This is one of those instances where it would have been useful to:
- somehow not see that headline number of 1,500 first
- come up with a guess (or look up) how many animals are typically killed in medical testing procedures for drugs, surgeries, etc.
- guess how many animal deaths would be expected for a company doing what Neuralink is trying to do
- only then check the true number after having this estimate in mind
Since we see the 1,500 first we have some kind of immediate emotional reaction to it that is not calibrated to anything. It’s a textbook form of scope insensitivity. Would you have reacted any stronger if the number had been 150,000? Would you have reacted more mildly if the number was 150?
When a headline provides a number and then the article provides no real context for what one might reasonably have expected that number to be, it’s a sign that you are being preyed upon.
> Some Neuralink rivals are having more success. Synchron, which was launched in 2016 and is developing a different implant with less ambitious goals for medical advances, received FDA approval to start human trials in 2021. The company’s device has allowed paralyzed people to text and type by thinking alone. Synchron has also conducted tests on animals, but it has killed only about 80 sheep as part of its research, according to studies of the Synchron implant reviewed by Reuters.
Seems they are providing context, as long as you take the time to read through the article.
I would argue that "context" is intentional misdirection. Most people don't know that synchron is marketing an electrified stent that gives maybe one channel of data I/O whereas Neuralink has a robot that implants thousands of electrodes in multiple regions of the brain and spinal cord. They are different by orders of magnitude in complexity and potential utility.
> I would argue that "context" is intentional misdirection. Most people don't know that synchron is marketing an electrified stent that gives maybe one channel of data I/O whereas Neuralink has a robot that implants thousands of electrodes in multiple regions of the brain and spinal cord. They are different by orders of magnitude in complexity and potential utility.
The literal quote you're responding to says that Synchron's implant is "less ambitious." It's worth noting that being overambitious is often the root cause of fuck ups.
> But overambitious is only obvious in retrospect.
I disagree. If you're trying to do, say, implement five revolutionary things no one's ever done all at once, so you can tell people you're going to go from zero to sci-fi in a couple years, there's an extremely high likelihood you're being overambitious. That's something that's obvious from the start.
> Go tell that to Thomas Edison, I guess. Or Nikola Tesla.
The vast majority of people, including engineers and business leaders, are not Edisons or Telsas. Sometimes people get lucky or they have unusually well-resourced and competent teams to tackle an unusual amount of stuff at once. That's why I qualified my statement with "there's an extremely high likelihood..." Given Neuralink is facing "a federal probe and employee backlash" over shoddy practices, I highly doubt they have the unusually well-resourced and competent teams to not be overambitious.
What's an example of Edison or Tesla doing multiple "revolutionary things no one's ever done all at once"? I'm genuinely interested, but details matter a lot. For example, the Edison company's contribution to electric light was mainly extending the life and reducing the amperage of light bulbs. Other people had already demonstrated the potential of electric light.
There is nothing about what you said that suggests that this requires more animal testing in a shorter timeframe. If anything a single animal test should provide so much more data that it should take much longer to process and analyze the results, slowing down the speed at which animal tests occur.
On the one hand you seem to be arguing that neuralink is more complicated and has more unknowns, and that this explains why it needs to do more animal tests, but that depends on how much data one can capture in a single test. So it is not a given that the complexity-to-tests-needed graph is linear.
And assuming that we do actually capture a lot more data in a single test (I would hope so at least), then that also means more work needs to be done to interpret this data in a meaningful way and make improvements. Which would suggest that it should take more time to move on from one test to the next.
There is a difference between total animal tests and how quickly the tests are done.
One of the example applications proposes to stimulate patterns of neurons in visual cortex to produce vision. To even get to the point where you can train a monkey to detect phosphenes, Neuralink had to (a) develop a way of producing flexible electrodes that would measure activity from a single neuron, were robust enough to be implanted, would survive the punishing in-vivo environment, and retain their ability to measure and stimulate for long periods of time (none of those steps can be adequately done in in vitro models). (b) They then had to make sure that their robot could implant them to the proper depth (despite brain movement), and that during implantation they could maintain connection to the interface system. (c) They had to build a ASIC that would capture a 1000 of channels of neural data and wirelessly transmit them, while ensuring that the SNR was sufficient for use (again, no in vitro model). (d) They had to test the encapsulation of the ASIC to make sure that it, too, could survive in vivo.
They could certainly have done all these things serially, but it would have taken a lot longer. In the end, where they are is still far from a useful product - they have monkeys that can see phosphenes, they have electrodes that last 1 year, and they have a reasonable ASIC - but compared to the academic timescale, where we've been working on these individual pieces 1 PhD (6 years) at a time, they've made really remarkable progress.
It's normally a dozen or two animals per product. It's usually 2-4 years to develop a device and get it cleared, an animal or two a month. Not anywhere close to 1500, this is criminal.
I'm not sure what tech space your experience comes from, but this is ridiculous. Thes numbers are true to demonstrate*biocompatibility* but are 4 or 5 orders of magnitude smaller than what is required to show *functionality*, let alone to develop a new technology.
I'm in devices. In pharma you need way more. In devices we do a lot of In vitro work, cadaver work, etc. so animals is just the final stage of that. For drugs you need for more admittedly, but it's usually rabbits and mice you need in high quantities, not monkeys. Usually you do a bunch or rabbits, and then just one or two monkeys to verify. I've never heard of anything close to 1500 monkeys for a product that isn't even on the market.
Read the article. Of the 1,500, 280 are "sheep, pigs and monkeys." The rest are presumably mice. The only specific figure for monkeys is the claim that "two monkeys" were involved in experiments marred by human errors.
This is still way way more than is typical. For context I've worked on artificial hearts where they did a few dozen sheep and pigs before going to human implants, some other devices where you do 5 or 10. Never hundreds just to not even get there yet.
The first artificial hearts were implanted in the 1960's. I think the point I'm trying to make is that Neuralink is doing a huge amount basic science / R&D in addition to trying to get a product into FDA. In their final FDA application, it sounds like (from the article) that they'll have data from ~100 animals. That doesn't mean that the other animals were wasted - it's more that the 100 animals for the FDA are wasted in the sense that they're tested on the pristine final product rather than all the steps before.
Typically work like this gets published, shared, talked about publicly exactly so our collective understanding is improved. Presented on at clinical and scientific conferences, etc. What Neuralink is doing looks completely different than this. It's clearly being run like many of his other endeavors. With a significant disrespect for regulators, for the health of the general public, etc.
AFAIK nobody has been injured due to Tesla FSD, so not exactly sure how that qualifies either.
Actual self-driving cars will save thousands of lives, so (to me) Tesla being the only company that is pursuing it in a way that might actually get there before the end of the decade says they care more about the health of the general public, not less.
The last time I saw the statistics, Tesla autopilot was about average for US drivers, but it's actual usage was biased towards the roads least likely to cause fatalities.
I'm all in favour of the vision behind self-driving cars, but the reality isn't quite as impressive as I'd like, especially given the AI has inherent advantages such as "no blind spot" and "can pay full attention to everything all at the same time" and "not distracted by adverts, hunger, and phone" and "doesn't get tired or drunk".
And — at risk of displaying the limits of my domain knowledge — I think the AI can be tested without being in charge, by asking the AI to create a model of the world as it drives, and/or by testing its predictions of what it will observe in the next few seconds.
Yes, because of the details of how and why. It's not the number. Yes, thousands of people die every day, but they doesn't make the needless murder of one person any less of an issue.
How do you kill something respectfully? Bow before you shoot it in the head? And why would that matter?
"Unnecessary" is a value judgement made by you, not an objective property of their death. They died for the purpose of furthering science and medical research – many people would consider that necessary even if fewer mistakes could've been made.
Not that it contradicts your core argument, but I'd be surprised if the number of animals slaughtered in a way that fails the official legal standard for ethical, but nobody noticed for one reason or another, is less than 0.1% of the total.
I'm fine waiting an extra-decade and killing 3k animals for that. Hell, let's make it 10k animals.
This is huge. Even just moving the cursor on a screen... you're fixing carpal tunnel syndrome for every white collar employee working at a computer all day.
Me too, but this is not what Musk has promised. He is promising far more in far less time. His typical MO.
And thinking that an average office worker would get an invasive brain implant to prevent carpal tunnel is nuts. Carpal tunnel is a thousand times better to have than an invasive brain surgury.
You didn't understand my point. I'm saying if this bothers you, you should stop eating meat. If it doesn't bother you, well, then no cognitive dissonance.
My point is that if 1400 of those animals are rats, using the stat "1500 killed" upfront is a bit misleading to laypeople in my non-professional opinion. The article doesn't say, but from other articles it appears that no monkeys were killed.
There seems to be a lot of goalpost moving in this thread.
> X animals were killed!
>> Yes but most of those weren't animals the vast majority of people consider particularly intelligent / morally questionable to kill for medical research purposes
"In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus"
Why do you say that? For me, to say they were treated poorly means that they were subjected to unnecessary harm or suffering. Animals can still be harmed as long as it is necessary and appropriate care is taken to minimize the harm.
The quote simply demonstrated that the animal was harmed. It says nothing about the necessity of that harm or care that was taken to minimize it.
Nearly all Labs go to great lengths to minimize harm and ensure the animals are comfortable.
Our current standard of care in surgury is better than this. They didn't need to use bioglue in that way, we have better technology than this, they used it because they were lazy.
Looking at the literature, it appears that bioglue is or at least has been used in human Neurosurgical procedures to seal CSF leaks. Without evidence otherwise, it seems like you are just making things up
Primates being treated "abnormally well" usually means they are left to do what they want without interference in their lives. This is a false descriptor of what they are being put through.
There is a normal for this class and type of device. This is way outside normal for this class and type of device- source, I've designed them for 20 years.
Surely you understand that some systems don't have a in vitro model. Particularly , the biological response and interaction is the unknown. I'm working on such a project now. It'll likely require many dozens of large animals if not hundreds to collect some semblance of data to support human use. I would consider anything less unethical and irresponsible development
Suggesting we calibrate our reaction based off other examples of animal suffering isn’t an objective take. Some people don’t want any animals to suffer by human hands. Some people are opposed to animal trials in their entirety. Some people might oppose their use in this particular instance. Some people might just have a hard cut off at three dead mice. Whether or not this number is industry standard can be beside the point for someone else, and it doesn’t mean they’re being “preyed upon” or manipulated for reading and responding to a fact using a different moral framework.
According to the most recent data from the USDA, approximately 915,000 animals were used in research in 2019, which is the latest year for which data is available.
Exact, 1500 is not a such big amount as people thinks. If we use correctly the term animals, expanding it to flies, worms and zebra fishes instead to use it incorrectly as a synonym for "birds and mammals", the real number should be much higher.
To kill 1500 vinegar flies in a week for research is not uncommon or a strange thing.
We need to remind that the faster you do research, the more people will be saved by research. The problem here is not the amount of lab animals killed.
Neuralink is way outside the rails. Yes, it is normal to do animal studies with a few dozen carefully planned, documented and cared for animal cases. It is not standard practice to do poorly documented, half baked studies where 1500 monkeys are used and tortured. This is way off the ranks of "normal"
As someone that works with devices, you should know that 1500 monkeys is a wildly absurd claim.
As someone who also works with devices, I would be extremely skeptical and wouldn't even believe 1500 monkeys if the article did state it, unless proof was included.
Just to be clear - this hot take is completely wrong. The Animal Welfare Act has rules that proscribe that certain kinds of complaints around animal research in mammals other than rats and mice have to be investigated by the USDA. Animal rights groups are very active in trying to infiltrate research organizations in order to "discover" problems, and disgruntled employees also have these complaints as a lever.
To be clear - (1) animal researchers are not perfect people and make mistakes and need regulating, (2) I could never work for someone like Elon Musk - he vastly overstates the potential of current technology but also because he may have other ethical issues, (3) the feds may sometimes go after people because of vendettas including Musk. BUT, in this case, for someone who watches the space of "animal welfare problems", the Reuters piece seems very suspiciously like of a hit piece from PETA or another animal rights group (or them amplifying an internal Neuralink dispute).
Douglas Houfstedder I am a strange loop. Great book on consciousness. He says monkeys have a higher level of consciousness than say mosquitoes. Maybe similar to a 3 year old human. That's why we feel it is worse morally
The headline is manipulated to imply it's worse than it is. A small animal bio research lab kills thousands of animals a year. They're trying to take Musk down, and unsurprisingly, some on Hacker News are taking the bait.
> The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.
How are they doing this science without keeping records of such important information about scientific experiments and the subjects?
Or are they lying, or intentionally finding a way to do the experiments and manage subjects without keeping these records? (I could believe either. I've heard some surprising things from people involved in research on animals, including of primate facilities they know of being hidden/disguised/unmarked, where I'd never guessed. I assume the "delicate PR" of animal research is well-known by people who work in that space, and might be incentive to suppress PR-damaging records.)
Totally. For obvious animal welfare reasons it is standard practice in the industry to keep careful plans for these tests. You must prove that you absolutely need an animal model for the test, you must have a clear cut, documented procedure and design of experiments, etc. Every other company that does this kind of work does this.
Source? Most universities have an IRB for non-human test subjects, and the federal funding requirements may require an IRB, but I can't find any federal requirements for an IRB on non-human subjects if you're not taking federal funding, even for FDA approval.
The scientists likely have exact records in their lab books etc. But there is no animal-accountant running a single, company wide, exactly accurate MI dashboard...
In companies I've worked for there very much is an "animal accountant". They are also the "cadaver accountant". You can't just throw those things out with the morning trash, you can't just buy them on Amazon. You need permits, permission, documentation.
Well you also need to house the mice and do what you can to avoid unnecessary discomfort. In that process you will certainly be doing accounting to e.g. ensure you have enough cages and that they are being cleaned at a proper frequency.
You will also be justifying the study protocol and as part of that an intended sample size. Sure if a mouse gets killed accidentally by a shaky undergrad it's not a major event, but you also can't just kill an order of magnitude more mice than the approved proposal without getting additional approvals.
There are strict rules about this at every university I've seen and I imagine they developed because of government grant stipulations rather than out of the goodness of their hearts. It's a legit cost - vets need to be on staff and individual labs can be fined for breaking rules. I'd guess biomed companies end up with a similar structure normally due to how closely linked they are with the rest of the research machine.
Having these centralized housing areas for mice from different projects, in addition to the IRB records of what was proposed, ought to give a pretty accurate number of mice on the department level. If the government asked for it to be calculated, I'd be shocked if the university didn't quickly turn around with a number.
Regardless, it is bad scientific practice to not document the number of mice used. It's not even an animal welfare thing, you should be documenting the number of petri dishes you look at too. Not doing so could easily enable sketchy behaviors like p-hacking as well as increasing likelihood of honest mistakes.
I'd also hope at a company like Neuralink they have electronic lab notebook functionality that would make it straightforward to pool numbers across individual researchers.
Personally I didn't find the 1500 number so outlandish, as I assume Neuralink is targeting a very broad scope. However some of the other details certainly raise red flags about their operating procedures.
Have you worked for a company or can you cite other experience beyond the person you’re replying to? You sound needlessly skeptical about a claim you actually have little knowledge to evaluate.
I have friends who have worked and currently work at Neuralink, and I agree with much of the sentiment I see in the comments about Musk. I also am confused about the long term viability of the company. BUT, I hate to see this sort of animal rights hack-job amplified on HN. You can recognize it as such by the radical animal rights orgs quoted and the minimal contextualization or detailing.
It seems like the main criticisms are (1) in 2 procedures out of 1500 , there were surgical targeting errors, and (2) many procedures are done in parallel rather than sequentially.
With regard to (1), if that were really the case, 0.1% errors would be much better than human surgeons. I'm sure that the mistake rate is higher, but that still doesn't mean anyone is behaving unethically?
With regard to (2), there's a huge problem in medtech around small sample sizes. It's always easy when you have N=4 to say "Oh, we should have understood this at N=1." But the reality is that a host of N=1 conclusions have been subsequently debunked. If the team wants to replicate failures to understand them, that should be applauded.
There's also some discussion of wound glue - translating, it sounds like some sutures opened up, which caused an infection, and they found a vet who was happy to blame the brand of vetbond they used.
There are many things wrong with Neuralink, but personally, one might that the major tragedy here is that I'm sure that the pigs that ended up with the wrong spinal implants didn't subsequently get turned into pork chops and bacon. And the reason for that life-wastage is the frustrating ability of animal rights groups to get their message amplified.
The two experiments mentioned involved 61 animals, so it's not 2 out of 1500 but at least 61 out of 1500. And I think it would not be unreasonable to assume that there are more cases than the ones explicitly documented in the article, given the immense time pressue Musk seems to be creating here.
The quote I see says, "staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries".
The other issue mentioned in the Reuters article apparently has to do with testing different sizes/generations of their devices. Whether it's appropriate to sacrifice more animals to make sure the FDA is not confused by a submission is arguably not an ethical issue you can blame Neuralink for.
> Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors.
and
> The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads
My figure added up the wrong events here, but the 86 pigs and 2 monkeys is the better figure anyway.
And it's not that it would confuse the FDA, if you implant the wrong device it reduces the information you get from the experiment as it is not exactly comparable to your other experiments. The article clearly states that they implanted the wrong size, so they made a mistake somewhere.
I'm confused by your numbers - it's not 1,500 procedures, it's 1,500 animals, and we have quotes like " Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors", so I have no idea where your 0.1% number comes from. Even just the 25 pigs that had the wrong implants installed brings that number up to greater than 1%.
I can't tell if you're so anti-animal rights activist that you're defending what you see as a reasonable use of animals, OR if you're so pro-Elon that you're willing to defend whatever. I'm reading you as the former.
So let's take animals off the table.
I work for a company, and we have a high-value limited resource that's well-regulated. Instead of doing methodical tests for teh product we're trying to develop with this resource, we've ruined 1500 samples of the resource. This seems unthinkable to me. Especially coming from an actual engineering with any kind of real-life resources.
"Measure twice cut once" is the adage in anything with construction, because you don't want to needlessly waste any kind of resource.
This is a software approach to hardware, and if they were destroying gold beyond repair, I get the weird sense you'd be less okay with it...
> In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018... The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.
It's even wilder to consider they don't actually know how many animals they've killed. On any basic construction project, you should be able to account for all of the valuable resources you used. It seems unthinkable to me that you wouldn't have the same level of accounting for living things especially given the regulations around it. But Elon don't love himself some regulations. I'm guessing you feel similarly from your other comments...
My annoyance is with the articles presentation. It leads to the kind of analogies that you're making. I think the most clarifying thought I've had is that people (and the article) are imagining that Neuralink is doing a clinical trial. Instead, they're developing at least 5 different bleeding edge technologies which are the needed precursor for making the device that one day might lead to a clinical trial. Imagine 5 teams with dozens of people working on different pieces that each require multiple rounds of in vivo testing. 1000 rodents in 4 years with 200 people all working independently is not particularly wild.
And to clarify, "they don't know the number" is not accurate. Rather, the USDA requires exact reporting of the number of Animal Welfare Act protected animals (non rodents) and round numbers of rodents. These are published by the USDA. Neuralink may also report precise numbers as part of their annual report to NIH or AALAC, but these are not public.
My frustration is that this is the scale of a small university's (like mine) research, and it's a shame to have actual mistakes linked to context-less numbers to make the situation appear bad.
