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Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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People don't get diabetic from overeating meat, that's nonsense, people get diabetic by consuming ludicrous amounts of sugar every single day.

I do agree with you overall point though.

The specific example I gave was bad, yes.

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

They are doing the experiments on monkeys, not chickens.

There's a term for that: speciesism.

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?

Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?

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.

So - caring more for a human or ape versus a mosquito, for example, would be speciesm?

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.

Don't fall for the rhetorical trick employed here: just because we can call this "specieism", doesn't make it wrong.

That is the point that my example was intended to illustrate.

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.

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.

You think he's a scientist? You think he's competent?

I think the neuroscientists Musk has hired are scientists, and yes, I think he’s competent at hiring competent people.

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.

The team at Neuralink is excellent - both the original team and more recent hires.

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