality rate of 100%. That's not an estimate or approximation and it's not rounded up. They are also untreatable.

There are only five well studied prion diseases (because of their rarity). Two are exclusively heritable: fatal-familial insomnia and Gerstmann–Sträussler–Scheinker syndrome. One, Kuru, is transmitted via cannibalism.

The incubation times are extremely long. Some estimates for Kuru go up to 20-50 years.

The most prevalent form of prion disease in humans is new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (nvCJD) or Human Mad Cow which has a lag of about 10 years based on CDC data. It is transmitted by eating tainted beef products. Let me stress that this is extremely rare: there have been 3 confirmed cases in the United States.

It is extremely unlikely that Soylent is a vector for prion disease, especially since it's been vegan since version 1.2 and never contained beef as an ingredient. Even if it somehow contained tainted beef, given that it's been available for less than 3 years, it's extremely unlikely that any cases of nvCJD (of which there have only a few in the last decade) or any other cases of prion disease were caused by Soylent.

There is good reason to question the safety of Soylent given its record but "prion disease rumors circulating on Twitter" are utterly ridiculous.

[bathMarm0t]

Trolling? Soylent -> Soylent green -> Movie where you grind up poor people and turn them into food -> Cannibalism -> Known vectors for prion diseases.

[lexhaynes]

Can you elaborate on these rumors?

[arcadeparade]

Read on Twitter a while ago about a guy who ate almost nothing but Soylent for two months and started getting joint pain and trembling, and was falling over a lot. Then there was a comment by someone on Reddit who started having seizures and anxiety and blamed Soylent. Seems crazy that people are just eating nothing but this stuff for months on end and not thinking about the consequences.

[computerphage]

It's outrageously unlikely that either of those people had a prion disease. See my reply to your previous comment for details. The median duration of CJD (which is the most similar to nvCJD and the best proxy for the statistic I could find easilty) is 4 months. That's duration of the disease before death. If the commenter had those symptoms because of prion disease, I'd estimate a greater than 50% chance he'll be dead by February. Again, it's extremely unlikely that he had prion disease.

[ceejayoz]

I'm anti-Soylent, but I'm not sure I'd classify "two random anonymous internet anecdotes" as "disturbing".

[jedmeyers]

Prion diseases usually take longer than the couple of months to develop symptoms.

[jayess]

"I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare."

This kind of writing is insufferable.

[yolesaber]

My favorite is when he talks about his enlightened post-kitchen lifestyle.

"I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber."

Did this dude just leave the stove on all the time and keep the knives pointed up next to the fridge or something?

[n72]

Yeah, so presumptuous of the architect to assume he'd want a kitchen. I'll bet this architect also dared to assume he'd want a toilet.

[chillingeffect]

I think when we get intensely focused and emotionally invested, we tend to think our work is the answer to the world's problems and every other way of doing things is flawed.

For instance, Sergey Brin claiming Google Glass would prevent the "emasculating" effect of smart phones....[1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/tech/innovation/brin-google-gl...

[klipt]

Now included with Soylent: antimatter suppositories! Never use the toilet again!

[CPLX]

Looks clear now however that opting for the toilet was a prescient move.

[awj]

You just have to read it in the voice of a stage actor clearly overdoing it on a dramatic soliloquy. Not sure if you're into comedians, but Paul F. Tompkins does this pretty frequently and well.

That said, it's still insufferable, just mildly entertaining as well.

[kelseydh]

This reminds me of the "Rails is Omakase" video ripping on DHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

It doesn't even have decent scansion tho.

[paavokoya]

Not everyone wants to read through life like Nathan Lane.

[webmaven]

Or Jon Lovitz.

"Acting!"

[monochromatic]

Good Lord. Anybody using the word "nevermore" outside of a discussion of Poe is 99% likely to be someone I won't get along with.

[krick]

Hey, and when writers of newyorker.com do it, it is called "fantastic journalism"…

[n72]

You seriously can't dustinguish between his writing and that of in the New Yorker?

[jly]

This guy is obviously smart and has some interesting ideas, but unfortunately a lot of them are very disagreeable to most people. I could barely get past his rant against having a kitchen and using retail stores.

