[gabemart]

I was also alarmed by that paragraph.

    > Various doctors, dietitians, and food scientists 
    > have been reviewing our formula and providing 
    > suggestions as they see fit. We have been listening 
    > to them and testing these changes in our beta 
    > program. Each modification requires making a new
    > batch of Soylent by hand, shipping them to our
    > beta testers, and gathering their feedback, a
    > process that takes at least 10 days per revision. 

The idea that the dietary advice of a doctor could meaningfully be tested in a few weeks by a beta program of laypeople with no scientific controls is utterly ridiculous.

Even if you had a large beta program and ran each revisions for 100 days, the feedback would be garbage unless you had proper controls and measurements in place.

[voidlogic]

>The idea that the dietary advice of a doctor could meaningfully be tested in a few weeks by a beta program of laypeople with no scientific controls is utterly ridiculous.

But you are assuming the purpose of the test is to test the merit of the dietary motivator for the change, the testing described here might just be user acceptance tasting. That is, does this this change make it taste bad? Give you gas? etc