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by jasonisalive 4175 days ago
Why don't you let people make their own decisions about what is good for them? It's none of your business "knowing better" than people.

And if you think Soylent's raison d'etre is "disrupt" then you're really stupid. Read Rob's blog. He writes a lot about the problems in contemporary food production and how he wants to tackle them with Soylent. If you ignore that in favour of portraying him as a blind hipster then you are not just stupid, but willfully so.

Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.

2 comments

> Why don't you let people make their own decisions about what is good for them? It's none of your business "knowing better" than people.

Because we're not discussing buying a new phone or laptop. If you look at guidelines for nutrition, you'll see that most of them advocate diversity. People are not simple computers, organic systems are way more complex. This is not sofware requirements analysis: you can't grasp all nutritional needs by fulfilling a table of nutrients and daily requirements, and this happens mainly because we don't have the knowledge to do so.

If we can't tell everything we need, nutrition-wise, how can we develop a full nutritional replacement? I'll answer you: by oversimplifying the problem, by simply being ignorant about the complexity at stake.

> ...

Your second paragraph deserves no response or consideration whatsoever.

> Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.

That's anecdotal (at best, because there's surely a bias there). And let me remind you, again, that we're not talking "electronics" or gadgets. The fact that they're functioning for a few years doesn't mean that everything's okay. What if they're not "looking" at the right signs? And how do you know that problems won't be developing on the mid/long-term?

> Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.

No. He has been living off a diverse diet that includes Soylent. Being a sole source of nutrition is a selling poit of Soylent - it's a claim you've made in this thread - but there's very little evidence to support that use apart from some anecdote and uncontrolled unblinded experiment with a tiny sample size.

Soylent have retreated from the extravagant irresponsible claims they made when they launched the Kickstarter, and that's good. But now Soylent is pretty much the same as all the other products but with less experience and differently targeted ads.