I have nothing wrong with a meal replacement like soylent (and the many other products that are basically the same thing on the market), but his ideas and his motivation behind it are disturbing. I'm all for optimization but this isn't the kind of world I would want to live in.

[lexhaynes]

He seems to have obsessive compulsive tendencies so severe that he can't eat food (e.g. "Kitchens are dirty") combined with some narcissism...

[CuriouslyC]

The irony is that a mildly dirty kitchen is actually good for you - you get exposure to a greater amount of bacterial diversity, which keeps your immune system functioning properly, and gives you an opportunity to pick up some beneficial microbes that can aid in digestion.

[colejohnson66]

> "Kitchens are dirty"

I don't get that logic. Your toilet is probably cleaner than your kitchen or phone. Doesn't mean you'd eat off your toilet. Besides, you can always clean your kitchen.

[posterboy]

Probably? Like over a 50% chance? How did you reach that estimate?

[colejohnson66]

Just a Google search of places dirtier than the toilet

[posterboy]

from the summary to the first hit:

>These surfaces have more germs than the average toilet seat, and you've likely ...

That's a quantitative "analyses", not qualitative, but "dirtier" implies both. Go drink out of the toilet, if you believe that, I will not.

[TallGuyShort]

Judging by many of the comments on here that think the problem has been obvious all along, I'd call it Hacker News Syndrome.

[brazzledazzle]

Everyone else's job is easier than my job.

[arvinjoar]

It's not a bad attitude though.

Experts with authority granted to them in the form of titles have failed us, and keep failing us in so many areas. Ranging from nutrition to psychology, we really shouldn't put their work on a pedestal. Techies are a smart bunch on average and can stomach a lot more complexity than the average joe. It makes sense for them to try to pick up stuff outside of their line of work.

Take Elon Musk as the most successful example. Deferring to experts is a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.

[tpeo]

There's a difference between "thinking for yourself" and "uncritically discouting past work". And that's the difference between asking yourself whether power poses really work and and coming in kicking doors, yelling that psychology is bullshit. First one is engaging in very much reasonable level of critical thought, whereas the second is just thinking "Dunning-Kruger is okay, when I do it".

On a side note, I don't quite get what Elon Musk has to do with this. Isn't hea millionaire paying big bucks for expert engineering talent to put his rockets up in the air?

[arvinjoar]

I'm not saying Psychology is bullshit, why would you frame what I said as such? I think it's in general super interesting. I'm just saying that you can gain a lot more from it by evaluating things critically than you can from swallowing anything and everything that's in vogue uncritically because some authority figure tells you it's the Truth.

Also, to nitpick, Dunning-Kruger is certainly ok when the top performers do it, if you care to look at the actual graph[1].

Elon Musk is very much involved in the engineering of his projects, he's not a Steve Jobs-style CEO. As tomp pointed out[2], Elon was willing to look at things outside of his area of expertise, and guess what, he actually managed to learn quite a lot about those things.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/bJXQWRY.jpg

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814851

[tpeo]

I mentioned power poses and psychology because it occurred to me as an example since you happened to mention psychology. I don't personally have any knowledge regarding your attitudes towards psychology nor did I intend to frame what you said in any way.

Prior findings must be indeed critically evaluated. That's not the issue. The issue is refusing to even acknowledge them or to acknowledge current field wisdom due to some unwarranted sense of superiority. Taking the dangerous and daring approach to crossing expertise fields instead of being careful is fine, of course. Everyone is free to do whatever they want! But if the daring do fail, they will look like complete asses. They had been given plenty of warning before hand.

And, this is the key and the real reason why I'm saying all this, the daring will fail more often than the careful. The most frequent reason why people try to enter a new field is because they think they might have some superior insight on the matter, whereas the development of each field is chiefly constrained by the amount of data available to it. Ideas are never in short supply relative to data. This isn't to say that outsiders can't make meaningful contributions, or that cross-field collaboration is useless, far from it. But that there isn't much that can done beyond what's warranted by the data.

I'll pass up the opportunity to talk about Musk, because I don't feel I'm qualified to do it.