In regards to #1 yes, but in a human surgeons case it would be called malpractice and the surgeon would likely face consequences, and have to pay out damages to the victim(s)
It appears that they have killed 1500 animals so far, that is a staggering number. For context most of the projects I've worked on use a total of a dozen or so animals over the course of the entire program, and those devices are on the market.
It sounds like you probably worked on passive devices like joint implants or evolutionary things like a slightly modified version of a previous valve or pacemaker.
The type of system Neuralink is building - a surgical robot that implants thousands of individual active electrodes into the brain - has no comparable in med tech development history. But compare to original DBS, pacemaker, artificial heart - 100s to 1000s of animals for development.
(To be clear - you took something to market, and this same complexity gives me doubts about whether Neuralink will be able to!)
Most of my work has been in active implantable like Artificial Hearts, LVADs, etc. as well as surgical robotics, dialysis, etc. Both are highly complex priducts and similar to Neuralink in their clinical work needs.
The comment above is wrong, you are right. I've worked on similarly complex stuff (active implantable devices like artificial hearts, lvads, and surgical robotics, etc.). We don't cause our animals to suffer like this, we don't need 1500 to do our work.
I don't understand this comment. Does an artificial heart need an onboard GPU to do the required real time signal processing? Does a arthroscopic robot localize the head of the device with < 10 um accuracy? I realize I'm coming off as a Neuralink fanboy, but I think it's ridiculous to compare next generation brain interface technology to the existing Medtronic/St Jude/Stryker space. The complexity is the reason why none of those companies would touch this with a 10 foot pole. Medtronic paid $200M to acquire a company that made a 32-channel DBS electrode and then killed the product because it was too hard to manufacture. Neuralink is trying to build a 10,000 channel device.
Do you have any resources to claim that more advanced technological devices require an order of magnitude more animals to experiment on?
How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels, not euthanizing when undue suffering occurs, incorrect experimental parameters (Eg wrong chip sizes)?
*Developing* a brain machine interface technology requires many animals because the key unknowns have to do with acquiring, processing, and manipulating brain signals (so no in vitro model). Once the technology is working, and a particular disease/disorder/disability has been identified, the final number of animals required for the FDA to give safety approval for human tests is probably similar to any other medical device.
> How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels
It doesn't, though my suspicion from reading the article is that these things are all reporting one side. Sealing a craniotomy (hole in the skull) is complicated, and while it is well known that vetbond on the cortical surface is a no-no, it's actually quite acceptable on the skull surface, my guess is that they had thought that the hole was sealed, but there was a crack that the vetbond went through. If you're developing a new way of making 100s of holes in the skull, I don't think it's surprising that it might not work how you model it in vitro. This is precisely why we do in vivo development in animal models. The wrong vertebra seems likely to be driven by Elon actively trying to hire engineers who don't know anything about neuroscience and then thinking he can train them fast. (I found that idea - which was in last years Neuralink presentation) incredibly annoying - typical Silicon Valley hubris.
> Developing a brain machine interface technology requires many animals because the key unknowns have to do with acquiring, processing, and manipulating brain signals (so no in vitro model). Once the technology is working, and a particular disease/disorder/disability has been identified, the final number of animals required for the FDA to give safety approval for human tests is probably similar to any other medical device.
Can you point me to any books, articles, etc that make the direct comparison that more complex devices means more animal trials Through an order of magnitude? I don’t know your personal expertise in the matter so I don’t know how to weigh the knowledge you’re telling me (and I don’t know either, which is why I’m asking). For example there’s someone in the thread who claims to have worked on complex devices and describes a different experience, and h want to weigh these knowledges relative to their contexts.
TLDR - not sure why I'm getting fired up about this. Thanks for your interest, here's a long form answer.
To be clear - I think referring to the sum of Neuralink's in vivo work as "trials" is a misnomer. They are doing basic R&D. A "trial" is when you have a device or drug that you believe will be functional to fix something. It's ironic, because the very thing that frustrates me to no end about how Elon Musk presents Neuralink to the public is biting him here. They are still a huge WORLD away from doing "trials". At this point, they're probably trying to get an IDE ("investigational device exemption") to begin to _test_ their devices in humans, which, in the case of brain-machine interfaces is still a huge step from having a clinical trial to treat something (and potentially get FDA approval).
Qualifications - I have about 20 years of experience in neural interfaces on the academic side (including in regulation of animal welfare). (I've even given a talk at Neuralink about my research). The Neuralink situation is really annoying from an academic perspective - they are doing really amazing tech development. What they presented last week in pigs and monkeys appears beyond what anyone currently can do reliably in the lab (of course it isn't peer reviewed). They have really good scientists that put up with the ridiculousness of working for Elon and are excited to advance knowledge and potentially impact health. The world of brain medicine has been stuck for three decades in a zone where we know (from neuroscience experiments in animals) that things like the symptoms of Parkinson's disease are complex multidimensional active processes whose treatment could be improved with high-bandwidth brain interfaces. But without those interfaces to use to develop the technology in people, there's no way to actually get to clinical trials. I think our hope with Neuralink is that Elon might fund them until they get past that point, and then there would be a virtuous cycle of data leading to discovery leading to treatment, but even at the ridiculous pace he's been driving them at, this is still a decadal problem. DARPA have invested $100Ms in this and still barely cracked it. And unlike the other scenarios he's worked in, there is no market for high bandwidth brain machine interfaces, and it's definitely worrying whether he'll lose interest when he finally realizes how hard the problem is from a market perspective.
I'm not a fanboy, I think there are definitely issues at Neuralink, and a cowboy attitude about animal care may be an issue. One of my acquaintances that no longer works there is a vet, so I wouldn't be surprised. ALL THAT SAID, the way that rodent experiments ("1500 ANIMALS!!!") and regulatory strategy decisions ("WRONG SIZE DEVICES IN PIGS"), are put together with a few actual tragic errors (vetbond leaking into some craniotomies and pigs implanted in the wrong spinal space), without acknowledgement that they have actually successfully implanted flexible probes into other pigs and monkeys for longer than has ever been done before (keeping in mind that the animals often are euthanized when they're data isn't good anymore) gives me the sense that this is a hit piece, and that the people that are piling on either must have strong opinions about animal research in general or don't really understand what the company is doing.
Hey thanks for the context, I have a better idea of the nuances involved here now. I however want to apologize if this has caused you emotional stress and hope you get the space you need to process through that stress.
I have an intuitive and therefore undereducated sense that anything to do with Musk gets hyper escalated and it’s a detriment to everybody.
Exactly, in my experience the more complex the device the fewer the animals you nneed. Simole things like drugs and molecules need the highest number of animals for testing. So it's the exact opposite of what the above comment says.
You don't need to do an animal study to unit test your gpu code.
And yes, I also work on surgical robotics where we have the latest gpu hardware to do the latest "AI" and again, we don't need to do animal studies to test that code. You do animal studies even everything is seemingly perfect on the bench.
I've worked for 10+ companies that have been acquired snd killed by the Medteonics and J&Js of the world. That's the rule, not the exception.
They should start with a simpler device, get it on market, then go for the crazy stuff.
Prediction from someone who has worked on this stuff for 20 years - Neuralink will never have a on market device.
Some of those mistakes they have made are totally inexcusable, and I don't want to come across as defending them. Just trying to get some more context because I am clueless about the medical devices field.
Those devices are developing on top of decades of research and use and not pushing into something so new aren't they? I am guessing it is probably less, but how many animals have been killed over the entire development of artificial hearts?
And something like a heart can be developed almost entirely outside of a body right? You can make an artificial heart pump blood in a lab. And then test pumping blood through a cadaver. Is there any way to external experiments like that for the brain? I wouldn't expect a cadaver to have neurons firing to be able to measure them. What experiments are they doing on live animals that could be done without them while still learning the same information?
You are exactly right. In artificial hearts you start with water, then glycol water that mimics the specific gravity and viscosity of blood, then dead blood from the Ranch 99, then you can get freshly drawn blood from an animal lab and keep that warm and circulate that, then you put the pump on the outside of an animal and plumb blood in and out, then after passing all that you do an animal implant. You can't use cadavers because they usually have their blood drained.
A parallel of this entire workflow exists for brain cells. You can grow animal neurons in a test tube and teach them to fly a flight simulator. This work was published 18 years ago, likely done a fair bit before then:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a...
I bet med schools kill similar numbers to Neuralink per year, and they've got nothing on the meat industry when it comes to suffering and death.
I'm not an Musk defender, and I'm a vegetarian, so this makes me at best uncomfortable. Knowing Musk, some deaths are probably due to pressure from the top, but this is a drop in the bucket when it comes to animal suffering.
Not the same. I'm saying there's a double standard for non-human mammal life; torture and eat is ok, torture for science isn't. The de minimis argument wasn't the key point. Charles Manson also didn't kill anyone.
I’m responsible for the death of tens of thousands of animals. Granted due to the size of pigs and cows it’s likely only a single digit number of mammals, but it was also only done for the trivial purpose of my own culinary pleasure. Imagine the number of animals need to balance out the moral calculus of not my food preferences, but life of a human. The excruciatingly high standard to which we hold medical animal research is indefensible to all but the strictest vegans, and in the context of our omnivorous culture an absolute travesty.
This reeks of hypocrisy. The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down? When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled?
The number of animals being discussed here is less than 200 all up. Mostly pigs. Do you know how many pigs are grown for slaughter each year in the USA? 130 MILLION! 90000 are killed every day!
I'm a meat eater but even for me those numbers make me feel slightly ill.
The saddest reality of human nature that I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with is the aggressive, unrelenting desire to hold the most competent and boundary pushing people to intentionally impossible standards.
A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.
My understanding is that Elon isn’t under fire for being smart, he’s under fire because he’s continued to make statements which are politically disadvantageous to the ruling class in Washington.
Its critical soemeone like Elon posit alternative theories as to the motives of Paul Pelosi’s crazed attacker. Or engage in racist and the now failed Trumpism. /s
Pork might have been a better food to make this comparison with, and in this particular example I get that monkeys being closer to humans is a lot of what makes this controversial, but the phenomenon I’m describing is still pertinent. There are undoubtably other experiments using monkeys in far less scrupulous ways for far less beneficial purposes, but of course Neuralink gets the spotlight due to Musk.
I used to think a lot of ostensibly moral decision making which had a net detrimental effect was something that would change if people better understood the full picture and where moral outrage would be most impactful, but I’ve seen envy dominate decision making over and over enough to learn that a lot of people are in fact quite content to harm everyone on net if it means the outliers are harmed more.
What beneficial purpose are you exactly talking about here? From what I've read, the science to make the products Neuralink is working on feasible is still decades away, according to most neuroscientists. Attainability of those goals should be a primary factor when deciding whether experimenting on animals, especially highly developed animals such as monkeys, is reasonable.
The beneficial purposes are improving prosthetics.
And the only thing that makes those goals attainable and products better is experimentation.
If they are needlessly experimenting and making no progress, that’d be tragic, and comparable to existing tragedies that happen in labs all over the world.
The timing, intended audience, and flavor of the criticism suggests this is much less about any ethical breaches and much more about reigning in someone who is perceived to be breaking out of bureaucratic control.
The thing is that intelligence is kinda orthogonal to the ability to feel pain. Bacteria don't seem to have a nervous system, so that would be a place to draw a first line.
Speciesm is when we care more for one animal species over another. For example people in the west will generally have more of a moral issue over eating dogs compared to pigs.
It would be, at least to an extent. Even vegans (which I am) still recognise that some animals are smarter than others, which can result in different moral weights given to them. And it doesn't normally include humans.
I see, so vegans recognize that speciesism is "true" in the sense that some animals do have more valuable lives than others, and harms to some animals are worse than harms to others? Makes it a bit hard to know what the term is designed to achieve. Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?
> Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?
Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism
elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.
Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?
Good thing you trust the competent scientists he's hired, because they're the ones blowing the whistle on Musk's operating practices. The lede: "Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid INTERNAL STAFF complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths." (emphasis mine)
Whether or not those quoted are actually representative or cherry picked, and whether they’re as opposed to internal practices as is suggested or simply think there’s room for improvement requires a trusted investigator to determine.
Quite frankly, the vast majority of the journalistic enterprise has been so heavily discredited and so abused for hit pieces and marketing that I don’t trust that the reporting reflects the internal reality they’re depicting.
The timing, the citation of multiple federal boards, citation of a competitor, and the group think Eye of Sauron that used to be aligned against Trump seemingly gearing up to go against Musk makes me highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the complaints.
This is a tragic situation, because it is now very difficult to distinguish between the types of people opposed to high pressure pursuits of excellence in general, regardless of how effective and voluntarily pursued and in good faith they are, and people who are legitimately waving a red flag about a serious problem.
This does not strike me as a serious problem, this strikes me as a hit piece.
I'm aware that we don't have all the evidence yet - this is why there's a federal probe. So far, the quotes we see from employees (those competent scientists that you said you trust) suggest extreme malfeasance.
Regardless of your opinion of the current state of journalism or the "Eye of Sauron" or Trump or whatever else you're trying to drag into this conversation, Elon Musk's company is being investigated by the federal government after his employees have alleged widespread ethical abuses in his company.
As a counterpoint to your lament of geniuses being persecuted, I don't think Musk is particularly "excellent" in any way except being rich, which affords him opportunities and platforms far beyond the reach of the average person, including being able to hire the smartest people in the world who do the actual work in his companies.
Maybe you don't think it's a serious problem, but enough employees do and so does the federal government. It's not "tragic" in any way that Musk's companies are regulated the same way other companies in those domains are regulated. I find that Elon Musk doing something unethical/illegal is far more plausible than what you suggest - a conspiracy by journalists and the employees of Neuralink (again, the competent scientists which you claim to trust) to defame him.
Partially agree, but I think a lot of the public outrage is over the use / killing / botched experiments on monkeys, which are widely acknowledged to be among the most intelligent and human-like of non human animals.
Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be.
In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.
I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.
this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government.
When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.
when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.
I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.
All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.
I don't understand how anyone can say this when Musk has been granted preferential treatment by the government across multiple cases. He's received very lucrative contracts that fund and subsidize his company, Neuralink has received expedited treatment by the FDA for their research. This has held true across multiple administrations.
preferential treatment over whom? he had to sue for the right to even compete for launch contracts. he's gone through hell getting Boca chica through an environmental review, and he was only recently considered to be right of center. at best it could be argued that he received preferential treatment until he publicly politicized himself.
edit:
He's also been shut out of the Biden administrations public initiatives on electric cars. an industry Tesla single-handedly created. ostensibly due to being non-union.
Most of that is BS of course but I get your point. His companies have received billions in tax breaks and NASA contracts, then supports Trumpism, Kanye and segregation.
he doesn't support any of those things and never did. but even if he did, it is still worth supporting him because of the actual positive change in the world he has manifested by having the balls to try. results are what matter, not his political beliefs or personal associations.
Preferential treatment over who? He's the only game in town for half the things he's working on and still has to fight tooth and claw for support. The guy is funding Starlink for Ukraine out his own pocket (or at least was last I heard).
People are so envious that Elon is a genius and one of the greatest men of our time (and not them) that they can't think straight about him.
Name one entrepreneur who has close to the track record of success he has had? He was even a major key funder of OPENAI that is all the rage these days.
Politicans hate him because people can see he actually cares and is competent in a way they aren't and so is respected and applauded for it. While they are more often than not mediocre men who can barely fix a kitchen sink.
what, really? not even spacex turns profit with it's gvmt contracts...Tesla turned a profit by his manipulation of initially the market, then latterly the crypto market, but despite making the cars dirt cheap (and it shows), he still couldn't make any money for over a decade.
He consistently misses but he knows where to make his money: conning vc, and getting his fans to dance on crypto.
He's a two-bit conman whose success is not in being an innovator but sometimes being ftm, he's going to be pushed out of every industry he's playing in eventually.
His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.
A clown who gets high off his own hype and the worship of smooth-brained fanboys.
I don't have sources handy just at the moment, but I've seen it reported by (what appeared to be) some fairly reputable outlets. It's possible it's untrue, but it all seemed to check out.
I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.
So why don’t the same people want Tim Cook to fail? Maybe if Elon was not tweeting obscenities at US Senators about their penises and ejaculation, perhaps like, maybe, people would not be having knives out for him? Just a thought.
Tim Cook doesn't have the entirety of the oil industry, the automotive industry, the power industry, the aerospace industry, (formerly) the payment processing and banking industry, and now the medical industry standing to lose trillions of dollars from stuff that he's doing. Tom Cook's scope and influence is also massively smaller than Elon's and tremendously lower stakes.
you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side:
>One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy.
judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer.
Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture.
That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all.
I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans.
The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison.
Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom.
Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.
Don’t forget that the horses are basically a living breathing pharmaceutical factories for the specific anti-venom they are used for, they are incentivised to look after the horses very well in order to avoid not only replacement cost, but wasted hours of specialised labour, and future lost revenue from the sale of harvested anti-venom products.
The “harvest” is basically a horse sized version of the sort of blood donation we do routinely for humans.
But those animals are not unnecessarily cruely treated. It's one thing to farm animals, it's another to deliberately treat them more poorly than is strictly needed to get the value out of them. That's what neuralink is accused of - unnecessary cruelty.
The number of chickens will blow your mind. There was a world clock I saw once counting like population and a bunch of random statistics including chickens in approximated real time.
Smaller fishes reproduce faster and in greater numbers so most of deaths are probably fish like anchovies and minnows that go mostly to a variety of processed fish products and cat food
Have you seen what primarily seafood eating cultures consume? There’s a lot instances of a large fish like a tuna being shared amongst many, or even something like a salmon that can feed one. When my in laws would prepare a meal it would usually be 50+ smaller fish or crabs for 4 people
In South India, The Indian oil Sardine fish is something people eat like 5+ fish/meal.
People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.
I once ordered a sampler plate at a Korean place and ate a bunch of what I thought were little noodles, but quickly realized were tiny fish. So I probably ate 20 or 30 fish that day and brought the average up a bit.
> The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down?
Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals.
Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.
The state also spends tax payer money on things like this:
According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...
How else would we test an experimental drug and what makes that bad or cruel?
And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.
I hope Neuralink makes reasonable efforts to minimise the impact of testing on animals. But state hindrance of Neuralink's research could delay or stop blind people from gaining sight and quadriplegics from walking and gaining independence.
These are themselves forms of harm whose negative effects could outweigh the impacts of testing imperfections by orders of magnitude.
Wait are you saying Musk isn't a genius but more of a master marketer !?!
When people will wake up it's going to be brutal. In 50 years we'll still talk about mars colonies and autonomous vehicles being "just around the corner"
Most people don't want to have their hands on the wheel if they are paying big money for a system like this. It's definitely nowhere close to good enough for having the hands off the wheel. I would argue that FSD requires more attention than normal driving because the software can do something rash unexpectedly.
This sounds very much like the kind of logic that's been roundly criticized from the Effective Altruism people in recent weeks.
"This company has a goal to some day in the far future do massive amounts of unquestionable good! Therefore, you must allow them free rein to do whatever they want now, or you're keeping people disabled."
We have ethical rules for scientific research for a reason. We have, as a society, decided that we value the lives, comfort, and dignity of both humans and (to a lesser degree) animals now more than potential future good. If we can get to that future good, we will be able to do so without resorting to destructive and unethical means...or it's not worth getting to.
If you want to help disabled people there are a couple dozen movements that are very clear about the support and policy changes they need. We could tremendously improve hundreds of thousands of lives in a very short time frame with relatively very little money. If that were the goal.
