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Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

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Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#201

Post by chrisdbaldwin »

akamaka wrote: post #194
Balgair wrote: post #166

Oh boy, another Soylent discussion. Here is what all the off topic discussion will be: Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?" Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the…

You could also say some people like Trump and other people like Clinton, and it's just an opinion. However, one opinion is highly correlated with being more educated. I suspect that the same is true here. The population at large has a very poor level of education about food, and Soylent seeks to exploit that very large business opportunity. I would prefer to see more people with an understanding of healthy eating and…

>The population at large has a very poor level of education

We have a general education crisis going on in the United States. We've got some of the best propaganda in the world, and it's making us sick.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#203

Post by chc »

jklinger410 wrote: post #151
chc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people even have a concept of a "beta-style food," so it seems pretty unreasonable to expect them to infer that from Soylent's marketing.

>We are constantly exploring the frontiers of food technology, with an aim to engineering foods which are more nutritious, efficient, and affordable than ever before. Right on their index

Lots of companies say stuff like that. If what you mean to say is "We want to move fast and break things, and we consider this a beta product not ready for the wide market, so we're applying looser controls than most food companies, and this stuff might make you stick," then you need to say that. You can't reasonably expect people to intuit that from generic marketing talk† about exploring frontiers.

† For example, milk brand FairLife boasts on its website about "changing the face of the dairy industry through cutting edge innovation." This is in reference to using 22-year-old dairies as their suppliers. Nobody understands it to mean that FairLife might make you sick.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#204

Post by ghurtado »

XorNot wrote: post #37
dkersten wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been playing this game from the start. I remember the original announcement blog post talking about how he figured out the formula through trial and error. We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.

You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune. Everything will be damage in large quantities. And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.

> You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune.

What kinds of poison can you build an immunity to by eating small amounts of it?

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#205

Post by BigJono »

akamaka wrote: post #194
Balgair wrote: post #166

Oh boy, another Soylent discussion. Here is what all the off topic discussion will be: Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?" Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the…

You could also say some people like Trump and other people like Clinton, and it's just an opinion. However, one opinion is highly correlated with being more educated. I suspect that the same is true here. The population at large has a very poor level of education about food, and Soylent seeks to exploit that very large business opportunity. I would prefer to see more people with an understanding of healthy eating and…

I suspect the intelligence correlation is the other way around to what you're implying. I'm still yet to see any evidence that Soylent or similar products are unhealthy (i.e that it takes more than a good balance of macro and micro nutrients for food to be considered "healthy"), especially when compared to an average western diet rather than an ideal one.

I have seen an awful lot of baseless appeals to nature and tradition though, both of which are indicative of low intelligence.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#206

Post by caogecym »

We always get latest version of soylent instead of having a way to subscribe a specific version. This is like cloud based service, the upgrade is transparent, you benefits from ingredient upgrade, and you suffer from it. The key here is how fast Soylent can identify and address customer's concerns.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#207

Post by darawk »

frugalmail wrote: post #193
darawk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, and there's nothing wrong with that. I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing not to use Soylent because of this. But there seems to be a weird sort of vitriol in the reaction here that doesn't seem like it happened to Chipotle. Perhaps because people see it as an example of the overconfident arrogance of 'tech people'. I'm not sure. But it seems deeply misguided to me. Yes, something has gone wrong. Yes, they are ha…

The whole point of bringing in the discipline associated with release notes and iterations is to make it a lot more transparent than existing food producers. The only problem is that they are not transparent enough with exact quantities and processes anymore. However, their process is supposed to decrease the number of issues not increase it.

I agree i'd like them to be completely transparent. However, they're certainly more transparent than your average packaged food company.

And I don't think you can extrapolate from a single incident that their process has increased the number of issues. You need more data than that to make a claim of that sort.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#208

Post by tiglionabbit »

dnautics wrote: post #196
hueving wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That documentary tested overeating well outside the bounds of any sane nutritional guidelines. It's sad that people don't have the critical thinking skills required to realize the same thing would happen if you ate those levels of calories at any restaurant or even at home.

wasn't there a counter-documentary where someone ate from mcdonalds every day and also followed a fairly strict exercise regimen and wound up being way fitter than when he started?

Fat Head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Criticism_and_st...

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#209

Post by roymurdock »

Balgair wrote: post #166

Oh boy, another Soylent discussion. Here is what all the off topic discussion will be: Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?" Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the…

Soylent is more than food...the company and, more importantly, the idea (increased productivity/efficiency) that it embodies is a poster child for the social norm-disrupting technology that is coming out of SV. Many of this site work in the area and belong to its culture/brand (whether they want to or not) and it's their identity and what other people, friends and family included, quickly judge them by.

It's not rational to judge an entire area or economic movement on the merits of a few, high-profile companies that are working on products that seem to be straight out of the movies (self-driving cars, addictive ad networks, virtual reality porn, gov spy software, futuristic milkshakes) but it's exciting so it's what people do.

Nobody cares about the food aspect. Think one layer deeper - it's SVs brand, and, inextricably, "technology"s brand - yes that includes computers, servers, CRM software, virtual machines, the actual stuff that people on this website do and no it doesn't make any sense to link this stuff to Soylent's energy bars - that comes under attack every time one of SV's brand leaders is found to be harming people rather than helping them.

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