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Comment by mentalpiracy | Hacker News Reader

For those of you about to reply with some variation of “the ends justify the means” - this ain’t it.

Plenty of commenters here will defend the idea that bleeding-edge science sometimes requires an uncomfortable amount of actual blood. (edit: I see several already have). If that is what you believe, fine — but this does not have to be the ideological hill you die on.

Nothing about this is redeemable, and your viewpoint gains no credibility by defending this horror show of bad science and worse execution.

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I hesitated between flagging and upvoting the submission, flagging for the, unsurprisingly, bad comments. And upvoting for showing the topic on the front page, because as all those ignorant comments show this discussion is necessary.

I settled for upvoting. But the take some peiple, I assume highly priviledged, people on HN have when it comes to short term damage done for potential, or even dubious, long term benefit is problemetic at best. Has something of Lord Farquart...

I don't think I understand your comment.

Are you saying that you are the moral judge of what is an acceptable take on the ethics of this or not, and people who disagree with your moral judgement are "bad comments" and should therefore result in the discussion being censored?

I apologise if I've misunderstood, but if not then that is not a good stance at all.

This is precisely the sort of thing that we do need to hear from all sides without censor.

I am surely not a moral judge, as I am not sitting on any ethics panel monitoring animal trials. What can easily be said so, is that those panel are necessary. And that there are practices aroind those panels, if a company ignores those that is a huge red flag.

Same goes for slaughtering animals for meat, there are rules, lax as they may be, so if those bare minimum rules are ignored it also a red flag.

In questions of doing illegal things or not, there are no two sides to be considered. As long as the laws came into being in a democratic process, but we are not discussing that particular can of worms here.

I don't see a single logical argument in your comment about why "nothing about this is redeemable". You just seem to imply that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

So I ask, why are they wrong?

Animal trials are not wrong in and of themselves. There are ruls and best practices around them so, with the goal to minimize animal suffering. Neuralink constantly ignores those.

And no potential benefit justifies these things, because the same benefits can be had by not taking any short cuts. What Neuralink does is ignoring rules, and they din't even have anything to show for it.

Sad so just how many people on HN actively look for excuses and justifications were none are to be found, "move fast and break things" is really strong in some people...

> Neuralink constantly ignores those.

Is that actually a fact that Neuralink and co don't adhere to relevant industry standards?

I was about to have a knee jerk reaction to this comment, so I read the article. I wish I just had the knee jerk reaction and skipped the article.

The article is 10 thousand useless words surrounding the fact that 12 monkeys died due to Nueralink research. They didn't tell us for what they died, if any mistakes were made, and for all but one we don't know how they died.

This seems like a case of bleeding hearts bleeding.

This comment hyped me up for a godlike argument that supports its thesis, but none came. It was just a really long thesis.

Do you eat meat?

That question is relevant how exactly?

If you're sad about Nueralink monkeys you should be sad about slaughterhouse cows. Are you just acting in bad faith or are you truly this dense?

I am sad about unnecessary suffering of the animals I eat as well. You should notice the key word "unnecessary" here.

Sad isn't the right word so, I am rather pissed at the people and companies causing this unnecessary suffering because they cannot be bothered with even trace amounts of ethical behavior in the pursuit of a single dime. Even worse are the people findokg excuses fornthis kind of behavior, at least the perpetrators have some monetary motivation, while the appologists are somewhere between edgy and and morally bankrupt.

> I am sad about unnecessary suffering of the animals I eat as well

Then stop eating them.

It’s highly relevant.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22890292/food-waste-meat-...

Is killing a pig to eat it worse than killing 25 of the 60 pigs in a experiment because you accidentally put in the wrong implant so the experiment is ruined and you learned nothing from killing them?

At least when somebody eats the pig somebody benefits.

You’d be amazed how much livestock goes direct to landfill due to disease caused by overcrowding and poor practice - and of course the meat you throw out because you let it spoil at home. It’s over a third of all animal product - a significantly worse rate than neuralink and other trials - never mind the absolute numbers, which come to hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, and tens of billions of fish, every year - just in the US.

A dozen, even a hundred, or a thousand monkeys are insignificant in comparison.

Where’s your outrage for the side-product of your usefully slaughtered hog?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22890292/food-waste-meat-...

So is it okay to kill a thousand monkeys for funsies because it is “insignificant in comparison”? No, that would be highly unethical. There is no societal benefit to such a action, so nothing can justify the action. No matter how few animals you killed that is infinitely worse than the meat industry in aggregate.

How about if I kill 1000 monkeys to produce junk science thus slowing the rate of scientific progress? That is even worse since not only is there no societal benefit, there is societal harm. No matter how few animals you killed that is infinitely worse than the meat industry in aggregate.

Well guess what, Neuralink is almost certainly doing junk science as evidenced by their total disregard for basic established scientific protocol. The problem with Neuralink is not that they kill animals. I am okay with killing animals. What I am not okay with is the bad science.

When you are running experiments to validate if your implant is safe, and you use a unapproved adhesive known to be neurotoxic to attach the implant, then the monkey dies to the neurotoxic effects of the adhesive, you did not do any science, you just learned that you should stop ignoring instructions. A child could have taught you that. You are not pushing the boundaries of knowledge through the sacrifice of animals, you are pushing the boundaries of primary school. You do not get to kill animals to learn that.

But a trillion animals for no purpose whatsoever is “infinitely better” than 12 monkeys, and you’re ok with that? That’s based on good science?

You know very well that eating animals has a purpose. The very fact that you are arguing that it is okay to torture monkeys means that you do not actually believe that eating animals is wrong.

But you know what does have no purpose whatsoever, killing monkeys because you can not read the instructions. In fact, any organization incompetent enough to do that regularly will invariably kill people during human trials due to avoidable mistakes, fail to achieve anything, and possibly poison the well for actually useful animal testing of brain implants and more.

Stopping Neuralink's total disregard for basic scientific protocol around the ethical usage of animal test subjects saves lives and increases the rate of medical progress. Every time you protect their unethical animal testing you are delaying the discovery of robust solutions to paralysis, and you are okay with that? I am not.

You didn’t read TFA, did you. I’m talking about animals which are killed and sent to landfill as a result of agricultural failure, not animals which are eaten.

But anyway, I hear you loud and clear - “rocket man bad”.

No I do not, and I agree with the GP.

So 12 monkeys are a bigger deal than a trillion animals (global annual food waste & agricultural waste) living, suffering, and dying for no reason whatsoever? This is like being on the titanic as it sinks and complaining that your shower is dripping.

It seems you've moved the goalposts from demonstrating hypocrisy to an argument about quantity.

You seem to be saying that 12 monkeys are more valuable than 1,000,000,000,000 other animal lives - and yes, it’s damned hypocritical to be fine with the latter but not with the former.

You are intentionally ignoring the reason for your initial question about eating meat. Why don't you address that before changing the subject? I'm not going to fall for your bait.

If I answered "yes", you would have called me a hypocrite. But I answered "no", and you are still calling me a hypocrite, even though I said nothing else. So what was the point of your question?

Judgmental comments like this don't serve open and honest intellectual discussion. It is full of moral judgement and shaming meant to suppress the other side. It only shows this commenters privilege to hold luxury opinions at the cost to others. We should learn from the moral policing that happened w.r.t covid discussions that lead to poor decisions with bad science.

Clearly having no ethics nor moral is at least as bad if not much worse, take the nazi eugenics programs and their other scientific experiments on humans. We learned a lot of things but at what price

We didn't even learn much, and nothing that couldn't have been learned by other means.

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