Ah, but that's not a cool implant he promised you see. He was given a plan to potentially end world hunger with as little as 6 billion dollars, but instead paid 44 billion so he could post on Twitter.
It's not actually about helping people, unfortunately.
"The problems with Neuralink’s testing have raised questions internally about the quality of the resulting data, three current or former employees said. Such problems could potentially delay the company’s bid to start human trials, which Musk has said the company wants to do within the next six months."
> But state hindrance of Neuralink's research could delay or stop blind people from gaining sight and quadriplegics from walking and gaining independence.
That's not even what neuralink's most optimistic PR is talking about
This is what their website currently states:
> With a Bluetooth connection, you would be able to potentially control any mouse or keyboard with your thoughts.
Nobody's going to regain sight or movement, at best they'll gain mouse and keyboard control. And that's the positive side, god knows how it'll be weaponised by capitalism in the future
This is appalling if true. People will try and justify the pain and suffering of these animals and the employees by the potential benefits of these devices, but none of this is acceptable. Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings. The idea that this is a result of this new wave of toxic productivity mantra is also terrifying.
>Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings
Going to guess the people that would be able to walk again
I'm not sure that's the great argument you think it is.
Doesn't it seem a bit coercive if the people who want/need this are so desperate for it that they literally cannot care about the ethics of the company behind the product?
I think you misunderstand science and are maybe presuming that it’s okay to be sloppy because it will eventually result in a cure, and the only people who are disagreeing with you are animal rights activists.
What people are actually criticizing is that this technology is built on shaky science with sloppy experiments casting doubt on any claimed medical breakthroughs. We cannot just presume that because the possible quality of life increase is massive that we should stop caring about ensuring a quality of life increase.
It’s entirely possible (and has happened historically) where someone over promises a massive quality of life increase and it thereby ends up shortening peoples lives and causes more suffering precisely because whistleblowers at animal trials were ignored.
The key distinction here is that "unnecessary" isn't really an objective measure. You are taking that for granted, while the person replying to you was not.
Given the choice I'd kill literally every monkey and pig on the planet if it meant we had the technology to cure paralysis.
I honestly can't comprehend the alternative. You'd walk up to some poor sap paralyzed from the neck down and say "Gee I'd really love for you to walk again but I'm a little bit more concerned about the pigs and monkeys?".
I think what you're failing to comprehend is that some people have a trait called empathy which prevents them from genociding the better part of a billion individuals for the sake of a few being able to stretch their legs.
We kill 80 billion animals for food every year. Pretty sure 1500 to advance science is nothing in comparison.
And I wish we had a better way, but we just don't yet. Bioinformatics is working on creating virtual bodies, but we're not there yet, it's decades away.
It's not one person. It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures. Seems like an easy choice to me.
Neuralink won't be giving this product away. The company is not sacrificing these animals to better mankind, it's sacrificing them to make a profit, and our hope is that in making a profit they will accidentally make a lot of peoples' lives better. However, we have regulations and restrictions around that process because when that company makes decisions about what it is and isn't willing to sacrifice, those decisions are not going to be made based on the number of people they help, they'll be made based on profit maximization.
We can do (and should do) better work than this to improve lives for disabled and differently-abled people in ways that won't require this sheer level of suffering and that won't gate those peoples' quality of life behind expensive devices controlled by a single company, headed by a man who is historically against right-to-repair movements, against consumer privacy, and against consumer rights. There are the cliche opportunities to help (which is not to say that they're not important) like improving building and process accessibility, improving disabled rights. But there's also pure research opportunities like making the devices that already exist cheaper and more easily available. Neuralink isn't going to be cheaper than the existing hardware we have today to help disabled people, and if that hardware is out of reach of many disabled people, than Neuralink is also going to be out of reach for them.
Heck, we can also do (and should do) this exact same research outside of a startup culture with less animal suffering involved, and the outcomes will very likely be better.
----
> It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures
This also isn't the choice being offered. Neuralink isn't ready for human testing, and we have no guarantee that the company is going to succeed or that they'll end up being competitive in the market. People are treating this as if you just press a button and grant people the ability to walk at the cost of 1,500 animals, but Neuralink has a lot more testing to do, and we have no guarantee that those animals aren't going to eventually turn out to have been killed for no reason at all.
This is also why we have regulations around this; because every single company believes that they are working on something so important that it justifies this level of sacrifice, and every company believes that if they were allowed to make those sacrifices that they would be certain to succeed and their products wouldn't have any serious tradeoffs or problems. Even makeup companies believe that they are working on something important enough that it justifies this level of sacrifice. So we have rules about research that apply to everyone, even (especially) people sticking computers in our brains.
The U.S. factory farm system has killed 120+ million pigs and over 7 million sheep this year (hopefully not many monkeys).
I am quite sure most of those pigs were subjected to torturous conditions before they were put out of their misery.
TBH, I think any outrage is hypocritical from anyone one who is not already outraged and boycotting the global meat industry.
The global meat industry provides us with 350 million tons of food a year.
What has Neuralink given anyone for 1,500?
I wonder if people are reading the article too, the problem isn't even that they're killing animals, it's that they're killing more than their research requires because of unreasonable external pressure?
This feels a lot like "If you don't care about factory farms, but you do care that little Timmy is kicking puppies for fun, you're a hypocrite!!""
People being morally outraged about the mistreatment of animals in some contexts might lead to them being morally outraged about the mistreatment of animals in other contexts.
This is a scenario where as a vegan I'm happy for people to have standards about animal wealfare in research. Yes, sometimes "think of the animals" arguments can be used by omnivores in ways that are harmful, but if the standard is that people need to be 100% committed before they complain about anything, then no one is ever going to be 100% committed. Any conversion to any cause almost always starts with people caring about the issue at the edges, and that process often starts out as messy and hypocritical.
So in general I look at what behavior people want from me to evaluate why they're making an argument. I've seen people complain that vegans/vegetarians are hypocrites for getting a COVID vaccine that isn't vegan, but they're typically not arguing for people to care more, they're arguing that the hypocrisy means they should be able to eat meat. And in this comment section I see people arguing that the meat industry is worse than Neuralink (and to be clear, it absolutely is), but is that argument being made to try and convince people to stop eating meat? Or is it being made to argue that Neuralink shouldn't face scrutiny for unnecessary carelessness in its animal research?
On average, people have a natural instinct (which can admittedly be overcome) to empathize with animals around them, which is why the meat industry needs to work so hard to separate consumers from the sources of modern meat and to mask how industrial meat farming has evolved and scaled over time and what the costs have been. I want people to develop that instinct, not suppress it. I don't really care if they're hypocritical right now, maybe if they foster that empathetic instinct they'll get less hypocritical in the future.
But I don't want them to say, "well, I eat meat, so I guess I shouldn't be upset about other forms of suffering." I think that would be moving in the wrong direction. The argument should be, "yes, and", not "no, unless".
Think it’s disgusting to try and claim someone having the chance at no longer being a prisoner in their own body is morally in the wrong just because they might be ok with some animals suffering to make it happen.
Luckily I’m not one of those people so I’ll happily say the suffering happens once, the benefit lasts for the rest of humanity.
The criticism is that there’s no evidence that the undue suffering is actually contributing to faster production. Not euthanizing animals when the trial is over, instead making them vomit until the stomach acid ate their esophagus for a week. Incorrect implantation (so experiment flawed from the get go). Things like this.
We should be extremely cautious that this kind of sloppy science doesn’t worsen he quality of life of already vulnerable people through botched science. We recently had a case with experimental windpipe implantation that could promise literally giving people their voices back and it liquified their necks!
"In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus"
>> Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings.
I guess at least anyone who slaughters animals for sport or simply for their taste. I know few people near that burger-shop.
Torture is not the same as murder and by implying that they are you make it harder for people to advocate for less torture. Nobody wins in that case, not even you.
Experiment isn't the same as torture, either. They're not being accused of devising optimal ways to make animals suffer. If you're referring to inadvertent or incidental torture; alone in a feedlot pen too small to turn around your entire life, standing in your own shit, stuffed with grain, then unnecessarily killed (no one needs to eat meat.)
I grew up in Texas smoking briskets and practicing at targets in family cookouts. Now I’m plant-based living in California and my three guns are collecting dust in my mom’s closet. To each their own, but I don’t see how culturally or logically either lifestyle would lead me to put a chip in my brain… though I’m sure a lot of people will when/if neuralink is viable, desirable and affordable, regardless of their habits and beliefs.
"Living sentient beings" is also an unnecessarily redundant way to refer to the more popular term that is just "living beings". This is not different than saying "living living beings". Everything alive is sentient by definition.
You're getting downvoted, but you're simply correct in pointing out the hypocrisy in those who claim to value animal wellbeing while also funding animal agriculture.
I... don't really see a problem with this, at least from the article. The actual complaint as far as I can tell is related to the fact that they moved fast enough to make mistakes, specifically because they want to get to useful treatments faster. If we lived in a vegetarian world I might object to it, but in this world there's an actual price for a sheep's life.
> Five people who have worked on Neuralink’s animal experiments told Reuters they had raised concerns internally. They said they had advocated for a more traditional testing approach, in which researchers would test one element at a time in an animal study and draw relevant conclusions before moving on to more animal tests. Instead, these people said, Neuralink launches tests in quick succession before fixing issues in earlier tests or drawing complete conclusions. The result: more animals overall are tested and killed, in part because the approach leads to repeated tests.
> On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment
> filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys, and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and dying
> included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation
> staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries
Surely they could have a more scientific approach that would avoid having to kill so many animals and also make progress faster because the environment would be more stable. If it's borderline illegal to accidentally kill animals or making them suffer when it could prevented, I'm not sure.
As it seems right now, they have something of a cowboy approach to science which will lead to unnecessary pain and death of animals, and walking in circles in their progress as they don't seem to know what they are doing.
I have a better idea: instead to run tests concurrently(kinda what Musk is doing) let's run them sequentially so that less animals are used(even if it takes way more time). We can use the saved animals for some tasty burgers. Nevermind that some people need treatments now. We can give them the saved burgers.
Killing animals needlessly aside, if you have to repeat experiments because you're sloppy, you're not moving at the correct speed as you'll have to double-run every trial you're doing.
Regardless how you feel about killing animals for humans, don't you want companies that can help people to actually move forward faster rather than slower?
That's isolated demand for rigor. You're basically saying that "yes, they're doing great work, and the average slaughterhouse is killing the same number of animals in a day or two, but they could be 10% more efficient and that makes them evil".
If the argument here is that they should be allowed to violate research ethics in order to get 10% faster at letting paralyzed people walk, I think it's fair to point out that they way they're conducting research seems to be fairly sloppy and probably isn't actually giving them the productivity/efficiency boost that their defenders claim.
thefounder here argues that running experiments in parallel is a moral obligation because we need to get Neuralink out the door as quickly as possible. capableweb responds by arguing that Neuralink's current strategy isn't the fastest way to get that research done. I don't see that as an isolated demand for rigor, I think that's a reasonable objection to the idea that the need to be perfectly efficient outweighs animal ethics.
Actually, that's a pretty clear tradeoff of moving faster. You can't say "ok, we want to move faster because we want to heal people faster" and have absolutely no downside. That would mean you were just inefficient before. Truly upping the pressure comes with downsides, which you accept in the name of speed. And one of the most obvious is that you accept a higher probability of things breaking, as long as overall you make better progress.
Parallelizing is very similar to the way modern processors do speculative computing: they go ahead and run several branches of code at once, before knowing which one will actually need to be executed. Once they know, they just use that result and discard the others. It's a pretty standard strategy every time you want to trade money for speed.
In the first push for reaching the moon, there was mass production of rockets that went a lot faster than a slow build-test-analyze-modify-build. By the time one rocket went kaboom, quite a few were already in various stages of being built or even finished.
If your argument is that capableweb is wrong and that parallelizing experiments will make research faster, then fine? That's an argument you can make.
But either way I don't really see it as an isolated demand for rigor: capableweb is disagreeing about whether Neuralink's strategy is actually optimized for speed, given that thefounder seems to be arguing that optimizing for speed is a moral obligation.
Once you accept that parallelizing is a legitimate strategy with a clear tradeoff, then the conversation moves towards if that tradeoff is legitimate. And here I'm saying that's isolated demand for rigor to say that research that would, at the very least, help heal seriously ill people is less important than a random celebration which ups the meat consumption to the same levels, or inefficiencies in the meat supply chain or hundreds of other sources of waste.
It's more salient, of course, but if the people commenting on this didn't feel the same desire to protect animal lives on other instances in the past few months, I kinda have to think this is less about their actual values and more about the article being written as a successful indignation pump.
> Once you accept that parallelizing is a legitimate strategy with a clear tradeoff
That's the question. Is parallelizing animal testing and ramping up the number of animals used a legitimate strategy and does it have a clear tradeoff? No one in is arguing that animal rights only matter in lab testing. Rather, there are two arguments that can be made:
- A) parallelization of animal testing is sloppy research that won't lead to better results.
- B) the benefits of parallelization don't outweigh the moral cost of animal rights.
Those are two separate arguments, and the parent comments were primarily arguing around A. B is orthogonal. That doesn't mean that B is an irrelevant argument or that there's no case to be made for animal welfare in testing, but it's a separate argument from A.
I believe it's a moral obligation not to trade speed for efficiency when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost). I have a different opinion on human testing of course.
It's like banning SpaceX's "sloppy" development because the failure of their rockets create pollution. Polution is bad and causes death but I think we should not get religious about polution where it matters little and the potential reward is high.
> when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost)
I've commented similarly elsewhere, but I really wish people would stop saying "think about the meat we eat" as an argument for more animal suffering in the world. The correct response to hypocrisy is to have consistently better morals everywhere, not to have consistently worse morals elsewhere.
Of course, people can disagree whether or not killing animals unnecessarily is immoral. But if you want to take the premise that eating meat is wrong, no vegetarian/vegan is ever going to tell you that they don't want unnecessary animal testing stopped until after everyone stops eating meat. People's hypocrisy around specific moral issues should not be treated like a license to completely abandon other standards; taking that approach to morality is a recipe for rapid societal decay.
> where it matters little and the potential reward is high.
Again, you can disagree with capableweb's argument, but I just want to characterize correctly what the argument is -- capableweb is saying that the testing here isn't actually going to significantly increase Neuralink's odds of success or their research speed. I would add to that argument that it may in fact lower Neuralink's odds of success if it encourages sloppier research or decreases public trust in the project. I don't have a strong take on that beyond that I think their testing is symptomatic of Musk imposing deadlines and pressures that are going to be toxic to a productive research environment. I don't know that excessive animal testing is going to slow down their research, but based on what the researchers in this article have said, I am pretty certain that the reason why they're doing excessive animal testing in this case is because Musk is pushing them to do sloppy testing to meet unrealistic deadlines that will lead to sloppy results and a worse product, if they get a product out at all. Fast careless testing is sometimes slower than methodical careful testing.
That's an argument that's orthogonal to the moral cost of killing animals for research purposes. If you don't think there's any moral tradeoff to killing animals at all, then the only thing that matters is how their decisions impact the end result.
And seriously, I just responded on here to clarify what capableweb was talking about and that they weren't making an isolated demand for rigor. I am not interested in getting into an argument about whether all of the research standards for animal welfare should all be dropped so that Musk can theoretically maybe monopolize a market in the future that will likely be inaccessible to most disabled people at a potentially slightly faster speed.
That's precisely my point. It's quite obvious to me that running tasks in parallel produces both more waste and faster results.
A good comparison would be Musk's other company SpaceX. You can surely put more rigor into r&d to reduce waste and failures (i.e like NASA) but you will progress slower.
Chances are that your company/project will get bankrupt(like so many biotech companies) if you don't move fast enough.
I don't think anyone has claimed that either. What the claim is, is that Neuralink might have abnormally high number of repeated experiments as they continue to commit mistakes which makes them either have weak value or having to repeat the same trials.
> the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated,
You said they'd "have to double-run every trial you're doing". Which isn't correct. They have to double run the experiments they screwed up on. That may or may not be faster than taking the time to improve experiment quality.
I find it interesting how quickly people resort to a "the ends justify the means" attitude about this stuff when, as pointed out in the article, there are others in the same space doing the same thing who HAVE managed to perform the due diligence required to get the proper approval. Is the assumption their efforts won't lead to anything because they've managed not to screw up the implant sizes or glue?
I think the argument is that they're taking too long. Actual humans continue to suffer with problems that could be addressed by this technology while some people are "hand-wringing" about animal life in a society that raises and kills animals inhumanely because they're tasty.
We can only assume that this is taking too long if we assume that Neuralink is somehow able to skip the fundamentals and be successful. As I pointed out above Synchron is further ahead, they are making more progress because they were able to meet the required standard, and I think we can all agree standards are important for human trials (or is a few extra human deaths ok if it gets to market sooner?), so I'd suggest it's Neuralink's own fault they can't meet the advancement criteria and not just concerns about animal welfare that are getting in the way.
Yes, in areas like testing discipline. I don't accept the argument that you can skip past the fundamentals and it'll all just work out because you may be able to help some people quicker. That's everyone's goal in that space - to get implants onto the market as fast as possible.
It is wholly incorrect that you can perform sloppy experiments that lead to excess costs of your research and expect this to be at all respectable or acceptable among your peers just because your research is particularly exciting or potentially useful.
If anything, being sloppy is a point against you when you’re working in particularly impactful stuff, because it shows your skills as a scientist aren’t up to the standards of the field you’re researching.
I'd have more sympathy for this argument if Neuralink was genuinely the fastest or more efficient way to solve these problems, but it's a far shot attempting to build a technology that is wildly ambitious where there's no guarantee that it will provide the revolution people claim (or that it will even be commercially and economically available at all to the vast majority of people who need it).
It's not just that the research could be done with less suffering/death, it's also that this is also not really the highest-priority research if we want to improve the lives of differently-abled and disabled people. But we're being asked to excuse bad research practices that result in unnecessary death because somehow Neuralink specifically is an emergency that needs to have market domination as soon as possible to save lives.
I have no objection to Neuralink responsibly conducting research in this direction, but it's far from the most effective or optimistic way that we could be spending that time and money, so I don't see why they specifically should get a pass to violate research ethics. They're already devoting resources in a way that is sub-optimal if you just want to improve the lives of disabled people as quickly as possible. And that's fine, but at least they can devote those resources responsibly without causing additional suffering.
Synchron is not nearly in the "same space". Comparing their active stents to Neuralink's implants is like comparing a current Timex G-Shock to the new Apple dive watch. (Which is to say both are cool, but one requires evolutionary tech progress and the other requires significant R&D.)
You have to weigh the ends against the means. "Repeating the experiments because of sloppiness" is pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to ends, in my opinion.
This argument assumes that "moving fast enough to make mistakes" is actually getting us closer to a usable technology. There's not much reason to think this is the case based on the opinions of other experts in the field. Theranos also "moved fast" - straight into a ditch.
> The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads
Especially when it's sloppy mistakes that don't provide scientific value.
> Theranos also "moved fast" - straight into a ditch
There's no need to make a figurative analogy to Theranos when Musk runs another company with the same development philosophy, with a product that will literally drive straight into a ditch.
Move fast and break things was edgy precisely because it was going against longstanding of common sense. Shaking things up a bit worked for what was fundamentally a low stakes software project (a CRUD microblogging app), where the users weren't even stakeholders. Back in physical world of hardware engineering, it's a terribly sloppy philosophy.
