I'm starting to think this has to be a viral marketing campaign / social experiment.
It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.
One of the most surprising things about the commentary on Soylent, is the level of vitriol and anger that they are pushing out a meal replacement product without an exceptionally high level of testing and scientific design; and that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong, or totally and completely impossible.
(For examples, just read the comments on this article, or any of the Soylent-related articles).
It seems to be based on a presumption that we all have amazing, carefully designed and scientifically tested diets as is, and Soylent is going to make our diets demonstrably worse, or (apparently) make us really sick, or (even) kill us.
Given that 69.2% of the adult US population is overweight, it would seem that our current amazing diets are perhaps not working.
Of course, the vast majority of us make it up as we go along, influenced by food manufacturers and marketing, and the people around us, as well as our parents.
Sure, food manufacturers have more scrutiny than you or I, but no one is making sure that any particular combination of food in the supermarket is going to lead to a healthy diet - nothing stops me from choosing and carrying out a bad diet - and many many people 'choose' and carry out bad diets as is.
Do you seriously think that, when the supermarket put in an entire aisle of confectionery, that they were doing it as some attempt to give us a good diet?
Or that coke is attempting to help us lose weight when the dump all that sugar - or HFCS - in?
If you think the person buying Taco Bell for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and KFC for dinner is following a carefully designed, healthy diet, you are deluded. If you think these people don't exist - you're deluded there too.
To be not evil, Soylent only has to be _not worse_ than the average existing diet.
Now, I agree that a complete meal replacement product should get more scrutiny than the average person's diet - and Soylent is! I certainly haven't had my diet designed by a group of food scientists or dieticians.
> the level of vitriol and anger [...] that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong
You're right there. Some people really do have a strong emotional response against the idea, which makes them put forward nitpicking arguments against it.
Will the initial implementations of Soylent be perfect? Probably not. But there is no reason why it's impossible to make an all-in-one food that is tasty, nutritious, convenient and cheap, so I'm sure that if enough effort is put into doing so, eventually it will happen.
When it happens, it's unlikely that I will solely eat Soylent; I like cooking and I like varienty. But I wouldn't be surprised if I come to use it for 30% of my calorific intake.
> I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.
If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree. You entrust those bodies and the qualified individuals within them because they ensure what you purchase is what it says it is. Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.
> An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
If Soylent works completely as advertised yes you gain time. Should it lead to any kind of health problems it's more than likely you lose time.
> Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.
Do you actually know that? Presumably if there is US regulation/law around selling and marketing food products, then Soylent will have to be compliant just like everything else?
Though, given I live in Australia, a country which
> adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health
and I can still buy all the Quarter Pounders and chocolate I want, it seems these bodies are more about food safety, than choosing my diet for me.
You either needed to read more or more closely. According to wikipedia linked:
"Like other food substances, dietary supplements are not subject to the safety and efficacy testing requirements imposed on drugs, and unlike drugs they do not require prior approval by the FDA; however, they are subject to the FDA regulations regarding adulteration and misbranding. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. "
No, you need to read more closely. It says exactly what I said. Soylent is covered under the exact same requirements as all other foods. This is very simple to understand, and I honestly can't imagine how you can possibly be having difficulty with this.
>>I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.
Sorry, but this is straight out wrong. You will lose nothing and it will cause no harm in anyway, and I mean it literally if you experiment with natural foods. Go eat bananas, or apples, or mixture of those. Or say mixture of 20 fruits. It will never cause you any harm. Eat rice, wheat, meat, ragi, vegetables you name it. It will cause you absolutely no harm if you eat what is supposed to be eaten by a normal adult.
This is true, even if you occasionally eat junk food.
But if you go and pull only the essential 'ingredients' of these foods separately, mix them up in water and drink them. You are likely to cause a good enough amount of damage.
There is a very big reason, why our tongues have taste buds,why our stomachs have hydrochloric acid in them,why the stomach has a mucus lining, why we secrete digestive juices/enzymes, why we secrete bile. You see the whole functioning of the body is not designed to receive dosage of macro nutrients back to back in hourly dosage.
On a macro level if you look close, the food chain and the digestive system is perfectly optimized to survive and even thrive in the hands of unqualified individuals like us. If our body needed back to back dosage of macro nutrients in precise quantities to survive, our species would be extinct by now.
So the definition of efficiency when it comes to human digestive system is not, time saved in cooking food, or ability to receive and absorb exact chemical nutrients in precise quantities.
