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>The techniques and the wording seem snake oilish. You know, every time this guy's story has popped up on here I've defended him. I like that he's trying to do
by goostavos 13y ago
>The techniques and the wording seem snake oilish.
You know, every time this guy's story has popped up on here I've defended him. I like that he's trying to do something big, I like that he wants to solve a very real world problem, and I like that in his blog posts and updates he phrased all of his results as personal findings needing further study.
However, this:
>>"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"
and
>>puts you in excellent health,
...This I do not like. At all. It's a massive, massive leap to go from "this is something under test," to "this is something that 100% works and will cure [insert list of ailments here]."
It's completely and wholly intellectually dishonest. It's put a sour taste in my mouth over the whole thing. It's gone from personal experiment to fund raiser and company structure in what? Five months? All of the early adopter "testimonials" sound like little more than confirmational bias rearing its head. "Oh, you bought a magnetic bracelet on the internet and you do actually have more energy now that you're wearing it!? Whoa! Amazing that it worked out exactly how you wanted it to!" These testimonials carry the exact same weight.
I feel like there's green in their eyes. Rigor be damned if riches can be had. Also, his ego is now on the line. I'm sure his brain is still being objective about the results.
IF is works, and IF it's safe, and IF the claims can be backed up with ACTUAL DATA, then by god, more power to the guy... but in the mean time, at the very least, can a guy get a trial with some other vanilla flavored sludge acting as a placebo?
Hell, I'll settle for an footnote on the page that says "None of our claims are backed by any form of relevant data."
- pbreit 13y ago"None of our claims are backed by any form of relevant data." But that would be false.
- joegaudet 13y agoThe issue I would see with the placebo sludge, would be that it would immediately present as no the real deal... As I assume one cannot live off of sugar water for very long. I'm not exactly sure what the control would be, I guess what ever it is they stick in feeding tubes?
- goostavos 13y agoI'm not a totally sure what would be a control. I typed that last section with quite a bit of haste, but I assume that it could be tested against a traditional food based meal that has similar nutritional value. The meal replacement idea is not entirely new, though, they've always been more in the area of supplement, rather than outright replacement. Things like ensure, slim fast, and a host of other meal in a can things exist. A quick googling led to this study: http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/11 http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/11 which indeed did follow the shake vs traditional food format. If nothing else, it could be benchmarked against existing meal replacements. I'm now actually curious how these things do get tested, and over what period of time. I'll have to hit my school's database tomorrow and see how trials have been run in the past
- moondowner 13y agoBenchmarking against existing meal replacements is actually something I wish someone will do, and document it properly.
- Andrenid 13y agoThere's Sustagen. A medically-certified full meal replacement powder, used by hospitals and medical facilities in Australia. I've talked about it in an old thread about Soylent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399994