I haven't followed SpaceX enough to know if they operate(d) that way, or if it worked reasonably. If it did, I'd guess it was due to increased guardrails. At first glance, you'd think the design of rockets would be more critical than cars. But the issue in Tesla's case isn't the trickiness of the technical problem, but rather the ethics of testing on consumers in populated areas.
Taking it as a given that a rocket can't be launched over say a major city (one "guardrail"), it would seem to matter a lot less if a bunch of unmanned rockets blew up on the pad or over a test range.
> There's not much reason to think this is the case based on the opinions of other experts in the field.
There is however good reason to think this is the case by looking at the history of many other developments, such as planes (so many crashes and deaths in the 1900s) and rockets (many SpaceX booms).
In addition to the technological question, there also seems to be a personality risk here. The kind of people who thrive in an environment where speed and marketable results are prized above anything else, and standards of care are neglected are unlikely to deliver top notch results.
Theranos had other problems, like a fundamentally untenable design that many biologists criticized as being physically impossible. Not hard, but physically impossible.
Nevertheless it is true that moving fast increases risk. You either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly.
Some of the things Musk has claimed are probably physically impossible using the device Neuralink has constructed. For example, there is indeed a treatment for depression that involves stimulating parts of the brain using electrodes. But the parts you need to reach are way in there[1]. Neuralink's device is not capable of reaching these areas in its current form.
However I'm way out of my depth on this. The best I can do is listen to skepticism and try to evaluate it on its merits vs. the things that Musk says and his track record of over-promising.
I won't speak at all on Neuralink, but you don't necessarily need to stimulate that deep into the brain directly. You can piggyback off existing functional connectivity between that deep area and an area closer to the cortical surface. Functional connectivity is when one area sends activation or inhibitory signals to another area when stimulated. This is the mechanism behind using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to treat depression ([0] as just one example) despite TMS's shallow stimulation depth. Using the functional connectivity also provides an avenue of sending inhibitory signals, not just activation signals. With that said, it requires functional imaging (fMRI) to determine the functional connections. Functional connectivity also isn't indefinitely static and it does change over time. .
I should add that it's much more nuanced and complicated than how I've explained. Along with determining if a functional connection is excitatory or inhibitory, you need to ensure its direction as well because functional connections aren't necessarily bidirectional. You also want to be confident in how stimulating the target endpoint will affect the functional connection over time. It may potentially strengthen it (think "training") or weaken it (think "desensitizing"), thus potentially affecting the efficacy of the stimulation over time. As with most scientific fields, knowledge is built up one step at a time and you need to stand upon the shoulders of prior work before producing an application with confidence.
Once Theranos's patents lost their teeth, devices similar to what was in those patents appeared on the market within a few years. All from big pharma companies. Today, a lot of blood testing machines can run many tests on a few hundred microliters of blood.
When you go get blood work done, they collect a vial, but often use only a few drops at a time.
Usually not, actually, although some more complicated tests do involve sample prep. For most tests, it's a small microfluidic cartridge and a tiny amount of blood.
I would remain skeptical about this claim. There are a lot of exploratory tests that can be done with a drop of blood and have a solid history behind, for more complicated tests we would fall again in a "Theranos magic" case.
I hope that the investors finally learn their lesson and accepted that if you want to produce good results you need to starting with good data. In science there is not sense in finding the minimum algorithm possible that vomits the desired results. Alive beings are complicated
So either the claim that somebody is building the nbext theranos machine or recycling theranos machines for doing what theranos couldn't... either is false, or is just old technology wrapped in glitter, or would send serious doubts in the confidence in the results. It depends on the details.
or barely succeed and have to make up the debt to technical design and process quality later, taking longer in the end than if you had built a solid foundation for your endeavor
Reminds me of Kim Ki Duks comments on the animal cruelty in The Isle[0]:
"In America you eat beef, pork, and kill all these animals. And the people who eat these animals are not concerned with their slaughter. Animals are part of this cycle of consumption. It looks more cruel onscreen, but I don’t see the difference."
I'm vegetarian, but totally condone a (relatively) tiny amount of animal cruelty for art and science. /Especially/ art-- it might make people realize what they are eating.
"If we lived in a vegetarian world I might object to it"
I am not a vegetarian and do not plan on becoming one - but I still want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible. Meaning I would like my meat to have seen the sun and outside and not only on the tightly packed way to the slaughterhouse.
But yes you can argue, that the conventional meat factories are horrible, so being horrible here is allright as well. But I think that is a horrible line of reasoning.
> I am not a vegetarian and do not plan on becoming one - but I still want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible.
Perhaps if we cannot forbade animal suffering altogether from deontological position, we can just take consequentialist position and tax it like other externalities. That would reduce unnecessary animal suffering while allow necessary.
I think you missed the point GC was making, which was (in my understanding) that we should basically allow people to do as much animal cruelty as they want (within extremity limits), we just tax them proportionally.
Scale matters. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference between the things you are comparing.
You get one or two orders of magnitude just from the lifespan of animals-- a pig in a factory will spend up to a decade suffering, musks monkeys presumably less than a year.
You get the rest of the orders of magnitude from the number of animals involved.
And yes, scale matters. To reduce animal suffering on a global scale, the obvious target are the meat factories. That doesn't mean, that avoiding animal suffering here isn't something that should be done as well. And when there was unnecessary testing, it clearly was unnecessary animal suffering.
The problem I have with this discussion is it pretends to treat animal welfare as an absolute, when in fact nobody does that or believes in that (apart form militant vegans perhaps).
There is a lot of biomedical research out there killing a lot of animals. Most of it is of dubious utility-- most of the low level stuff can be done in simpler organisms or simulation, lots of it is highly speculative with no applications in sight.
This research has a very high expected return, and it can't be done in simpler organisms. I do agree that it could probably have been done more carefully or more slowly and saved a few animal lives, but I am certain that this is a long long /long/ way from the worst example of this.
"The problem I have with this discussion is it pretends to treat animal welfare as an absolute"
I don't see, where I did this. I clearly stated that I eat meat and I know that this means animal suffering. It is all about the relative suffering to me aka avoiding unnecessary suffering or finding better ways (simulations) wherever possible.
"but I am certain that this is a long long /long/ way from the worst example of this. "
And there surely are worse examples. So what? This is about this concrete example. Unnecessary animal suffering to meet some arbitary deadlines. Not to save the world from a pandemic or alike.
"This research has a very high expected return, and it can't be done in simpler organisms."
My question would be, why not use humans? At what point would the "very high expected return" justify this? Never? Why not?
Apes are indeed quite close to us (so are pigs) and I think drawing a line along "with that species really anything is allowed as they cannot speak" to "they can speak, we have to take every caution with them" is just strange to me, or rather plain wrong.
So to be clear, I never said animal testing is never allright. But I do think the reasoning of "anything is allowed with animals" is very wrong.
I wasn't calling out you specifically, more explaining my attitude here in general. Sorry for not being more clear about that.
> My question would be, why not use humans? At what point would the "very high expected return" justify this? Never? Why not?
Very good question! Obviously we are heading into sci-fi territory now, but in a world where all suffering was valued according to some agreed-upon objective metric I would suggest the following:
- yes much more human testing, especially volunteers who are terminally ill/suicidal etc.
- in such a world testing would presumably be much more expensive, so they could afford more complex research substrates that we don't bother with because we can just use animals
- eg. lots of brain organoids and other synthetic experimental substrates
And for the record, I do think such a world would either be some sort of anarchocapitalist chaos or painfully slow to develop. But at least it would be morally coherent!
Joking aside I guess my only real message here is, people who find this stuff disgusting should think about their dinner plates. In my ideal world, we use approximately 50% as much animal testing and 0.1% as many animal food products.
"yes much more human testing, especially volunteers who are terminally ill/suicidal etc."
Basically, it is already done, when late stage cancer patients agree to the very latest, risky treatments.
But I would extend it with say, granting death row canditates certain privileges, when they agree for some risky tests. But that is a very grey area with lots of room for turning into dystopia (but you can argue death row prisoners are living there anyway).
Also the problem with proper testing is, that you need healthy subjects which are as similar as possible. So that would mean breeding or cloning humans as test subjects. I fear this is secretly already done or planned, for very promising stem cell research/gene therapies/enhanced babies.
"In my ideal world, we use approximately 50% as much animal testing and 0.1% as many animal food products. "
And in my ideal world, we do not do animal testing at all anymore, but since I have not a working replacement avaiable, your numbers sound agreeable.
> I am not a vegetarian and do not plan on becoming one - but I still want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible
I don’t understand how these statements can possibly coexist unless you think that the animals you eat are slaughtered without suffering — a bar which is impossibly high, IMO.
Not Op, but the same from me, I eat meet, I killed chickens at the farm this does not mean that I am fine for say you torturing a cat, beating a horse or killing animals for fun and not eat them. So the situation is not a 0 or 1 , you can do your medical experiment but follow the ethical rules and laws that you should.
So… then you disagree with avoiding animal suffering whenever possible. Or rather you’re fine with avoiding animal suffering whenever it doesn’t keep you from eating a chicken sandwich?
I have no problem with that attitude.
But let’s not delude ourselves. As (relatively) wealthy people in developed countries, we’re absolutely fine with people and animals suffering when it lets us have a hamburger or put an iPhone in our pockets.
Correct , I will not replace some good local meet and our 2000+ year traditions,
for not a good enough reason.
I killed animals to eat them and I am not bothered by the act, it had to be done. I was raised in a farm in Romania(Easter Europe, poor country ... so your typical american stereotypes will not apply = things were different like my old grandma asking me to kill a chicken (I was maybe 10 or 12).
Andy FYI I am not rich nor using an iPhone or 1000$ phone.
The slaughtering is not really the problem to me. Cannot be avoided, allright, I can live with that (but there are of course worlds between how the meat I like to eat was slaughtered, compared to the cheap meat from the supermarket, think a deer that died with a clean shot, compared to a animal waiting in stress and panic for hours or days before the slaughtering factory).
And what matters more, are the living conditions the animal had before the slaughtering. Like being outside in the sun and on real grass, compared to tightly locked inside the whole life, literaly living in their own shit.
I mean you’re calling attention to the word you’re ignoring: “whenever.” You’re basically saying some suffering is fine as long as it’s suffering you’re fine with.
Don’t get me wrong, that is a 100% valid attitude to have. But don’t pretend like you’re trying to avoid animal suffering whenever possible — because you’re clearly not.
> The slaughtering is not really the problem to me
Also lol at this. Makes it easy to avoid animal suffering if being slaughtered doesn’t count as suffering to you.
I’ll agree that there’s no way to eliminate suffering.
But you can continue to reduce your creation of suffering in animals by not eating meat.
It’s fine if that’s a decision you’re not willing to make.
But if you say, “I just try to minimize suffering” and then continue to eat meat, you should instead say, “I just try to minimize suffering that I can’t justify to myself.” Otherwise you’re lying to yourself because you’re doing one thing and saying another.
"I just try to minimize suffering that I can’t justify to myself"
That is clearly implied, isn't it?
There is almost no action, that does not directly or indirectly creates (potential) suffering. Normal agriculture creates a lot of suffering by poisoning the earth and the animals within. But even the most ecological agriculture creates suffering. First, by making a forest to a field. Wild animals and plants had to go away, so that the corn can grow. But yes, growing corn in an ecological way minimizes suffering by comparing it with growing corn in the most toxic way and then feeding it to animals that can barely move, to then feed some fat humans, who can also barely move.
The most chilling statement out of the article to me is "Musk’s impatience with Neuralink has grown as the company, which launched in 2016, has missed his deadlines on several occasions to win regulatory approval to start clinical trials in humans, according to company documents and interviews with eight current and former employees."
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?
> How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people?
Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.
These animals are intended to simulate humans for purposes of research, though. A disregard for doing the experimentation properly has the potential to carry over into production usage, just like coding newbies who write code with SQL injection holes saying "eh I'll fix it later" are practicing writing insecure code.
"Oops wrong glue/vertebra/implant" folks are not people I want anywhere near my brain surgery.
So do the parents of children but it hasn't stopped flaws in Tesla's FSD. Not entirely directly comparable, sure, but it's the same attitude of "get it to market before it's ready".
If there's one thing we've learned from Elon's acquisition of Twitter, it's that his default response to "you'll get sued" is a confident belief he can beat the rap.
It can work rather poorly in software from a quality perspective too, but in software the game is often to test a business hypothesis very quickly or ship features fast enough to win feature bingo with competitors and quality often goes on the back burner.
It's just that in health care the bar for MVP is way way higher.
I have a whole rant about how consumer software and software for serious things (ie: people can die) need to be treated differently just like civil engineering and building a shed in your back yard should be treated differently. There is no room for agile code in a finished product where lives are on the line. Its fine for non life or death things and its a great way to prototype ideas. But the control system on your car should be developed with more rigor than that.
It actually does, but in a measured way. You have to have a hybrid approach. Agile for stuff like little software features and bug fixes, waterfall for big important (often safety and effectively tied) milestones they often precede an animal or human study. Iterate the smaller less safety critical features (which are often software based) and then align the exit of one of those phases with a hardware freeze that captures key safety and effectivity in the hardware and then do a cadaver, animal or human study to prove it. You don't want to apply agile to the hardware usually.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
I personally know plenty, that's my evidence. I also personally knowing morally bankrupt people. I know morally bankrupt people who aren't CEOs, I know good people who are. These are separate adjectives.
>> Unless you don’t wanna see it, that he’s a sociopathic personality with too much capital fueling his god complex and a brittle long-termism agenda?
> So, he’s your standard CEO, then. Got it.
He's definitely not "your standard CEO." How could you even say something like that with a straight face? Those aren't binary qualities and he seems to have them to a far larger degree than other CEOs. Alternatively, for someone in his position, he is unusually lacking the social skills or self-control needed to mask them.
So Musk, who has done and is doing a lot to reduce air pollution(which is causing 6.5 million deaths per year) and climate change is sociopathic, but all the oil executives get a free pass, got it.
This is the same pope of climate change who wanted to build concrete tunnels underneath cities to transmit a single brand of car and wants to build gigantic rockets to go to Mars in a billionaire pissing contest?
The likelihood of EVs and Tesla in particular impacting climate change is minuscule and much overhyped and oversold.
While fairly true, it isn't really relevant to climate change. If anything, the EV movement has reignited the love of the car, which is harmful to curbing climate change. Building one mile of a one lane road emits 400 times the emissions of building an EV, and building EVs actually emits more emissions than an ICE car. EVs only cross over to be more emissions friendly about 6-24 months into driving ownership, ignoring battery disposal and recycling. EVs are the most overblown response to climate change that will ultimately do nothing.
Rockets are absolutely terrible for climate change. They dump huge amounts of pollutants directly into the atmosphere, including the upper atmosphere.
The fact that people see Musk as actually caring about climate change is disheartening. In fact, it may even be the case that Musk and his companies are a net negative in terms of mitigating climate change.
I was responding to the idea that he is supposedly a savior for climate change.
Regarding sociopathy, I’m not a psychologist, but he seems clearly a narcissist. He almost feels too sensitive and needy to be a sociopath, but who knows.
Wait! Wasn't that the point of these credits in the first place?
Penalizing ICE auto manufacturers who weren't doing enough switching to clean energy alternatives, while also rewarding the competition that were trying embrace these alternatives?
Effectively having those that weren't doing anything subsidize those that were.
But if he'd not sold them, then the other manufacturers would have been forced to reduce emissions even more - otherwise it's just a cost of business (passed on to consumers).
It's not some altruistic move - it propped up Tesla's balance sheet when it was needed, and makes a mockery of his green credentials.
(1) Reducing localized air pollution by offsetting it somewhere else. The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car.
(2) Musk actively hampers government investment in one of the best pieces of infrastructure for reducing transportation related climate change and pollution. See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
(3) as for the sociopathic tendencies. The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of. Dude doesn't even have a physics degree but doesn't correct people. He is actively promoting the great man of history theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory] which is complete bullshit. It takes a group of people to accomplish most great things of history. Hannibal crossing the Alps by himself wouldnt even be a foot note in history of Rome... But with his officers helping him push his military through and into Italy... Well one of the greatest enemies of Rome in her history. Same thing with spaceX, Elon musk didnt design and make his companies rockets... He hired great leaders to dedicate to who made it happen. He is just a 21st century salesman.
>The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car
EVs replacing gas guzzling cars and SUVs is a win for the environment. You're just regurgitating the oil lobby's misinformation.
>See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
Do you have a source for "how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California"?
>The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of.
Trivially debunked, he gives Karpathy the limelight on AI Day, and lets the battery engineers talk on stage on Battery day.
He seems pretty down-to-ground to me, personally, especially compared to other people of similar wealth. What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
> too much capital
I personally agree, but this is still a subjective opinion, not a real criticism. The more general implication of this is that there is such a thing as "too much capital", in which case we need to draw the line - at which point exactly capital becomes too much? A million dollars? A billion?
> brittle long-termism agenda
Brittle or not, arguing that Elon cares only about long term is factually false - he already delivered many things, including Tesla electric cars and Starlink internet service, which are useful here and now.
> What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
Just look at the way he's been treating Twitter employees.
For example, making a joke by bringing a "sink in" [1] the company right before making pre-announced firings. That episode right there tells you he's more concerned with making a joke for the lolz than about the emotions of his new employees, which is a pretty clear sociopathic action.
For the specific example I mentioned, it clearly could have been handled much more sensitively.
Don't make bombastic jokes when entering a company you're about to eviscerate. It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
There are dozens of stories that show Musk is at least a narcissist with very little empathy, not necessarily a sociopath, but it's the same for the rest of the world.
Elon's callousness is legendary -- read what his first wife had to say about him, people close to him and the way they were fired, the way he named his son with Grimes, the way he baselesly insulted a hero diver as pedophile, the fact he has so many children he barely sees them.
> It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
Sure, but is it enough to call a person a sociopath? By that definition, every rich person sheltered from ordinary working man's reality is a sociopath.
There are other reasons why I think he's likely to be a sociopath, from his bullying behaviour to his increasingly out-of-control impulsive tendencies.
I'm not a doctor so I can't make a diagnosis, but if you really are interested in whether he's a sociopath or not there's plenty of material online with indications on that. Here's a list of signs of sociopathy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/signs-of-a-sociopath/
So the world in which this incident shows sociopathic behavior is the exact world that Musk (and I, for that matter) disagree with.
My impression of prestige tech is that large parts of the industry are children because the money tree kept everyone in cold brew hop teas and catered lunches regardless the usefulness of your product or your monetization strategy.
Moving fast and break things actually seems like a decent idea in healthcare BEFORE you get to the human trials, then you should slow down. Not sure how hard a change in culture that will be.
We kill hundreds of millions of animals a year after incredible suffering for much worse reasons than making the blind see. And healthcare moves very slowly atm, leading to a lot of suffering.
I agree with the idea in general but some of the errors are just bad science that doesn’t discover anything. Putting the wrong sized chip in a brain? Using a mistaken vertebrae? Not euthanizing as soon as it’s apparent the trial is too flawed to continue? These are just sloppy mistakes.
In retrospect it’s sort of insane that this sounds like a ton when that many dead animals pass through my local grocery store in… a week? Looking up the stats Costco sells 150k rotisserie chickens a day.
There's obviously a difference, since animals can be slaughtered instantly and have not expectation of what will happen to them and no memory after. [0] On the other hand, experiments where they eventually die are likely to cause immense stress and pain.