Also note the aim of the human digestive system and the way it measures efficiency is very different than our way.
>>An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
You could say this about playing a game in the Google doodle, or say reading the news paper.
Its not like your receive 6% of your life in one shot. You receive it an hour at a time. For the kind of job we do an hour is not sufficient to even get started.
Although I agree with you on many points I think you might be projecting onto D9u's comment. Nothing in the quote he posted suggests it is necessary to disband the NSA, nothing suggests Americans should wish they lived in a country like Russia. A 'course taken' implies a general direction, not a revolutionary change.
In the current situation Russians should be allowed to feel pride that it was their decrepit mafia state that opposed the United States on Snowden. That doesn't mean Russia did it for the right reasons, or that Russia is now a better place than it was before. A lot of Russians who feel pride in this action would probably still take the opportunity to live and work in the USA, the two are not mutually exclusive.
The problem I have with posts like yours is that they imply that because other places are a mess that exonerates the USA heading in that direction too.
'I dreamt of building something that would shake things up and improve the web.'
A serious question from an outsider - is this something people really believe or is it a platitude?
I seem to see this statement often since I started reading HN. On the other hand success seems to be measured in selling companies for large sums of money and moving on to something else. Does this really improve the web?
There are a large number of individuals whose inflated self-image needs an objective reality check...
Thinking that one can do anything is good self-motivation, but one shouldn't deny the evidence that "anything" and "everything" are not the same concept, nor that one's particular "anything" may be neither simple nor valuable.
The vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned and have no connection to the state.
The 4 million+ cameras in the UK statistic which has been floating around for about 10 years now was extrapolated from two streets in Wandsworth and was only ever really media bait. If you believed all these statistics the number of cameras in the UK would have dropped by more than half (over the past 10 years), since the last large scale estimate was under 2 million.
Sure, but what if I place a camera on each side of your property (outside the property line) of your house, pointing to the edge of your property, then use your tax dollars to pay employees to watch you on the cameras every time you leave your property? Would you enjoy that? If not, why would you put up with it? It's your state, not the government's state. The government are your employees, not your owners, so you have to decide which rights you want, not just which rights can still be defended by existing laws.
I'm not sure if you're serious here. The UK government doesn't own the vast majority of the cameras in the UK which make up this 'huge' number. The vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are not connected to a grand network. The majority of cameras are in small shops / stores and are used to provide evidence for shoplifting or other types of theft. It's the owners choice as to whether they are there or not.
The UK government doesn't employ vast numbers of people to watch the live output of the minority of CCTV cameras they do own. The state owned CCTV is almost never used in a proactive sense. You can probably safely commit most crimes in full view of a CCTV camera in the UK. If someone reports you or you leave obvious evidence of the crime the CCTV tapes will be reviewed.
There is a massive difference between the man power requirements of analysing video footage compared to analysis of text.
This comment's a great example of what he's talking about. You're not even worried about Farmville, you're worried about extremely pedantic grammar corrections that most of us got over by the 3rd grade or so.
No it is not a serious attempt at proving everything a body needs, not in the slightest.
If it was a serious attempt the soylent team would be composed of scientists with expertise in nutrition. Instead their website lists a lot of people with absolutely irrelevant skills. I can't think of anything associated with y-combinator which is quite as embarrassing as this.
Sadly one part of hopes this takes off, so that in 10 years time we have an idea of the long term results of a diet of this kind of nonsense. It will have been tested on the kind of people who have the arrogance to believe that because they understand business / computing the can 'solve' the worlds nutrition problem.
I agree with everything you say. But I am also reminded of all the highly accomplished people, who, looking back on their lives, say that "the only reason who took this on was that we had no idea how hard it was going to be."
Speaking as someone with some years experience in ML to me there is a world of difference between the front page for wise.io and mynaweb.com (presuming these are the competing sites).
The Myna page explicitly states it uses multi armed bandit algorithms, the algorithm fits the properties of the following claims. Wise's use of 'patent-pending', 'machine learning technology' and 'deploy machine intelligence' gives the impression of hiding shortcomings with jargon.
In the academic field 'how exactly' a BCI is going to work is very well defined and there are only a limited number of basic types.
It's the representation of BCI in the media which is a joke. The actual science behind EEG based BCI is not that complex that the average person couldn't understand them. The disconnect between reality and peoples conception is similar to the way AI is represented, compared to what it is.
It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.