But as for your nitpick: I don't see why top performers incorrectly gauging their own ability would be "okay". They would pass up great opportunities because they perceive their ability to be lower than what it actually is, and they might experience unwarranted anxiety and feelings of inadequacy (something like an impostor syndrome) if they incorrectly perceive their ability to be lower that that of their peers. There are many ways in which this might not be "okay".

[leshow]

I think you have an imaginary view of what Musks thinking process is like. The reality is he pays top dollar for experts in every field on his interest or that will advance some other goal of his.

[mtberatwork]

> Deferring to experts is a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.

Not deferring to experts when you posses surface level knowledge (or less) of a subject is a sure-fire way to shoot yourself in the foot.

[baldfat]

He is just being a cynic thinking he is a intellectual skeptic.

Cynic : Cynics are distrustful of any advice or information that they do not agree with themselves. Cynics do not accept any claim that challenges their belief system.

"Being skeptical, not cynical, helps us in forming beliefs that are in agreement with evidence."

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/08/im-a-skepti...

[arvinjoar]

That's quite a conclusion, given so little data. Priors may vary I guess.

[baldfat]

No their was plenty of data. I run into cynics all the time that just doubts everything "Experts" says and their arguments are not about the actual data or implementation of the data.

[colejohnson66]

The biggest I've run into are people who believe in homeopathy. Give them all the evidence that it doesn't work and they'll disregard it in favor of their anecdotal evidence combined with confirmation bias.

[daxorid]

In this particular case, the experts have not only been wrong, but been deadly wrong for the last thirty years. Nutrition has been revealed to be woo-woo pseudoscience after mountains of recent research has debunked the lipid hypothesis for heart disease.

Reinhart has NO obligation to heed the "wisdom" of people who have been killing us with sugar for decades now. We should have nothing but contempt for these charlatans.

[__jal]

Great, so you've discounted one tradition of food advice, although it is far from clear whom, exactly, you're discounting - you start talking about what sounds like dietitians, but end talking about what sounds like processed food manufacturers. But never mind.

Now you have a search problem. Which dilettante do you want to listen to? A techie making a protein shake that makes people sick is far from your only option. As best I can tell, most folks tend to choose diet fads based on a messy set of priors and an aesthetic judgement about the surrounding marketing.

It makes market sense to me that something like Soylent would find a niche; there is a segment that finds eating a hassle, and so an anti-food with hints of Jetsons-food-capsule, from-the-future marketing has a place alongside all the other goofy food fads.

I just don't see any reason to rank Soylent any higher than macrobiotic hyperlocal kale wonder-juice, either. (I do rank both higher than the colloidal silver thing; as far as I know, neither turns you blue.)

[webmaven]

Nutrition experts aren't the ones responsible for the prevalence of sugar and starches in our diet, though:

http://www.whale.to/a/light.html

[arvinjoar]

No, you should definitely listen to what experts have to say. You should then proceed to evaluate it critically. Be mindful of what methodology they use. What assumptions they bake into what they're saying. Ways their model doesn't fit reality. And so on, and so forth. You should seldom defer to them.

[wallace_f]

Thank you for that.

To add to that, this reminds me of the kind of Epaulettes Feynman talked about in SYJMF -- creating titles, awards and distinctions to create an aura around experts. This kind of "aura" of trust and distinction is something that I think in 100 years we will look back on the same way we look at experts of our past: imagine how you view religious leaders who held the keys to understanding life and the universe, or doctors who did more harm than good.

Here's an anecdote. Post WWII the Nobel Prize was awarded for the lobotomy procedure... Experts with authority and all the fanciest Feynman-epaulettes that the world has dreamt up have failed us, that's a certain fact.

[ebbv]

Yes I love how Elon doesn't hire rocket engineers and scientists or consult with NASA. Oh wait he does those things.

[arvinjoar]

If you had read my comment a little more charitably, you might have noticed that I never said you shouldn't consult or listen to experts, but simply that you shouldn't assume someone who is not an expert can't figure things out in a field outside their line of work.

Experts weren't always so kind to Elon[1] either.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

[livingparadox]

On a side note, disregarding experts is most certainly not what Rob Rinehart is doing. They specifically only regard expert, peer-reviewed literature as authoritative sources for formula changes. Trying to depend on your own analysis is a poor substitute for standing on the shoulders of giants.