[0] Now there can be a very complex discussion about this. I'm not saying slaughtering is unproblematic. I'm not saying you couldn't try to make a similar point for humans to which I would also have replies why that's a different matter. I'm just making the point for this specific purpose of comparing here.
OK but that is not actually how US factory farming operates. They are almost universally factories of extraordinary animal suffering, where broken or sick animals are discarded like trash (smashed, shot, thrown in a dumpster to die, etc).
I think it's likely that even the most terribly mistreated lab animal has a better quality of life and death than the average US foodstock chicken.
I've been involved in atudies where we cut the heart out of sheep and then implanted a pump to replace it. One animal had the pump strapped to its back. The animal bumped up against its pen one day and broke one of the 1/2" tubes free and the pump (artificial heart) sprayed blood all over the pen and the animal bled out. We discovered it in the morning.
I'd rather do just about anything than that. Worst death imaginable.
They're not exactly hard to find, or secret. They are, however, subjective; you may think it's funny to throw male chicks alive into a meatgrinder, or to cull a entire facility's worth of unsalable pigs by turning up the heat.
France is force feeding/torturing 700,000 geese and 37 million ducks every year for foie gras according to google. That is definitely causing them stress and pain.
And similarly there are other countries that are much more lax when it comes to animal and human studies, so there is a cottage industry of US and european companies doing clinical work in those countries before doing their big US or EU studies. Each country has different laws, different lines that can or can't be crossed. Your example and mine are both good examples.
i work in the medical device industry and am very familiar with preclinical (animal) research. my problem with this article is the inference that the animals COULD have survived if the studies were not rushed. the reality is that these animals are specifically bred for research and are always euthanized at the conclusion of the study.
Where is the inference that the animals could have survived? I think it's pretty clearly outlined in the article that the animals end up dead regardless.
What the article is saying though, because of tight deadlines, sloppy procedures and chaotic environment, the trials are rife with mistakes that could have been prevented if they were more careful, so they don't have to repeat the same trial over and over because they fucked up the previous times.
So the suggestion is to instead of running a trial bad 4 times killing 4N pigs, run one good and proper trial so you only end up killing 1N pigs for the same output research data.
Me too (work in the space). My issue is the quantity of animals they thought they needed, I've never seen more than a dozen or two needed for an entire medical device program, drugs may need more, but for devices this is a staggeringly high number.
The Neuralink system is nothing like testing the biocompatibility of a simple artificial knee. (Though I'll note that insufficient animal testing led to huge issues in this space.)
I've never worked on artificial knees. My frame of reference is artificial hearts and surgical robotics, those are on the same order of complexity as Neuralink, so my experience is pertinent IMO.
I'd argue that the brain and the heart are at least 2 orders of complexity apart. Granted many neurologists try to treat the brain as if they were similar, and current brain implants essentially function as pacemakers, but I think most folks that are excited about Neuralink are excited because for the first time they are building interfaces that begin to cross those 2 orders of complexity.
We are not talking about those though. We are talking about devices that treat the brain and heart, completely different. Devices that treat the heart are far more complex devices - they have moving parts that need to work seamlessly while submerged in blood. Brain implants are just glorified PCBs in enclosures with electrodes. No moving parts, no motors.
It's also not the first time those things have crossed. We've been doing cochlear implants for decades, neurostim devices for nearly as long. None of this is new (except for the Musk being an ass part)
I understood that the time pressure lead to mistakes that made some experiments useless. So they had to be repeated, which means more animals in total died than if the experiments had been done correctly the first time.
Of course the specific animals would have been used for other experiments, but it would have affected the total number of animals bred and killed.
Lot of "people eat meat, so why should we care?" in the comments. I disagree with this line of reasoning. It'd be pretty much impossible to make progress in anything with that sort of attitude, allowing backsliding in one place because you don't have another in order. It argues, in my opinion, for better oversight of the poor animal welfare in the food chain.
But you could also say that "it'd be pretty much impossible to make progress in anything with that sort of attitude" where "that sort of attitude" is one where there's no sense of urgency and people work at a leisurely pace. It only depends on where on the spectrum from "greater good" to "individual animal rights" you stand.
I think to those folks arguing that we eat meat, it makes sense that this isn't a big number given the potential greater good, in comparison to all the meat we uselessly eat out of mere personal dietary preference.
As for me, I don't really have a formed opinion on this. I would err on the side that the greater good is served, but of course would rather if animals weren't needed, or minimize how much harm is done to them. These are are philosophical questions, and it's difficult to untangle which conclusion is pure versus pragmatic, versus convenient.
Isn't it hypocritical to dismiss that argument, though?
Arguably if you cared about animal wellbeing you'd start with the farming industry.
I'm not saying shutdown animal-cruelty cops because the farming industry is far worse than individuals abusing animals, but those 1500 animals killed were killed in the name of science.
They aren't dismissing the argument. They're saying pretty plainly that both things can be bad, and therefore both can be addressed simultaneously. Taking the stance that animal welfare activists can't care about anything else until the insanely divisive issue of factory farming is solved, on the other hand, is being dismissive of the issue at hand. It's whataboutism. Moreover, someone might take issue with animals being sacrificed for Neuralink while being okay with animals suffering for human consumption. Such a take would be nuanced, not hypocritical.
Arguing against whataboutism makes sense, but considering over 50 billion animals are killed every year for food it seems a bit weird to consider 1500 animals being killed for some purpose news (0.000003% of that total).
I don't understand the pushback this article is getting. If someone is murdered it's news, even though there might be war or genocide going on somewhere else in the world. I don't think anyone in the comment section has said that this is the most important issue of our time, but it's something that is happening. Maybe laws are being broken. Maybe this news encourages new laws to be made. Since when did we start resenting greater awareness?
Given the number of "what about the meat industry" comments on here, I want to speak as a vegan and give you my express permission to be morally outraged about careless research causing animal suffering, even if you are an omnivore.
And I wish all of the people here arguing that you need to stop eating chickens to be upset about this a very, "either convert fully to veganism yourself or go away and stop appropriating vegan arguments in an effort to try and get people to care less about animal wellfare."
I would love for all of you to be vegan, but you are absolutely allowed to care about animals before you become vegan. I don't care if you're hypocritical, please do not use the existence of veganism as an excuse to turn off the empathy centers of your brain. No vegan is ever going to tell you not to care about animal suffering just because you don't care about it perfectly consistently in every area of your life. That is not what veganism is about.
for everyone in this thread who thinks "animal deaths are ok if it means a cure comes faster", the article makes it seem like "moving faster" in this space just results in botched experiments & needlessly dead animals since Musk never can manage a deadline vs hype
I have a family member trying to produce some novel materials. To prove it is safe for human skin contact he is required by federal regulations to perform testing on beagles.
Something on the order of 60,000 beagles are bred per year for animal testing. Most of the testing isn’t actually helpful or valuable. But it’s the only way to get through the regulatory approvals.
He used an early Tesla Roadster as a daily commuter for years. Then he launched it into space on the first flight of the Falcon Heavy. He uses prerelease versions of the FSD software in his Model S.
Musk wouldn't get a Neuralink early on because the current implants are designed to help people with disabilities. Even if everything goes according to plan, it'll be quite some time before there are implants that enhance healthy adults.
To me that just makes his claims about wanting to move humanity forward as a whole (rather than just doing stuff out of personal ambition) ring more true.
plenty of accurate ways to critique elon, no need to make yourself look foolish by suggesting tesla and spacex and other ventures are just ponzi schemes.
It won't be Musk, but I would not be at all shocked if one of the people there gets an implant with no official or public record of it very early on in this process.
SpaceX launches more payload to orbit than the rest of the world combined. They're the only ones who have managed to land orbital boosters.
Tesla has manufactured over 3 million cars. They are so successful that the majority of electric vehicles in developed countries are Teslas. Since Tesla is a publicly traded company, you can look at their SEC filings and see that less than 2% of their revenue comes from subsidies.[1] 86% of their revenue is from selling and leasing cars. 8% is from services related to those cars, and 5% is from energy generation and storage. In Tesla's accounting, regulatory credits are a rounding error.
I have a hard time figuring out how either of these businesses are a confidence trick.
NASA could of also taken on those contracts and launched more rockets than they are currently are doing.
Elon isn't launching them on is lonesome as some great misunderstood innovator. He's the public face to a lot of investment, which could easily go elsewhere and be more or less successful, who knows.
Feel free to have whatever opinion you want of Elon Musk, but SpaceX has been wildly successful by just about every metric. In terms of cost, they are launching payloads at 1/44th the cost per kg of the Space Shuttle and at a fraction of the cost of their private sector competitors. Also, there's the fact that we were bumming rides off the Russians for a decade because of NASA's issues...
Agreed, SpaceX is successful. Disagree that this excludes an alternative where public funds were spent elsewhere with similar success. More or less success, who knows.
Feel free to maintain your bias, but it's a fact that smart engineers can achieve success under more than just one single showman.
Social media has turned the internet into a consensus enforcing, group signaling machine that overwhelms reasoned opinion and moves against dissent like an immune system. Nowhere on the internet is safe from this monster.
Just looked it up and over 23 million animals are killed every single day just in the US.
This is just for land animals. Including seaside brings it somewhere around 150 million a day.
To think that now all of a sudden 1,500 animals over months or years matters is laughable. Anyone criticizing musk needs to either stop and reflect on how their society is causing all this animal murder, or at the very least realize how irrational they look getting worked up over this.
Not only that, but this story is about 1,220 mice and a statistically insignificant number of pigs, sheep, and monkeys (the article doesn't even say how many of which). We breed mice exclusively to feed to our pet reptiles as a society. This is just another Musk hate story cause he took one of their toys away.
The same government targets animal rights activists as terrorists. I suppose that make sense from the same government that drones babies and women and talks about human rights.
With that in mind then it is critical to carefully watch any "product" when it starts getting into the hands (heads) of people. Theranos was bad but it got even worse when they were defrauding customers by giving them garbage results.
This would be true if Musk didn't have a track record of delivering ambitious projects (albeit late). Elizabeth Holmes had exactly 0 track record of delivering anything.
That makes the "look, the monkey likes doing this" a bit funnier than it already was. It was clear that it was a (pathetic) response to the cruelty allegations.
That said humans are cruel to animals at a scale far, far, far larger than this.
Ignoring it is typically the wisest response if you can't effectively explain yourself. If you can, responding can work, but it's going to add to the fire.
They did neither here: Mentioning the controversy, but not saying anything redeeming, more like demonstrating that they don't take them seriously.
> The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
> But current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated, leading to more animals being killed, three of the current and former staffers said. The three people attributed the mistakes to a lack of preparation by a testing staff working in a pressure-cooker environment.
> Musk has pushed hard to accelerate Neuralink’s progress, which depends heavily on animal testing, current and former employees said. Earlier this year, the chief executive sent staffers a news article about Swiss researchers who developed an electrical implant that helped a paralyzed man to walk again. “We could enable people to use their hands and walk again in daily life!” he wrote to staff at 6:37 a.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 8. Ten minutes later, he followed up: “In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!”
> On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment. On one occasion a few years ago, Musk told employees he would trigger a “market failure” at Neuralink unless they made more progress, a comment perceived by some employees as a threat to shut down operations, according to a former staffer who heard his comment.
> The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021, when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation, according to a person with knowledge of the situation and company documents and communications reviewed by Reuters.
> The mistake raised alarms among Neuralink’s researchers. In May 2021, Viktor Kharazia, a scientist, wrote to colleagues that the mistake could be a “red flag” to FDA reviewers of the study, which the company planned to submit as part of its application to begin human trials. His colleagues agreed, and the experiment was repeated with 36 sheep, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. All the animals, both the pigs and the sheep, were killed after the procedures, the person said.
> On another occasion, staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter and documents reviewed by Reuters. The incident frustrated several employees who said the mistakes – on two separate occasions – could have easily been avoided by carefully counting the vertebrae before inserting the device.
More than anything else, the rushed quality of this research combined with how Musk treats such a sensitive implant ensures I will never volunteer to be a human test subject for Neuralink. Assuming it even gets to that point.
Do you refuse any sort of medical treatment or drug that was tested on an animal without sensitivity? Do you refuse to use or consume anything tested on lab mice, which are subjected to horrific experiments (by human standards) by the millions every year?
No, you seem to misunderstand. Animal treatment is awful, but one of the big reasons to do these treatments ethically and with care is to ensure the quality of research while reducing the risk of cruel side effects.
Musk is in the 'move fast and break things' camp, which is the last thing I would ever want when considering an implant that's going into my brain. If you want to trust Musk with your brain and assume he won't treat quality control the same way he's treated everything else then that's your prerogative, not mine. As I've mentioned and continue to mention, Musk is not the single one pushing forward on these sort of things. He is not some hero doing this out of the goodness of his heart.
I would much rather use an implant that has had the absolute most amount of research and development work done on it as possible, which means quick iterations and hard deadlines to move forward.
You can make the claim that he isn't doing it for humanitarian reasons, even though there's no foundation to make that claim unless you're Elon himself. However with the anticipated price point (a few thousand dollars) for a Neuralink surgery and implant compared to the cost of R&D over the next decade or more makes it pretty clear that Elon isn't doing this to make his next fortune. He's stated his reasons for Neuralink a million times over and if you don't choose to believe him then all I can do is disregard your comment alongside all the others that claim to psychically know for certain his intentions when you've literally never met, worked with, or spoken to the guy before.
I want to know if I'm getting an implant that I'm not part of that testing group and that the maximum amount of diligence has been done to reduce the risk of side effects in that implant. Careless animal testing and rapid iteration make me less confident about that.
If Musk is willing to cut corners and do sloppy research during animal testing, he is not suddenly going to become enormously careful as soon as humans are involved. He's actively proving that he doesn't have the patience to wait until he's sure about the process before implanting these things in a living brain.
Quick iterations and hard deadlines very often lead to things breaking in production. Once something is implanted in my brain, I do not want quick iterations on it. I don't want it to have been recently changed. And given that Musk appears to be seriously pushing for human testing within the next 6 months, I don't see any reason to believe he's going to want to conduct human testing with significantly more care or that he won't be applying a "move fast and break things" philosophy to that testing as well.
When someone is putting a device in my body, I want to know that the scientists made sure that device would be safe even if doing so meant missing some deadlines.
This is fucked. If true, the entire company needs to be shut down and investigated for animal cruelty. What’s the value proposition here? Who even needs their supposed products?
Musk is clearly a sociopath with complete disregard for human or animal wellbeing.
In no way am I advocating for the way they have treated animals, in fact I am a vegetarian myself and I hate killing or harming animals.
"Who even needs their supposed products"? If they deliver the technology they are supposedly building, they'll cure blindness, quadriplegia, and shepherd in the genesis of cyborgs.
Based on Elon's track record, they'll probably never deliver anything, but to pretend that nobody wants their products is ridiculous.
> Based on Elon's track record, they'll probably never deliver anything
How is this at all based on his track record? Are we just going to ignore Tesla and SpaceX? They're both the most valuable car and space companies in the world.
Neuralink is not the first BCI nor is it the last, and it's not even focused on solving blindness or paralysis. The actual goal which Musk has stated multiple times has nothing to do with either of those things; it's merely a means to an end to try and push forward with shoddy research.
> What’s the value proposition here? Who even needs their supposed products?
Are you joking? Have you spent literally any amount of time reading about Neuralink and what they're aiming to do in their first phase of work? Literally millions of people with a wide variety of physical disabilities could have their lives radically changed with this technology.
As somebody who routinely eats pork and lamb, and shares concern for animal welfare, I don't see any evidence that these animals experienced any undue pain and suffering (besides the death) which is routinely accepted by society for animals we eat.
> The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.
An allegation isn't evidence, and animals do die in testing for medical gain. The real question is whther it is undue, avoidable, unethical, causing unnecessary suffering. As somebody that believes that animals are quite concious and we don't particularly have the right to "use" their lives for our medical gain, this is far from the common societal consensus. I also hypocritically eat these animals which I justify as just nature - so its hard to draw a distinct line that my belly has more justifaction to their life than much more valuable scientific progress.
> As somebody that believes that animals are quite concious and we don't particularly have the right to "use" their lives for our medical gain, this is far from the common societal consensus.
The mammalian anatomy has been conserved for 65 million years. Function follows structure. We are essentially the same, the only difference is we grew out the neocortex to be more capable of language, vision and abstract thought. All of those animals feel the same fear, pain, and love that we are capable of- we are just able to associate them with ideas better. It is shocking that some people still don't recognize this, but I suppose it is understandable they would reject something that would get between them and their cheeseburgers.
> its hard to draw a distinct line that my belly has more justifaction to their life than much more valuable scientific progress.
Ironically enough, I'm vegetarian and keep a snake. He is a Ball Python, and not a particularly good eater, so I feed him live rats. Doing this can truly makes me sad as Rat's death is sometimes... prolonged, and sometimes Rat is friendly and smart. But Snake needs to eat whole animals, while conversely I can get by just fine on beans and rice. Keeping and feeding Snake is very–philosophically enlightening(?)–I can't quite grasp the words for it–but it acts as a reminder of the natural order of life, and a reinforcer of why I think of animals the way I do. Snake is a simple, reptilian killing machine[1] juxtaposed by rats who often are smart, curious, capable critters, yet Snake must eat rats or he will starve.
It seems you understand this, but you can't realistically develop new products for human use on any type of a time scale that most people would be happy with, and the amount of human happiness those products enable, especially through longer, healthier lives to share with family, and the literally billions of lives affected, makes testing on animals a worthwhile evil, at least to me.
I've been party to this(your) view before, typically when I defend animal testing and someone points out that I'm vegetarian with confusion and outrage, both mild, and proceeds to remind me that I often cite animal welfare as a significantly motivating factor in my diet. So I guess my comment is to say that I think it comes at least partially from a place of not being close enough to death. We hide away slaughter houses and even import immigrants to work at them, meat comes to us in plastic packages often with specific names that further us from the animal that much more. Indeed, I know that if I had met the cow that produced the cheese that I so love and keeps me from becoming a vegan, I would refrain much more than I do.
But that is just me, I've met plenty of people who raise pigs named porkchop, bacon, and babyback, or a cow named Angus, and while they don't slaughter the animal themselves, I have no doubt they would. They just really love meat and don't have the same reverence for animals that I do, but most of them feel the same way about my (lack of) religion. Different strokes, live and live, it takes all kinds~
[1] I must admit Snake gets curious sometimes wishing to escape and explore, and it makes me sad that I can't let him act upon those wants because it wouldn't be in the best interest of his welfare.
In the long term there could potentially be a lot of benefit in restoring motor function or communication in people with catastrophic brain or spinal damage, as well as any number of other helpful neural surgeries. The device itself is one part of that, but developing surgical techniques is another large part of the research.
However like all things, it needs to be developed ethically, the counter point of course being that some of our best medical techniques have been developed over the years in unethical ways (by modern standards).
Federal regulators judging which medical research is valuable to society, then evaluate their policies based on that? Or are you asking whether it's worth it for the company to engage in moon-shot research without rock solid proof ahead of time?
All that should matter here is that they follow the rules and act ethically
My question has to do with is the intended applications of Neuralink worth it, to needlessly kill animals in testing and push research through carelessly?
How would "the wrong surgical glue" lead to the monkeys dying? If it was surgical glue, but the wrong kind, it was surely sterile for biological use. There are just too few specific details in these accusations. It's not clear why this justifies a Federal prosecutor actively requesting the U.S. Agricultural IG to open an investigation. If this involves a lab partnership with Univ. of California, why not go through CA state channels for this? How many lab animals die each year? Is this a case of malicious prosecution?
