> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially when it's sloppy mistakes that don't provide scientific value.
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.
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 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).
Nevertheless it is true that moving fast increases risk. You either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly.
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.
[1] https://www.shockmd.com/2008/01/20/6-different-locations-for...
0: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2...
When you go get blood work done, they collect a vial, but often use only a few drops at a time.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/standing-committe...
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.
This is the key factor for me.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Because killing humans to save mice would be a really stupid choice
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.
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.
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.
"avoid animal suffering wherever possible"
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.
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.
Do you believe differently in general?
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.
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.
No.