Replacing food with Soylent is weird. Perhaps in your social circle it's a plausible thing to do, but I'm pretty certain that most people would think it's a bizarre thing to do regardless of what certain geek social circles might think.
In fact, that's my impression of lots of LW-style ideas, such as cryonics and SI-style AI research.
Rationality always works when it is done perfectly. But it's incredibly easy to miss something and come to a weird conclusion by pure rationality. And being partly rational can be pretty bad when irrationality has evolved checks and balances and your rationality bypasses them but is not good enough to replace them. So I'm automatically very skeptical towards anything which is perfectly sensible--here--which people outside this circle of atypical minds would find ludicrous.
Not to mention the name. Yes, I know that in the book it was not made of people, but giving it a name that has negative connotations in the outside world suggests that the idea is insufficiently vetted by the outside world.
Replacing food with Soylent is weird.
And also potentially dangerous to your health. The idea of a uniform "human chow" makes sense and has legitimate uses, and we have a paleo precedent in pemmican, which has a reputation for sustaining people in polar environments in good health when they didn't have access to fresh food. But then pemmican uses natural ingredients. By contrast, I worry about ingesting Soylent if the recipes incorporate the wrong stereoisomers of synthetic organic molecules that the body's enzymes won't bind to for metabolism...
Edit: Sorry, I didn't realize there has been so much discussion on this already! I thought I had just stumbled across some obscure product haha. Anyway, I've been reading through discussions here, on Hacker News, Tim Ferris' blog etc. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not this is truly a "replacement for eating" (or whatever the term is). I think the more interesting question is whether it's a good idea to:
My initial impression is that it is a good idea to use it as a once or twice a day thing.
*The two main problems (digestive issues and headaches) seem to be sufficiently addressed by 1. Adopting it slowly into your diet (over the course of 5 days or so) and 2. Making sure you get enough salt.
Original Post: you could ignore this if you're familiar with Soylent
I've just came across a meal replacement drink called Soylent - http://www.soylent.me/.
It is...
However I really don't have enough information to make any reasonably strong conclusions. Those bullet points above are more vague suspicions than evidence backed knowledge.
So do any of you guys know anything about Soylent or meal replacement drinks/bars/etc.? Are they healthy? Are there things I haven't accounted for?
Also, I'm sorta surprised this isn't more popular. Most people I know hate cooking and cleaning and shopping and spending so much time and money on food. I think most people would be more than happy to have Soylent (or something similar) for a meal or two each day, and then have a big dinner or something. It would save a ton of money and time, and would reduce the amount of fat and sugar in the persons diet. And because you're spending less money on food and consuming less fat and sugar, you could justify eating out or ordering in a splurge meal more often! What do you guys think? Why isn't this more popular? Are people really that afraid of the health effects?
(I'm not being hypocritical. I know that *I've* been asking about the health effects and seem to be worried about them, but I wouldn't think most people would approach this the same way I am. If I lived on an island isolated from other people, was told about Soylent and asked what I think it's popularity is, I would guess it to be very high. I would think people would see that it's pretty nutritious, aren't really any known risks or reason to think there would be risks, and be eager to save time and money by using Soylent).