From their description of the complaint[1], it appears the glue used is known to be toxic to nerve tissue and should not have been used on an animal's brain. The description of the consequences for the monkeys is quite hard to read (especially given what we know about their mental and social capabilities) and it certainly seems to me to warrant investigation to determine whether it was caused unnecessarily.
>The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
...
>The “lead surgeon” who was performing craniotomies and electrode implantation on a monkey, “had concerns about the void in between the two implants and applied Bioglue to fill the dead space.” Later, a necropsy revealed that the monkey had BioGlue on the surface of his brain. There was no mention of BioGlue being applied in the surgical record for this procedure, indicating poor and possibly noncompliant recordkeeping by lab personnel. BioGlue was never an approved substance for use in surgery in the approved protocol.
Thanks, but after a brief read of the 716 page complaint it appears that all of the allegations come from self reported compliance documents for the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science and contracts in attempts to comply with the ethical treatment of animals.
The expectation with animal experimentation isn't that everything goes smoothly, or even that all suffering is avoided in exchange for the information that will result in scientific advancement and safety for humans. The expectation is that there isn't undue suffering caused, and an ethics review board deems that the exchange and suffering paid by the animals is "worth it".
It's an uncomfortable reality for sure, and I would not want to be one of those monkeys, even without suffering, meeting an untimely death in service of human knowledge, but I recognise the trade off and it seems like the complainant doesn't have any extra evidence that there are systematic abuses of ethic review procedures and animal welfare standards.
That said, transparency is good and if there is substance to the claim that they Neuralink or UC Davis) are causing undue suffering then I wish them the best of luck fixing it.
Thanks for the details. In this case, if the allegations are actually true, and they accidentally used Bioglue on brain tissue, it seems like a fine is in order for the UC Davis lab. But does it really warrant an investigation of this magnitude? Why couldn't this be handled at the California state level?
I mean, this is like saying 'how could the wrong antibiotic lead to someone dying'. Obviously I'm not a medical expert but it would not surprise me if there were different classes of surgical glue for injuries vs surgery, human vs animal and general toxicity depending on location applied.
Even if you think animal suffering doesn't matter, consider: If they're this sloppy now during early research, are they suddenly going to clean up their act once they're selling product to humans?
How many consent decrees have Musk and his companies violated? I think the chance of Neuralink following FDA rules is low, even after any hypothetical lawsuit ordering them to follow the rules. To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs, and Musk has giant huevos.
The article literally continues from the last quote with an example of unnecessary pain and suffering:
>Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised his colleagues to immediately kill one of the pigs to end her suffering.
>“Based on low chance of full recovery … and her current poor psychological well-being, it was decided that euthanasia was the only appropriate course of action,” Baker wrote colleagues about one of the pigs a day after the surgery, adding a broken heart emoji.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed. Needless suffering is always bad. But. Is this really a BIG problem or are the politics (of Elon being who he is) leaking again?
This is not about some social networking platform or a car company. If this thing works and eventually has the ability to vastly improve QOL of disabled people, won't the testing be justified? I mean... how many desd animals outweigh one functioning quadriplegic? Only extremists would say "zero" or "any number", but regular people will probably say a number in the hundreds. We're team people after all. Not to mention that we already kill millions of animals for food (most of which live in terrible conditions all their lives and some of which die in brutal ways). And it's not like Elon goes around killing endangered species, these are mostly sheep, pigs and rodents we're talking about here.
Before you get to that question, you'd want to first answer the question of whether the deaths of the animals were actually necessary to make progress in the first place. Just because Neuralink has killed 1500 animals doesn't automatically mean that those deaths were productive. They just as well could have been the result of negligence or recklessness without real scientific value. That seems like a question that's worth investigating.
The huge red flag isn't the internal backlash to the animal testing.
The red flag is the capricious and utter disregard for any sort of experimental, procedural, or safety policies in carrying out this research. Putting in several dozen of the wrong size of implants? Using toxic substances? Failure to record surgical details and experimental results?
This company, and its current crop of employees have absolutely no business being anywhere near the inside of someone's head.
Am I the only one who thinks 1500 seems low for what they are doing? And all animals used in clinical tests like these are destroyed after, so it's not like they are going out of their way to slaughter animals.
Could they use less animals by doing things differently? I'm not an expert on any of this but I'm sure they could, but how does this compare to any other experimental brain or spine stimulation testing?
These are not mice, and there are much, much higher standards for animal experiments on e.g. primates. The expense and amount of effort per animal is also very different for monkeys compared to mice.
Let's say there's a 1% chance that Neuralink is able to improve the quality of life for paralyzed people by 100% (double) within 20 years, at the cost of 10,000 high-order animals (sheep, pigs, monkeys, etc). Is that worth it?
If they could do it with only 1000 animals instead, but this delayed availability by 10 years, would that be better?
These are the types of questions we need to think about in order to have a productive conversation.
Black-and-white positions with binary and objective moral superiority are not possible. We must weigh costs and benefits, and acknowledge that we might end up in different places based on having different, but reasonable and good-faith priorities.
That kind of reasoning is not really relevant, as it can justify all kinds of unnecessary suffering. A more relevant question is whether neuralink is following best practices in setting up these studies and carefully justifying the use of each animal.
Animal studies are already widely accepted as a justifiable necessity in medical trials. That doesn't imply a blanket endorsement of well intentioned but sloppy use of animals.
I feel like you could do that exact same math with human lives as well, but either way the reasoning is flawed - there is no benefit to sloppy mistakes that produce unusable data.
1. It doesn't sound like the extra animal suffering is actually helping their odds, it sounds like if anything it's going to reduce customer trust in Musk's ability to implant electronics in their brain without killing them.
2. It's possible to do this research without this extreme level of reckless testing on live animals.
3. It's not clear that Neuralink's approach will actually be better for society in the long-term. Musk's policies towards consumer freedom and privacy in every single one of his businesses he's been a part of from Paypal to Tesla has been atrocious; I would prefer another company that's not owned by Musk build neural implants because I don't trust Musk not to screw the people who are getting the implants.
The correct questions here are:
- Will sacrificing 1,500 animals actually increase Neuralink's odds of doubling the quality of life for paralyzed people in 20 years by 1%? I don't think it will.
- Will other companies be able to produce the same results in 20 years without that suffering? Probably, yes. Nueralink is not the only company researching this.
- Do we want Neuralink to "win" the market of neural implants in the first place? I would argue that we probably don't, the best-case scenario for neural implants would be if they came out of an Open ecosystem in cooperation with more traditional companies who have less of a startup/move-fast-and-break-things vibe.
- Is the sacrifice that Neuralink wants to make generalizable as a moral principle? No, we know what it looks like when animal testing is deregulated, and it looks awful, and Musk shouldn't be given a special pass on those rules.
The problem with doing quick math on whether suffering is "worth it" is that it can be used to shut conversations about how to get the same outcomes with less suffering. It's an argument that's been in play basically ever since activism around animal testing began, and repeatedly, the people who argue "it's worth it to save everyone" have been proven wrong -- both because it's been repeatedly proven that we can do the same testing without Musk's extreme level of disregard for animal life, and because the outcomes very often turn out to be over-exaggerated or gloss over serious caveats. People are very bad at estimating the odds of success of a venture, and very bad at estimating what the potential benefits or downsides of an outcome will be, and so animal testing without moral boundaries tends to lead towards people killing a bunch of animals for no good reason.
In practice, saying "anything goes as long as the research is important enough" hasn't really born out well morally, so it's good for us to have standards that apply to everyone, regardless of what they are working on or how important they think the project is.
Unless you are a vegan, I really don't get the outrage over a company killing 1,500 animals, most of which are rodents, pigs, and sheep. How many animals did Chipotle have killed yesterday to serve their customers? They serve cow, chicken, pigs. I bet they kill pests in their kitchens too! Horrific!!
Edit: And to think all those animals used for food, why is it so bad to use animals for research that could heal the paralyzed or give sight to the blind? That is far more noble cause than just being food.
The issue is that these animals were tortured, and they used way way more animals than is usually needed.
One monkey was caused to vomit so violently from the surgury that it had open sores in its throat. The issue is that animal wasn't immediately euthanized, it was kept alive and its final weeks were spent in agonizing pain, it was tortured.
We don't generally think it's OK to torture the animals in our food supply. That's the difference, the torture.
Where the discussion goes off the rails and becomes less enlightening in my opinion is railing against using and ultimately killing animals in the pursuit of scientific advancement in general versus something unique or specific about how Neuralink uses animals.
My personal belief is that animals are absolutely crucial at this point for many scientific purposes. Some things which animals were used for in the past can reasonably be done without killing animals, thru computer simulation or modeling, and certainly animals should not be needlessly killed, or intentionally left to suffer.
Animal use should be reduced when reasonable, but particularly in the case of animals which are also feedstock, it’s logically absurd to even minimally constrain scientific research to reduce the number of pigs and sheep killed worldwide by a few hundred or thousand animals when they are bred by the millions to be slaughter and eaten.
What’s interesting to me is the nuanced discussion of serial versus parallel testing, and the need for sometimes re-testing.
When you have a matrix of potential choices, you can minimize the number of tests overall by serializing the process, at the expense of maximizing the duration of testing.
If you parallelize the testing, similar to branch prediction in CPUs, you will end up running tests that would not have been needed, but you complete the overall experiment faster.
The trade-off of time is not merely a matter of impatience. The capital costs must be absolutely tremendous, and the likelihood we even get to the point sometime in the future where there’s a life-altering treatment that is FDA approved, and the ultimate cost of that treatment, is highly dependent on how long it takes to achieve the fundamental research objectives and overcome the extraordinary challenges they are facing.
So it’s not simply arrogance or apathy, a serial approach could very well either make the treatment uneconomical, or even make the R&D costs and timelines un-fundable.
As someone who had rack of lamb for dinner last week and bacon for breakfast this morning, this research is absolutely on a higher moral plane and IMO it would be abhorrent to tell paraplegics that Neuralink is doing anything even remotely wrong by trying to accelerate this research while American pig farms produces 2 billion pounds of bacon every year.
More generally than this one case or Neuralink or Musk... We have made basically zero progress treating any mental health or neurological condition in the last 40 years. And those diseases (from depression to Alzheimer's) are the number one blights on human health. Suicide is the leading cause of death for some demographics in the west.
Based on that, I think there is a good argument to do more animal testing, to move faster and (sorry animals) to make more mistakes.
I completely disagree, we've made more progress in the last 40 years than in all of human history. We can sequence an individual humans genome, that's just one example. This is true for nearly all of Medicine. Your way off here.
I was specifically pointing to mental health (where we still don't have a well defined list of diseases) and neurology (where we have made no actual progress on any of the major diseases). You're right for medicine and human biology more widely
But just our understanding of mental health as it relates to genetics. We now have genetic markers for all sorts of mental health disorders. That alone has changed the landscape significantly.
In neurological stuff just look at the neurostim world, big stuff there, acknowledged that it's not strictly mental health but you mentioned neurological stuff.
The problem is, none of that has lead to any actual treatments. It's sort of nice to know that gene 1 leads to depression at x% rate. Or gene 2 means people get dementia sooner. But until there is a pill to prevent or treat that we are no where. Until then, you need to do more, not less experimentation.
I guess this is the difference between scientific progress and medical progress. We have made very little of the latter in these fields.
True, we haven't yet cured dementia. But we currently have the best standard of care for mental health in all of human history:
"The best treatments for serious mental illnesses today are highly effective; between 70 and 90 percent of individuals have a significant reduction of symptoms and improved quality of life with a combination of pharmacological and psychosocial treatments and supports."
Exactly, snd it seems a lot of Musks endevours play it fast and loose with regulation. Well, even when it comes to morales, which are an important part of animal testing.
"Principle of reducing the number of animals used in research, refining scientific procedures to minimize pain, and replacing animal experiments with in vitro models when possible."
The older I get, the harder it gets to stomach animal testing or even animal consumption. I don't mean that this is overly cruel to animals, because nature itself is cruel. However, I could not be someone who did this work because I cannot knowingly cause suffering, and I'm wary of anyone who can.
I like to avoid cruel experiences for animals where possible but I think there are times that we can justify it. Medical science is one of the few times. I'm not a fan of cosmetic testing on animals but medical testing is worth it IMO.
If this device can help someone that is otherwise paralyzed interact with the world that is life changing.
It does expose that I value human experience way above animal experience but I've yet to find a reason not to. We use them for food, as many of them do to other animals. It's an odd part of life that suffering is part of the circle of life.
Consuming a steak is quite easy because there is a mental disconnect between this abstract red shape called a new york strip and the thinking, feeling animal it came from. When I was younger, the disassociation was so great it didn't occur to me except in an abstract sense. Also, while these environments can be cruel to animals, it's hard to be more cruel than nature.
Now that I'm older, though, disassociating is harder. It's hard for me to look at meat without thinking about the animal it came from. If I were forced to kill and butcher animals myself in order to eat meat, I know I could not do it in good conscience.
Ergo, if I cannot do it in good conscience, I find it difficult to see how anyone else can.
Obviously “nature” is a difficult concept to pin down, but I disagree with this sentiment. I think probably most factory farming (especially of chickens and pigs) is waaaay more cruel than nature (whatever that means)
One of two competing definitions of “Nature” in this context is a phantasy of how it would be without humans around. Other one is that we’re part of it. Likely it’s somewhere in between.
You are missing the point. The point is that we have a system that yes, harvests those animals for food. But we have an agreement in society that our goal is to harvest those animals without unnecessary cruelty. If some rancher were torchering their animals while ranching they would go to jail.
Its not that neuralink did monkey experiments, every medical device company does those all day, there are entire facilities dedicated to doing so with populations of hundreds or thousands of animals. The issue of that neuralink tortured those animals, did shoddy half baked work and therefore caused undue suffering to them.
It's like cadaver work, it's a necessity for our modern medicine. It's one thing for a student to do cadaver work to learn how to be a surgeon, respecting the sacrifice of the cadaver. It's another thing entirely to disrespect that cadaver, disrespect that sacrifice, that's illegal. That's what neuralink did, disrespected the sacrifice.
"But we have an agreement in society that our goal is to harvest those animals without unnecessary cruelty."
This is not true. The agreement American society seems to have is "do whatever you need to do to keep the bacon on the shelves and make it cheap".
What actually happens behind the walls of a slaughterhouse is an atrocity, the cruelty is unimaginable. I've watched it. Do a search for "factory farming undercover videos" and learn the truth behind mass factory farming. It is right there on the internet now and has been for nearly 20 years now. Multiple source, multiple films. So much. It is very traumatic to watch.
> I don't mean that this is overly cruel to animals, because nature itself is cruel
I don't quite get why if nature is cruel then some level of cruelty is okay. If I have a button that when pressed, will cause all cruelty in animals to be gone, I would be wrong not to press it. Suffering is suffering regardless if its "natural" or not.
Easy, nanobots that will create a projection preys and once their predator captures them, the projections will turn into their respective food source. The predator still have the illusion that its capturing something, but no consciousness actually suffers.
Or even better, the button will move every conscious being into their own universe where they are the only conscious being. The process is perfect and the being cannot observe any difference. Each of these world progress in parallel (does not diverge) and therefore all beings existed in a world where they would have existed. Except no being is suffering.
Edit: Also, just because they need to eat the way they do does not mean that it is still not suffering and is therefore a moral bad. Why can't animals be "wrong"?
It is important to eliminate cruelty when we can. The difficulty comes from the notion of "necessary cruelty." If animal testing will save lives, we can probably agree it's a worthy sacrifice, but I somehow don't suspect the monkey volunteered.
I have some familiarity with people who work with animals. From what I've seen, for most, the nature of what they're doing never really ceases to haunt them to some extent, however justified or comfortable they feel about it at an abstract level. They just carry on. Something praiseworthy about human nature there I'd say, apart from all the rest of the stuff of course.
But the net suffering is probably less with scientific advancement. A few monkeys get an operation under anesthesia and seem pretty fine after and as a result you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people that have serious conditions restored.
I agree. In a utilitarian sense, we are in a better world with less suffering and higher mortality (at least for humans). The problem with utilitarian justifications is that they are usually raised by people for whom it costs nothing and gains everything from the outcome. It's "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Put another way, a more twisted person could use your same justification for, say, an undesirable subset of the human population. It wasn't long ago parts of humanity were regularly thought of and treated no better than monkeys.
All I'm saying is that in spite of knowing it'd advance humanity, I wouldn't volunteer to be the monkey, and I don't think you would, either.
Odd thing: Many humans have pets of a certain species and then kill another species to feed that preferred species. This is called speciesism (it's a thing, one can search it). One matters more than the other. Because the one is used for a different form of human pleasure.
"Othering" is probably one of the basest of cognitive biases. Even animals have it. At some point we need to be able to selectively empathize in order to remain sane.
After learning about milk production, I'm leaning on being more ok with meat production then dairy. I still consume both though and I'm holding out hope that artificial production of dairy proteins will some day destroy factory style dairy
New Zealand is obviously an exception. This is like saying “I’ve experienced prison in Finland. It’s a pretty good life for the average person.” But when compared to a dairy farm/prison in America it is anything but a good life.
> Our animal-free milk from flora is the first of its kind, using whey protein made by microflora, not cows, to make dairy that’s identical to traditional milk. Yes, we said identical.
Basically. Every part of the animal livestock system at scale is a horror. If you can get from small, local producers then that’s great. But the factory farm system for anything meat, dairy poultry is hard to stomach.
Frankly, small scale dairy is worse than factory dairy in many ways. The amount of excess calving required is almost none when bST hormones and sex selected semen are combined. Have you noticed that veal is practically gone from grocery store shelves?
I think "rape" is a bit of a hyperbole here. Yes, the cow is penetrated without consent, but the same is done all the time for rectal exams on all sorts of animals, including cows. Cows don't face trauma and PTSD and emotional harm from this penetration the same way humans do and to compare it to rape is ridiculous.
Conveniently left out the qualifier immediately following: "the same way humans do"
We absolutely know for a fact that animals don't experience trauma the same way and to the same severity as humans. They're literally incapable of human level emotional harm.
I am not denying that. I am saying it's not comparable to human trauma. This whole discussion is ridiculous because it hinges on the idea that artificial insemination is traumatic for animals when I would be really hard pressed to believe that when it's done correctly.
And yes I feel the same way about artificial insemination on dogs as I do on cows. It is a quick, instantaneous, and painless process that I cannot imagine any animal would think about twice when done properly.
“Whys” are hard but arguably —- and not a direct answer to your question of course — the why of cows producing (most of their) milk is analogous to the why of dogs acting cute: it’s for humans.
Subject to my own personal brand of morality, feel free to insert your own but...
"animals have been killed for food this year in the United States"
If you kill 10 animals for food it's not the end of the world.
If for every 10 you kill an additional 1 because of the horrors of factory farming, it's sad, but in the grand scheme of things, they still died for us to have food, they just didn't become food.
If you kill 1 animal just for kicks, you probably need to be institutionalized.
And if you pay people to maim 1,500 animals to meet unreasonable deadlines for a moonshot vanity project that's cutting corners while planning to implant its results in human brains, you need to be stopped.
Important context - announcements of USDA investigations are public records. PETA et al monitor the website and create press releases which, e.g., Reuters can pick up. *Outcomes* of investigations are often covered much less.
How is that providing context? Add how many companies experiment on pigs and how many pigs they go through each year, compare that to Neuralink and you have something you could call context.