[kiba]

Elon Musk made himself into an expert.

I would consider him an authority on rocketry.

[arvinjoar]

Kind of proving my point? :) He did have to go aginst the grain though[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

[sn9]

He's hardly a typical case.

People who get into graduate physics programs at Stanford rarely are.

And the amount of information one has to add to a solid undergrad education in physics to do rocketry is relatively minor compared to the amount most dilettantes need to add to become an expert.

[stomato]

> Take Elon Musk as the most successful example. Deferring to experts is a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.

I'm not sure what you mean. Elon Musk is an extremely purpose-driven, incredibly intelligent person in addition to being successful. From wikipedia:

'He is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Motors; co-founder and chairman of SolarCity; co-chairman of OpenAI; co-founder of Zip2; and founder of X.com which merged with PayPal of Confinity. As of June 2016, he has an estimated net worth of US$11.5 billion, making him the 83rd wealthiest person in the world. Musk has stated that the goals of SolarCity, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX revolve around his vision to change the world and humanity. His goals include reducing global warming through sustainable energy production and consumption, and reducing the "risk of human extinction" by "making life multiplanetary" by setting up a human colony on Mars. In addition to his primary business pursuits, he has also envisioned a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop, and has proposed a VTOL supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion, known as the Musk electric jet.'

These are not things that just a "successful" person does. He breaks the mold from tech: the mind of Nikola Tesla but with much more business sense.

[tomp]

S/he means that Elon Musk set up a rocket company and a car/battery company, without previously being an expert in either of these things. Sure, he became an expert by learning, but he also noticed and used many things that earlier experts have missed.

[Chrisjay]

I would call it mania. If I wanted a pejorative, I'd call him euphoric.

[djur]

As someone who struggled with bipolar for years, his writing reminds me a lot of the shit I used to write in notebooks when manic. I was always convinced I had figured out a way to live a purer, better life without the bullshit everyone else always managed to slog through. And I never even had to sleep, except on the occasional bench in the middle of the day!

[carrja99]

> The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them.

What in the world...?

[lgas]

https://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-fi...

[adrianm]

This has to be satire. Right? Please be satire.

Thanks for sharing this though, I was previously under the impression Soylent was created by someone relatively sane.

[wetmore]

I assumed it was satire, considering he's written other tongue-in-cheek posts, like http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005.

[BatFastard]

His attitude is at least better informed then many celebrities. And he was a celebrity for a short time.

[grapeshot]

Engineer's Disease.

[ekianjo]

Maybe thats the kind of attitude that makes founders good at taking risks, while more careful people would rationalize themselves out of trying new things ?

[jlarocco]

> BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude?

Insufferable ;-)

[dghughes]

That situation with his house/pod was pretty bizarre too are we sure he isn't slipping mentally?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/27/soylent-ceo-...

[code_sardaukar]

In my high school they had a lot of words for this attitude, including "faggot", "square", "nerd" and "nerd faggot". As someone who grew up in this environment, I'm very interested in the critiques of people such as myself who allegedly held these attitudes.

[Artoemius]

This was a fun read, and I found myself agreeing with him on most of the points.

I would call his attitude "confidence in his own ability to reason clearly".

[hatsunearu]

Dunning-Kruger effect comes to mind.

[0-9]

A hybrid of hubris and chutzpah

[LouisSayers]

Seems to work for Donald Trump

[MistahKoala]

If I was feeling snarky, I'd offer 'ultracrepidarian'.

[wetmore]

I think that's satire, in the same style of http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005.

[gm-conspiracy]

CEO?

[mixmastamyk]

"Fake it 'till you make it."

[gmarx]

I kind of like "Hybris" even though I assume it was a typo.

How about "deludbertise"?

[yolesaber]

In Greek, the "Y" makes an "uu" sound so it's not entirely incorrect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon

[tomcam]

Pompous

[relics443]

I wouldn't call it hybris either :-p

[dilemma]

> Getting rid of my fridge was one of the greatest days of my life.

[alvarosm]

yeah I have two good words: mental illness. the guy is nuts