As it stands, that number doesn't really provide any context at all. Even maybe misleading as you're talking about any type of animal, I'm assuming? While Neuralink seems to focus on pigs as they are commonly used for device testing.
People lack imagination. Think of it - a Musk company with sleeping compartments. Employees with Neuralink connectivity working even when they sleep. The man is going to be a gigazillionaire.
There are going to be enough people out there very eager to sign whatever waiver you put in front of them and implant Musk's chip in their brain. Why not use them instead?
The article seems to say that only 280 of those were larger animals “pigs, sheep, and monkeys”. For a little perspective, Americans ate 21 million chickens yesterday, roughly 7-8 billion per year. I’ve probably personally eaten a substantial percentage of their sheep and pig death count, and there’s not much ground breaking research coming from that, besides an exploration of all the things made better by bacon. Maybe the animals getting eaten have a more pleasant exit, but I wouldn’t be confident in that.
Interesting article, I have always wondered about the oversight of animal experimentation at private companies. In my old industry rumors, there is some oversight, but because it's private it's not regulated like university research (my xp).
Before animal fans get too upset, know that IACUC exists in the uni sphere which is the vanguard against bad research: https://www.aalas.org/iacuc. In short, you have to prove to your local committee why your experiments need animals rather than cell models, in what capacity, and what your standard of care is. It is NOT a rubber stamp org, and they will reject you for any diligence you have missed. IACUC was created the year the Penn monkey helmet experiments were brought to light by PETA, which were abusive. I don't like PETA as an org, but they did good work there.
In the private world, maybe such a thing doesn't exist, or its less prevalent. For sure, even in my time (2000s?) there were rumors of labs contracting research out to other places to escape IACUC oversight. There are strict regs on what you can do to animals, especially primates in the USA.
In my experience, I've seen dogs, macaques, micropigs, xenopus, fruit flies, zebrafish, rats, mice, and even chinchillas in the lab. I've worked with probably half of that list. (USA) They're all extremely valuable models for driving human outcome research. There are tons of examples of fantastic technology derived from animal research. Horseshoe crab blood is a great example, for detection of endotoxin in manufacturing drugs and vaccines. Xenopus frogs used to be used as pregnancy tests in the 30s, as it turns out they will lay eggs if you inject them with small amount of urine. The story of that one is fantastic, recommend a quick perusal if only for how far we've come.
If anything, I'd like to see neuralinks brain in a rack setup come to replace many forms of tissue culture in the lab to push the envelope further and give us more reasons to not use animals in these tests. From a purely capitalist standpoint, animals are WAY more expensive than cell lines, especially mammals.
Also, I can field any questions people have about lab work if you're interested. I'll answer as best I can.
Again, it's not that the animals died. In your analogy it's as if McDonalds mishandled many of the animals in its supply chain, caused them to vomit so continuously that they had open sores in their throat , kept them alive anyway, and then slaughtered them.
People aren't upset that neuralink did animal studies, everyone does those, it's a cost of our modern medical magic. People are upset because they tortured those animals, and way way more of them than is typically needed.
As times passes I am less supportive of how companies use ideology to weaponize regulations in order to slow down competition. How fast the COVID vaccine was created is a bit of uncovering how fast it could go when people are willing to compromise for the greater good (also talent and hard work).
It feels like the machine was created to slow down progress and now it cannot be stopped. As other comments said already, factory farming is worst than what Neurallink is doing, and vegan activists are trying to save animals for ages. On the other hand, Musk is also known for pushing hard employees, and animals is just the extension of pushing hard for breakthrough.
If not done in the US, maybe it will go elsewhere, and to what purpose? This feels to me like a very worthy cause. A huge number of other animals are used for other types of health research. I guess just because people dislike rodents they give it a pass. But what Neurallink is doing is in far fewer number than rat use for drugs, etc, and far less than animal farming. It is just the engine of regulation, competition, lobbying and patents working as it is supposed to.
The COVID vaccine is perhaps a poor example as mRNA vaccines have been something in development for quite some time before COVID. It was a technology there at precisely the right time
I don't understand how that's relevant to the neuralink story. Yes there are people who will benefit from being able to communicate via brain activity instead of their meat. But I'm not sure how that's curing a deadly disease?
Of course moving recklessly fast in a way to produces inferior results also kills things (animals directly and people indirectly) because of the delay introduced.
Literally millions of animals die every day as a byproduct of animal processing industries. As in, death in a way that doesn't result in any sort of useful consumption.
True, but it's a cost of doing the business. In general, if there was a way where we could do that processing with less animal suffering we would. In Neuralinks case they could have done their business with less animal suffering, and chose not to.
They are not by far the least worst offender. Medtronic, J&J, all the big med tech and pharma companies do this work day in out, for decades, and none of them do it this way. Neuralink is by the far the worst, and that is why there are articles and former employees saying so.
The issue isn't that they did the animal experiments, as you point out we do it every day.
The analogy wouldn't be to the meat industry generally. The analogy would be to a rancher that intentionally did something to one of their animals that caused that animal to vomit so violently that it had open sores in its throat, choose to keep it alive and not euthanize, such that the animals final weeks were spent on complete agony, it's torture.
Since you're asking if scale should influence our attitude, consider the following sentence: "I could have called an ambulance for my severely injured neighbor, but I gave up when I checked the numbers and saw that 70 million people would die this year regardless." I'm not saying these scenarios are equivalent, but I do think there are scenarios where considering absolute numbers is irrelevant or absurd. Going for the low hanging fruit can be better than doing nothing.
We must, of course, for fair treatment, steelman[0] the argument about the lack of morality of the purported 1500 animals allegedly killed by Neuralink.
The first reaction by anyone decent should be obvious: This is horrible. I can't imagine anyone not agreeing with the simple idea that animal testing is a horrific thing.
The argument in favor of it generally includes an element of accounting for human lives saved and benefits to society balanced against using animals for testing.
Does this erase or balance-out the moral reservations we all have?
Not sure. Can we add further support for the practice?
Well, how about the fact that N animals per year (where N is a very large number) are bred for testing. In other words, N animals would never have existed in the natural order --just like we raise chickens by the billions to eat.
Before going further, a key question:
What's the scale?
According to PETA [1], 110 million per year. That's a lot of animals. I think I can say this would not be possible without breeding animals for research.
OK, how about benefits to society?
In lieu of a list, here's a link [2]. The list of medical benefits is quite long.
What does an institution like Stanford [3] have to say?
Quoting:
"It is important to stress that 95% of all animals necessary for biomedical research in the United States are rodents – rats and mice especially bred for laboratory use – and that animals are only one part of the larger process of biomedical research."
Well, that's interesting, that means 104.5 million out of the 110 million are rats bred for research.
Does that change our mindset? OK, time to look at the other side. There might be more questions than answers here.
Is the entirety of our rejection of animal testing based on emotional or moral stances? Religious?
Is there a canonical "rule of the universe" to use as a measurement or threshold of acceptance?
Is any number OK?
Is zero the only acceptable metric?
Looking at the list of benefits [2] it is easy to imagine that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people would not exist today were it not for animal testing. I say "would not exist" because someone's death results in potentially erasing an entire genealogical tree --with potentially geometric growth. In other words, a single death could have massive consequences.
Does that justify it? Well, what if we have, as a result, overpopulated the planet. Have we interfered with our own natural selection process? Is that the crime?
What are the limits then? Is humanity supposed to live in the natural survival-of-the-fittest and not resort to life extension through science and medicine?
Are science and medicine part of our natural-selection story?
It's easy to see the analysis of this seemingly-simple issue, where a moral/emotional reaction is easy to deliver, quickly becomes massively complex with questions such as "How many people are you willing to see die?" and "How many members of your own family would have died?" or "Would you exist?".
I can't provide any answers here. This is far too complex. Opinion? Sure. We all have one.
I fail to see the utility of using animals for the testing of cosmetics. I am sure there are corner cases for justification here and there. Not sure what those might be.
Neuralink? Well, that's a good question. What's the benefit to society? I can't think of one. Well, wait, how about things like using a future embodiment of Neuralink to enhance equality/equity by providing everyone with the same cognitive capabilities? That's far-fetched, yeah. Is it a real possibility? Don't know.
Is this one of those "just because we can" ideas? Should we do it?
Clearly the purported 1500 animals (not sure what kind) attributed to Neuralink is insignificant when compared to the 110 million per year quoted by PETA. Are 100% of them bred for testing? If so, is that OK, just like eating chickens? What's the different between eating a chicken and using the same purpose-bred chicken for research?
I'll stop here. I don't have any answers. I am not sure what the right stance might be here. Not sure how "right" is defined. Not sure of anything. Lots of question though, more than I can list here.
In closing, we do need to address criticism of Musk and others who toil to advance humanity in any way. I am reminded of:
"Ladran Sancho señal que cabalgamos"
Criticism of every successful person often follows the same pattern and is delivered by the same type of people. It's easy to be harsh when one does nothing, contributes nothing, delivers no benefits to society, enjoys the benefits others create and can take a "holier than thou" stance while watching the world from a couch and having popcorn. Being critical is easy. Becoming a net contributor to society isn't.
My comment was rational and reasonable, and quite relevant to the thread. If some Musk fanatics interpret it as flaming, or causes them to react with flaming, that's their problem, not mine. Flag those responses, don't blame me, the victim of their reactions.
Sorry, but it was entirely generic flamebait, which is exactly what that site guideline is about. It's not hard to see this in practice: just look at the comments it led to.
When a topic is burning through the rest of the internet with sensationalism and high indignation, that's a pretty good clue that it's off topic here.
It's common to feel like one's own comments are "rational and reasonable" while flamebait and trolling are things that other people do, but this is an "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" sort of bias—we all underestimate it in ourselves, by 10x at least.
And it took SpaceX ten or more years to become a success.
The same mentality that pretends Boring is a failure already, leads to people saying the Model S would never be manufactured at scale and neither would the Model 3 (HN for one was filled to the brim with such comments back then).
I don’t think describing another fiasco related to musk is flamebait any more than criticizing any celebrity with a hardcore fan base to be flamebait. Fans have parasocial relationships with their celebrity in question so they will flame at any negativity, warranted or otherwise. I don’t think “Taylor swifts new album has some slow points, just like her other albums” is flame bait just because she has rabid fans.
Is six a lot? Ford has had 53 recalls in 2021 and 52 recalls in 2022 so far; even adjusted for recent car sales - Ford has sold 8.4 million in the past 4 years, Tesla has sold 3 million in the past 4 years - that's 2 recalls per million Teslas and 12.5 recalls per million Fords.
Tesla has far fewer models? Maybe that is part of the advantage?
That’s some very carefully crafted maths to avoid saying “25% of Tesla cars have been recalled”
Look there are things Tesla can be praised for, but I don’t think anyone seriously believes they’ve got a good record on recalls especially with the year they’ve had
Tesla’s recalls are almost entirely software updates, and for trivial stuff like the seat belt warning chime might not alert the driver in some corner case. Another “recall” I got was a software update that disabled the boombox feature while the car is moving. The NHSTSA banned that because it could override the government mandated pedestrian warning sound.
The only physical fix I’ve gotten was replacing a cable for the backup camera. Apparently some models had a cable that could wear out, causing the camera to fail.
If we used the same standard for iPhones, then 100% have been recalled. The NHTSA really needs to have more levels of severity, because current recall stats are obfuscating the actual reliability and safety of different models and manufacturers.
Every car I've ever owned, from multiple brands, has had a recall. Some even had multiple recalls addressing different issues. So on the face of it 25% doesn't seem that bad to me.
which says that Tesla is the 4th best auto manufacturer in terms of recall rate at .936, which is better than the industry average of 1.115; Ford is at 1.139, This was in 2016, when Tesla had only been shipping relatively small volumes of cars. If recent articles which put Tesla's recall rate at 0.25 are to be believed (I'm not sure that they should; they seem to carry the tone that this recall rate is exceptionally bad), that would certainly make Tesla the least-recalled car brand.
Their metric of "problems per 100 vehicles" is not very well correlated with what we think of as vehicle quality. If your phone won't pair with car's bluetooth, that's considered just as much of a problem as the drivetrain failing. In their survey summary, they even admit that most issues are with infotainment systems due to things like, "not enough power plugs/USB ports". That's how they manage to claim that the highest quality vehicles are made by Buick and Dodge, not brands like Honda and Audi.
Also J.D. Power is pay to play.[1] From the WSJ[2]:
> Each year, J.D. Power & Associates gives out quality awards based on surveys of thousands of new-car owners. It sells the results to auto makers and charges licensing fees for using the survey's rankings in marketing and ad campaigns. According to one car maker, J.D. Power charges as much as $300,000 for copies of a survey, and the same amount to use the awards in ads. J.D. Power declined to confirm its charges.
What’s the distribution of recalls by model for both companies? I would expect a company that makes many more models to have many more recalls, and I don’t think that volume of sales necessarily correlates with recall rate.
I don’t know if Tesla is an outlier in terms of recalls, but I think this isn’t the right way to compare.
Daimler AG, one of the oldest car producer in the world, in the lineage of the original inventor of cars, and definitely in the "premium market" (today known for their premium "Mercedes" brand), has had 16 recalls in two years, for ONE of their models.
The success of SpaceX belongs to Gwynne Shotwell far more than it does Elon. It also doesn't hurt that his CIA buddy joined NASA in time to give SpaceX a $400m investment.
United Launch Alliance has been awarded probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than that over the past two decades, yet the difference in technology advancement rate with SpaceX is staggering (and don't get me started about the bottomless pit of stupidity that is/was Roscosmos). I would say that the "CIA buddy" thing cannot possibly be the only explanation.
I cannot comment about Gwynne Shotwell; I lack the corresponding knowledge. I can only note that if Elon Musk is a completely mediocre person, he still must be doing something right because the world is full of mediocre people who achieve much less than he has, and I don't believe in blind luck.
calling the cybertruck a fiasco is a bit rich. Sure, it's super late but they're also selling every single car they're making even though they increase their price by a huge margin. Why would he care about making a cybertruck if he already can't make enough of the other cars?
The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years, and there is finally transparency around the moderation decisions. Twitter is also finally taking child exploitation seriously. The only negative was the haphazard release of Twitter Blue "verification," which felt chaotic and was turned off as a result pending relaunch, but was hardly a fiasco.
> The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years...
Yes, you get more photos of a train wreck than a routine train passing through town, too.
> Twitter is also finally taking child exploitation seriously.
There's no real evidence of this (in both that Twitter wasn't, and that Musk changed something). The tweet thread that put this talking point into play was immediately debunked in various spots, like the claim there was no CSAM reporting option when there had been for years.
Can you point me at the clear explanation for why Crimethinc was suspended?
Musk says that Ye was suspended for inciting violence. Does that mean anyone posting a swastika will be suspended? Since Musk says permanent suspensions are bad, does that mean Ye gets to come back at some point? If so, what are the conditions?
Twitter has stated that they’re relying more heavily on automation. Musk claimed he was going to open the algorithms. Are the automated abuse detection algorithms available for inspection? (Hopefully not, since that makes it easier to avoid them, but perhaps Musk should have considered that before making promises.)
> To those who aren’t aware yet, last week Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos) this was not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find. I’m grateful to see these changes.
> Bleu said following the meeting, they offered her a position on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Committee, but she declined because she refused to “work with or for abusers.”
Do you happen to have any links about Andrea Stoppa and Ghost Data? A Google search seems to find nothing but that story as evidence for their existence which seems a bit weird.
Ah, just noticed that the Daily Wire, bastion of accurate reporting they are, spelt the name wrong - it's "Andrea Stroppa" which returns more useful information and shows that Ghost Data have been around for a few years (although I'd note their reporting seems to be "here's a thing everyone knows presented as SHOCKING EVIDENCE!!! in a many page'd report".)
Nope. I just searched for a counterpoint. It's usually helpful before I swallow anything whole.
My basic point is -- it's too goddamned early to draw any conclusions about Twitter. We're going to find data for one thing or against it, because this just happened, in effective terms, and nothing has shaken out yet.
Yes, I am throwing out a counterbalance with somewhat less vitriol than the usual WARAHGHAGHGH Twitter is Dead! that appeared before the guy stepped foot in the place.
It isn't working. You're quoting someone who is part of a network of Tesla/Musk propaganda agents. Stroppa and Bleu are liars with agendas, one pretending to be a self funded researcher and the other a human trafficking advocate, and both are fielded by Musk's PR news site Teslarati to control a narrative.
"As shown by the infographic summarizing the results of our analysis, Elon Musk is one of the subjects with whom Stroppa interacts most on Twitter, retweeting, replying and quoting several times what, according to the annual Forbes ranking, is the man. richest in the world." | https://www.breakinglatest.news/health/andrea-stroppa-the-go...
Stroppa lied via Reuters months ago when he claimed he and 5 researchers spent two weeks and found only 500 CSAM accounts (those of us adjacent to CSAM research could find 50k in an accidental sneeze). He's being dishonest again in this story by intentionally citing action taken Twitter 2.0 when that action happened (and concluded) two days prior to Musk's takeover. His "reports" have been taken apart by actual CSAM investigators like Carolina Christfoletti (who actually flags his statements as "misinformation) and researchers across several universities.
Eliza Bleu is QANon disinfo agent, daughter of a MAGA Republican, and fundraising partner of Felecia Killings, a literal child rapist. She works with Mike Cernovich, one of the guys behind the Pizzagate conspiracy and the person responsible for getting James Gun fired. The time period she claimed she was trafficked, she was the well known girlfriend of Gerard Way and an American Idol contestant.
Their ruses work on everyone not in Infosec or OSINT who are familiar with their backgrounds because they say the right sounding words. So you buy it, the same way boomers watch CSI and think hacking the internet can be stopped by two people mashing keys or unplugging the power cord of a monitor. People read their bullshit and think they're actually involved in child exploitation research because they "sound" right.
> The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years
Yeah, but so does every dumpster fire, or car wreck. Everyone is looking at those.
> The only negative was the haphazard release of Twitter Blue "verification,"
I'm not even sure how to respond to this. He's been firing people left and right, and everything points to the overall system being about to collapse under it's own stress (because there isn't the staff to support it).
I would love if there was actual evidence provided for this claim and its actual effectiveness because this seems to be the sort of "think of the children!" claim that is emotionally very satisfying but ultimately rings hollow.
Why would you want to see the evidence of this? I believe the claim is still true, but it's one of the few claims I don't want to verify for myself. Maybe that makes it unpersuasive as an argument. It seems to be a more serious priority for the new regime over the old one.
Because if you're going to mark that as a measure of the new leadership's success the only way to judge that it is by having evidence that the claim matches the reality. Saying "the claim is about something I don't need verification that it's real" is a really strange stance to take. I'd argue that the most important claims are the ones that should require the best evidence.
Funny you should use that word, seeing how it has gotten more and more obvious that focusing on "engagement" is the reason why most social media is so awful.
Making a deal to pay 44 billion dollars for a 30 billion dollar company with no cancellation clause, and then spending 6 months desperately, and very loudly trying to back out of that deal is definitively a fiasco.
Whether or not his stewardship of it will turn a 30 billion dollar company into a... Much less valuable company... is, however, not a question that we can definitively answer - at this time.
How does the financial side translate at all into the user-experience side? Their relationship is tenuous at most.
Also, the macroeconomic conditions between April and July were entirely different. I can see why someone would go along with a bad deal in a world where interest rates are quite low, then get cold feet when interest rates spike up. Maybe that's not optimal deal-making, but it's hardly a "fiasco."
> How does the financial side translate at all into the user-experience side?
It doesn't, but I never said that I was talking about fiascos for the customers. Time will tell with Twitter on that subject.
That would be something alongside blatant lies like "FSD next year" and "Your tesla will taxi people around while you sleep", but if I pointed at that, someone would certainly come along, point at the Tesla stock price, and tell me that this is not actually a fiasco because he's the richest man in the world.
> I can see why someone would go along with a bad deal in a world where interest rates are quite low, then get cold feet when interest rates spike up.
I cannot see why they would go in to buy one of the sickest of the big tech firms, at a premium, in an economy built on funny money, with no escape hatch, and then proceed to piss on everyone within shouting distance when they get buyers' remorse.
Or rather, I can see why they would do that, but it doesn't reflect very well on them.
All that and with 50%+ less overhead. It being an unequivocal success is breaking people that have built their personality around hating someone and are desperate to see them fail.
I mean... FSD has rolled out to every vehicle in North America that bought the feature. It's definitely not perfect, but it's getting better every update. Yes the timelines have been much longer than Musk claimed, but you can watch tons of YouTube videos of the cars driving themselves. Failure seems to be less and less likely as time goes on.
But this time, it's not wait a few years for something to maybe happen, but wait a few years to see how Twitters numbers develop. If Twitter has a quarter of the market share in 2 years we can say that yes, Elon failed, but right now it's hard to judge.
Well if you're impatient like me you'll be happy to know that once they miss the first $1.5 billion interest payment they'll either default, or he'll have to sell off massive chunks of Tesla shares or stake in Spacex, potentially blowing up multiple companies in the process. So it might take a singular year or less to see how it goes.
As an end user what’s even changed? Seems the same to me.
Just Bluechecks and journalists angry that they’ll no longer be a special class of user on the site so they’re claiming it’s over and a disaster when really it hasn’t changed to the end user.
It's funny that the reaction to the twitter moderation team being reduced to still enormous was to move to Mastodon, with no moderation teams other than the guy who runs the node.
I think the big difference is on Mastodon, you have way finer-grained control over what content you are exposed to. Twitter is more like one giant global state, so if there is toxic content, it can leak to way more eyeballs that don't want to see it.
Yes, a massive success like SolarCity, Hyperloop, Boring company, the car-subway they built in Vegas, the spacex-edition-tesla with a 10K PSI tank onboard for cold gas thrusters, and of course how could we forget the flawless, glorious success of self driving cars that don't need a human in them.
The guy has the same ratio of good:bad ideas as everybody else, he just has more money to burn on them.
Yes we could easily be looking at Tesla and SpaceX having failed they came so close. I think Musk is obviously an extremist which is fine but sometimes you have a management strategy that works and you apply it in different scenarios and it falls flat. Pissing off and calling out advertisers is probably not ideal, for example.
Yes, it is proven trial and error is the common strategy. The best strategy is trial and 'small' error. An Error that does not usurp your survival and that is different for different people.
How insanely hilarious to me that they did all this work... And still use drivers and not automation. It's a loop. If they can't self-drive that with all their own vehicles everywhere, then it's not really coming to actual roads for a LONG time.
Neither the sale of Zip2 nor the success of PayPal had anything to do with Musk. He was simply lucky to be in the Valley with a lot of his parent's money and connections at the right time.
Tesla Gigafactory was built in record time and got productive even quicker. In Germany, new development that does not take 15-20 years of planning and legislative red tape definitely is a success.
To justify their valuations, both Tesla and SpaceX have a long way to go. SpaceX for example needs to get Starship working and win major DoD contracts like the big defense contractors. STARSHIELD needs to grow into a "Star Wars" type program and the employees need to go along for the ride to justify their crazy valuation.
This site is full of wanna be tech entrepreneurs. This crowd, at least when they aren’t in a serious success stage, often is working hard and not understanding why they aren’t winning.
(I’ve been in this stage before)
They see someone like musk, and it threatens their ego. So they attack him every chance they get. They project their own shortcomings and insecurities onto him.
But imagine the hubris of doing this. You can rest assured these are the ones who’ll be stuck in this stage, because they aren’t focused on growing they’re focused on protecting their egos.
I better waste a truckload of eggs and make that omelette in my lifetime. I think we had enough "potential treatments" for humans that take 50 years to pass(if ever) the "potential" stage. We eat enough steaks anyway so using 0.00000001% for research doesn't sound that bad to me.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style and otherwise breaking the site guidelines? You've done it quite a bit, unfortunately, and we have to ban such accounts. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Thesis 2: I want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible
It would be completely consistent to only consume small-farm-raised animals which live a content free-range life, up until the moment it is quickly and humanely slaughtered.
My grandmother raised sheep and chickens. I don't know how the sheep met their end, but the chickens were slaughtered by a quick snip with very sharp scissors to some neck arteries; they were dead in seconds. The most suffering those chickens experienced was annoying grandchildren who loved to chase them.
If, hypothetically, all meat was sourced this way, the subjective experience of those animals is no worse, and most likely far better, than their wild life.
Let's set aside the enormous debate that could be had around whether or not killing an animal "humanely" is ever actually possible, and instead assume it is for the sake of argument. Do you think that the person who originally stated that they want to consume animal products while also minimizing animal welfare is _actually_ going through the effort to ensure any animal product they consume was suffering-free? That means the milk powder in the crackers they had at lunch were _verified_ by the OP to have not involved any suffering on behalf of the cow who yielded the milk, or the calf who was born to consume that milk. Do you think that is what happening, and that the OP is _actually_ making sure they only meat from animals who grew up in a grassy field and were killed instantly with 0 pain?
I don't. And if you also think that seems unlikely, then I think you should agree with me instead that perhaps we can't really be claiming to value minimizing the suffering of animals while consuming their bodies.
As a vegetarian, I would much rather have someone who eats meat and also has a preference for reduced animal suffering, rather than having that person abandon it due to someone's demands for consistency.
Gatekeeping caring about animal welfare leads to more animal suffering, not less.
Who is gatekeeping? I'm merely pointing out the hypocrisy. And if you're definition of gatekeeping includes merely pointing at that contributing to the subjugation of animals in our food system is in fact unnecessary suffering, then I think 1.) your definition of gatekeeping is useless, and 2.) we should be doing more of that "gatekeeping".
Also, have you considered being vegan rather than vegetarian? After all, the dairy industry is the meat industry, so what effect does being a vegetarian actually have for the victims?
> Your style of debate is _not_ working, my guy. Your comment history in other threads seems to paint a picture of you not really arguing in good faith.
Downvotes are a signal that others have that perception of you.
That's generally true, but I don't think it is in this case, as when I argue about this I argue in good faith. When people downvote someone for saying that one cannot claim to care about animal welfare while paying for their exploitation, I can be generally certain that the reason for the downvotes is because they don't like having cognitive dissonance pointed out.
Do you have specific suggestions for what would be a more reasonable way to point out such dissonance?
Look back over your comments from the last couple weeks. You've routinely made comments about people being afraid to talk to you, or said you hope they find the courage they currently lack. The way you carry yourself in general, you act like you think you can teach others but they can't teach you, and many of your critiques tend toward simplistic snark that you think should be conversation-ending. Your supposition that people downvote you simply because they don't like having cognitive dissonance pointed out (even when other vegetarians and vegans are telling you that you're hurting the cause) suggests your sense of self-righteousness does not come with the requisite degree of self-awareness.
I think the majority of the first part of what you've said is mostly captured in "you act like you think you can teach others but they can't teach you", so I'll respond to that first:
I am open to being taught, I just expect something better than silliness like "I can care for animals and also eat them for pleasure" when it comes to what I find convincing. Please, by all means, teach me something. I am genuinely open to it. If you read through the many conversations I've had on this topic in the past, you'll also find thorough explanations as to precisely why I find these carnist arguments so tired and ineffective. Just because I am once again, for the umpteenth time, saying that people who claim to care for animal welfare while actively harming animals are hypocrites doesn't mean I'm close-minded, it just means that this delusion is ubiquitous.
> many of your critiques tend toward simplistic snark
This is probably more true than I would like to admit, but in my defense I am arguing for what I know to be the ending of the subjugation of trillions of sentient creatures, so forgive me for being _extremely_ upset when I need to convince people of what is an obvious truth: one cannot claim to value animal welfare while participating in the unnecessary abuse of those animals.
> even when other vegetarians and vegans are telling you that you're hurting the cause
Being a vegan or vegetarian does not make someone more likely to know what is good for the cause. Knowing what makes an effective social movement is a completely different area of knowledge, so the fact that other folks who eat fewer or no animals disagree with my strategy doesn't say much.
> "I am arguing for what I know to be.... obvious truth" ... "delusion" ... "hypocrites" ... "silliness" ...
and this is why. Again, look up "cage-stage Calvinism". Nobody ever has a good conversation with a cage-stager because they're so busy talking about "obvious truth" and "delusion" and not really listening, just sort of generically pattern-matching and then declaring their doctrine.
I read a couple articles on it when you first mentioned it. I see what you're saying, I just don't think it applies in this case. I think you're either trying to say that outrage over great evil is either always unwarranted, or that perceiving something as being a great evil is always wrong, or that the concerns about the treatment of animals in modern society doesn't count as a great evil. But I disagree with all of those things. There are some pretty significant differences between an outraged zealot and an outraged rights activist that come into play here.
> not really listening
I have listened for multiple decades. I listen to others talk about it at _great_ length. You can continue to simply believe that I am deaf to reason, or acting unreasonable in some way, but that's simply incorrect. You make it seem as if I am digging my heels in despite evidence that anything I say is wrong/unsound/false, but that's simply not the case.
None of the above, but this is more of the same issue. You're interacting with my words, but you're so quick to jump to a defense that you haven't really heard me.
"Do you have specific suggestions for what would be a more reasonable way to point out such dissonance?"
You could start by being open to the possibility that your position is not the absolute truth.
And then maybe make arguments as to where you think the other arguments are not consistent, instead of snarky comments very close to personal insults.
In other words, focus on the arguments and not the person.
More concretely, you understood my position wrong, and then made a self evident conclusion in your head - and shared that conclusion. Which is not very advanced debating style.
> You could start by being open to the possibility that your position is not the absolute truth.
I have done that. In fact for decades I was convinced that the exploitation of animals was okay/fine/moral/necessary, etc.
The open-mindedness that you encourage was the catalyst for believing so strongly in this.
> And then maybe make arguments as to where you think the other arguments are not consistent, instead of snarky comments very close to personal insults.
That's exactly what I've done. I said the argument is silly because it is self-contradicting. And what psuedo-insult are you referring to?
"The human brain is a wild thing when it can form this single thought and think it to be consistent."
How is that not an insult to my brainfunction?
"In fact for decades I was convinced that the exploitation of animals was okay/fine/moral/necessary"
And the point is, we are not talking about vegetarism here. At least I am not. I am talking about avoiding unnecessary animal suffering.
So you say eating meat is unnecessary in general. Fine, that is your opinion.
My opinion is different, I believe to my body it is necessary, or at least I am better off with meat, than without.
Now you could try to change my opinion by providing me with studies saying vegan livestyle is better or as healthy (to which I would likely respond with, "yeah I know that study, those are the flaws preventing a generalisation"). But you did not do this.
And if you want to know why I believe eating meat is allright?
Because there would be no more trees, with no pretadors eating the deers and co. and I like trees as well. So nothing moraly wrong with killing and eating meat for me.
But putting the animal in miserable conditions is indeed unnecessary suffering to be avoided and not allright with me.
What exactly is not coherent in that line of thought?
I didn't say your brain, I referred to brains in general. Mine is capable of the same dissonance. If you thought I was trying to personally insult you, then I'm sorry; I can see why you'd read it that way but that wasn't the intent. I'm insulting _everybody's_ brain function, my own included.
> I am talking about avoiding unnecessary animal suffering.
Veganism is a philosophy based solely on this principal, so by discussing animal welfare in any context, we are effectively discussing veganism and animal ethics. I say all of this because we _were_ talking about "vegetarianism", as you put it, even if you claim that we weren't.
> Now you could try to change my opinion
But I wasn't trying to. I was just pointing out the dissonance for you to do what you want with. I'm not interested in trying to convince you of anything - it's your job to convince yourself.
> Conclusion: you want to know why I believe eating meat is allright?
Suppressed Premise: Eating meat is okay if it keeps trees on Planet Earth
> Premise B: Because there would be no more trees
> Premise C: But putting the animal in miserable conditions is indeed unnecessary suffering
> What exactly is not coherent in that line of thought?
This is incoherent because premise B is untrue, and generally the conditions that animals raised for meat in violate premise 3.
FDA has as much credibility as the SEC. SEC prosecuted LBRY token, while letting FTX steal people's money to fund fraudulent covid studies for the establishment. [1]
Those studies encouraged vaccination, which allowed the covid vaccines to kill millions of people from blood clots, cardiac problems and cancer. [2] They only tested the boosters on 8 mice [3], so I guess they really do are about animal welfare. FDA could kill millions of humans and get away with it, but if you support free speech and injure more than 10 mice you have to be investigated. Is that the takeaway from this story?
Not to sound harsh but I want advancement to cure horrible diseases and disabilities, not government red tape halting us from moving forward because some monkeys woke up with a headache.
Okay, let’s strap you into a chair and drill into your head against your will and then subject you to hours of tests only to realize it’s the wrong implant so we just have to kill you. Sound good?
Bud, these animals go to war with each other and tear each others faces off and get eaten alive by predators every day. This is hardly the worst thing to happen and its the only way to make progress in this area. They're also not trying to be cruel, its not some torture chamber.
It’s not? They’re recklessly messing up implants, forcing them to be killed. There’s no benefit to that, only needless suffering and death.
Humans go to war with each other and use nuclear weapons, does that mean murder, torture or human testing (in the form of implants against your will) are okay? You argument falls entirely apart on that one simple premise.
yes the human ubermench must rule over the savages as is his right as the greatest wielder of violence. Not familiar to ideology that we experience to bunch of in the 30s and 40s at all....
The same government that tortured and killed thousands of beagle puppies for no scientific purpose (in order to pad a budget) now coincidentally cares about animal welfare, just shortly after it had been badly embarrassed by the company's CEO. How strange.
I believe the OP of the comment above is talking about the fact that before his twitter ban, the last picture posted by Kanye depicted Musk in an unflattering pose. The statement by OP is mostly incorrect, Kanye did post the picture, however that was apparently after a private conversation with Elon regarding an earlier post of Kanye depicting a swastika, where Elon said to either delete the photo or be banned. Kanye doubled down, attacked Elon personally and got banned.
Note: I do not really care about either Elon or Kanye, both seem to suck, just supplying the context for the comment.
Over a hundred comments and I haven't seen one suggestion yet that this is retaliation for what Elon is doing with Twitter right now. Wouldn't you think that's a distinct possibility?
When internal employees complain, the regulators are compelled to investigate regardless of whether the person in charge has a beef politically with the executive body. Otherwise, it would be an incentive to revile the government if you know you are not in compliance with any regulating body.
Not suggesting that the allegations are untrue, just that the timing is politically expedient. Neuralink has been in the news before about animal treatment (Feb '22).. and it was not as big a deal in the media then. For the issue to resurface now is...interesting
I would argue that this might also have been due to Neuralink recently announcing their updates where a monkey was shown to be operating a Neuralink device. Remember, Elon Musk has been politically controversial wayy before he got hold of Twitter. Since 2020 when he flouted Covid policy, he has been controversial politically. So since that time, there is a possibility that any regulatory action against him would have been considered politically expedient. Hence, one can argue instead that it is politically expedient to claim any action against him to be policially motivated.
For sheep and pigs surely you can just run a farm and do experiments on them just before they're due to be slaughtered. Then only vegetarians can complain!
Actually, you can’t do this. Negligence is one thing. Deliberately torturing animals, even if they are used for food, is illegal.
Scientific animal research has guidelines to minimize suffering as much as possible. The government treats this as a necessary evil. If you’re attempting to do this in good faith, it’s only morally wrong.
Many companies make illegal activity a corporate policy, but that doesn’t make them immune from prosecution if someone decides they have stepped too far over the line.
Where in the article did it say NeuroLink was deliberately torturing the animals? In fact, the article said that the animals are killed after research in order to do post mortem examinations. This is standard across many animal testing labs.
This is how we could describe any procedures in this area of medicine, so the intentions seem to meet the criteria for calling it a test and not torture, but the sloppiness is the extra cruelty on top.
There are other articles describing horrific incidents:
"In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus."
It's not two mistakes. It's two cases of torture. Just because it's only two doesn't mean it wasn't torture. It's not like they discovered the mistake and then immediately euthanized the animals, they chose to continue the experiments and torture them after the mistakes were evident.
You have to put the critters to sleep with anestethic drugs in order to "experiment" on them, since the experiments involve surgery. I very much doubt that such animals can safely enter the human food supply.
Not sure why you were down voted. This is a valid question. The challenge is that anesthesia gas and analgesia drugs may contaminate the meat, and most research orgs are understandably terrified of further liability given the already intense pressure on them. (As seen by the Reuters piece, which is clearly a hit job.)
In this context there is no meat. No one sells these animals as meat, it's illegal.
These animals are being sacrificed to test new medical devices, drugs and procedures. We use anesthesia gas and drugs on people when we use these devices, so we need to use it for the animal tests also. Every single animal case I've been a part of utilized human quality anesthesia, including having a real anesthesiologist present doing it. This comment is way off, shows a deep lack of understanding of the process.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that no one, AFAIK, has actually attempted to outgas the meat or evaluate whether buprenorphine survives cooking. And it is wasteful, in the sense that if they don't need to do cardiac perfusion of formaldehyde, the meat part of the pig might well still be edible once the brain has been removed.
(edit) And I should point out that when I started in the field, we used to donate euthanized rodents to the zoo for snake food, but somehow that now became not-a-thing, despite the fact that there are humane/approved ways of doing euthanasia that minimize distress while still not requiring anesthesia. (This is how the reptile food industry operates!)
Not really. They really work to get the most out of each animals sacrifice. So one day it may be used for a cardiac procedure, the next day some kind of skin drug test, the next day some kind of cardiac drug, etc. So it's not like they use one tiny part of an animal then throw it away. They use the whole animal to get clinical benefit.
It's the same with cadavers. They cut them up and use only the part they need to do the work. It's far less wasteful that way.
> So one day it may be used for a cardiac procedure, the next day some kind of skin drug
Our IACUC will not allow this. The general policy from the Guide to Animal Care (NIH document which governs PHS funded research in the US) is in fact that an individual animal should not be exposed to multiple distressful procedures unless scientifically necessary. My understanding is that European animal committees have more of a minimize-the total-number-of-animals attitude, but that doesn't fly in the States anymore, at least on the research side.
- somehow not see that headline number of 1,500 first
- come up with a guess (or look up) how many animals are typically killed in medical testing procedures for drugs, surgeries, etc.
- guess how many animal deaths would be expected for a company doing what Neuralink is trying to do
- only then check the true number after having this estimate in mind
Since we see the 1,500 first we have some kind of immediate emotional reaction to it that is not calibrated to anything. It’s a textbook form of scope insensitivity. Would you have reacted any stronger if the number had been 150,000? Would you have reacted more mildly if the number was 150?
When a headline provides a number and then the article provides no real context for what one might reasonably have expected that number to be, it’s a sign that you are being preyed upon.