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Something like 4% of males admit to steroid use at some point. If you consider that non gym goers probably aren't using steroids (let's hope), that means a significant portion of fit males are. Heck, it doesn't take long at the gym to see women that are dabbling if you're in a major metro area. And from reading their posts online in forums id say most know there are severe long term problems. They try to ignore the people dying in their 20s and 30s as people that just took way too much.

People seem to be perfectly happy to trade future years of their life for present benefits.

Significant? Are we talking 40 percent or 4 percent of gym goers?

My perception of most gym goers are ordinary folks who want to get healthy, not gymbros who want to build giant muscles. Of course, this is at a single gym so this is anecdotal.

4% of adult US males from a study I read.

So ignore the ones that don't workout at all. Now probably ignore the ones just going through the motions at the gym and clearly aren't trying to achieve real muscle growth.

It stands to reason that if you see someone fit and with decent muscles, they're part of the group that might have taken them.

If it's 4% of all males, makes me think it's close to 25% of males with good amounts of muscles. Of course it's skewed by basically 90% of people with massive amounts of muscles taking them. But massive muscles alone doesn't make up 4% of the population.

Reasonable guess, but hard to verify.

It appears for example that every youtuber who looks like they have decent amount of muscles are going to be hit with the accusation that they used steroids.

90% of statistics are garbage. More seriously, there is a massive replication crisis and these types of studies are at the center. Did they survey 20 people? Did they happen to be 20 year old fratbros on a college campus?

Even if you set survey methods aside, it has been well established that there are is a single digit percent of people that are simply survey obstructionists. They will say that the sky is red on a survey, because they dont care or are trolling

He said fit males. And he likely means, "visibly fit males".

> People seem to be perfectly happy to trade future years of their life for present benefits.

Most humans will trade almost anything for reproductive fitness. It's what they're selected for.

Here is a meta-analysis that puts lifetime prevalence at ~6% for males:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10472...

> Something like 4% of males admit to steroid use at some point. If you consider that non gym goers probably aren't using steroids (let's hope), that means a significant portion of fit males are.

"At some point" is not the same as long term or chronic use. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517163/ :

> There is a distinction between lifetime ever-use of AASs and chronic use. Lifetime prevalence use includes a high percentage of short-term (even a single episode of) experimental use in teenagers and young men.

Rather than hoping it gets shut down because of your fears, why not just take the approach of ensuring the FDA closely regulates the safety and efficacy of the technology. They do clinical trials and study these things to address concerns like yours.

How do I go about doing that?

My friend works for a medical device manufacturer helping prepare for FDA inspections and related quality control measures and as I recall, and this was a couple years ago, he said that the FDA is fairly stringent but could be more so, and he wishes they'd fine for higher amounts, because if getting fined for a mistake was a bigger financial hit, companies would be better incentivized to avoid mistakes that the FDA currently catches and has them correct.

If it worked like that, that would be great! However, our regulatory frameworks unfortunately seem to be in rather a rather weakened place right now. The medical industry is rife with corruption in a number of places, as best as I understand the situation. And even if it weren't, measuring safety I think is a very hard thing to begin with. :'/

I suppose the first step would be looking into what the regulations are for this sort of thing, and whether you think they are sufficient.

Eligibility for this implant:

>Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4 limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year post-injury (without improvement)

Even if all the problems you are talking about happen, I would venture a guess that the vast majority of quadriplegics would jump at the opportunity to use their arms and legs again, even if it meant an overall shorter lifespan or other complications.

> I would venture a guess that the vast majority of quadriplegics would jump at the opportunity

Surely said jump would then invalidate them from eligibility?

I agree it seems like a horror story from where we’re sitting, but at the same time, I could see how our conception of integrating brains with computers could become an outdated way of thinking. In the future uploading your mind to a computer might be a casual thing you do to play a video game.

The best analogy would be showing someone from the 17th century a modern prosthetic device. There is a realistic chance that they would hang you for witchcraft. A mere digital camera would be considered interfering with the laws of nature and the work of the devil or something. We may be harboring similar biases in the present day we don’t even realize.

See for example the 1979 story Newton's Gift, where a man is troubled by the thought that the scientific greats from hundreds of years ago had to waste months or years of their lives doing manual calculations.

So he invents a time travel machine, and goes back in time to give Isaac Newton a modern electronic calculator.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/262571/isaac-newto...

I agree it seems like a horror story from where we’re sitting, but at the same time, I could see how our conception of integrating brains with computers could become an outdated way of thinking. In the future uploading your mind to a computer might be a casual thing you do to play a video game.

Mind uploading has the same philosophical problem as....teleportation. That is why some people think Star Trek teleporters are actually death machine.

That's not the issue that the OP is concerned. He's concerned that the device will cause irreversible damage to the information substrate that is the brain.

The best analogy would be showing someone from the 17th century a modern prosthetic device. There is a realistic chance that they would hang you for witchcraft.

The problem with using analogies is that the logic might not apply. We can conceive or think certain things will be different in the future doesn't mean it will be.

For example, it is unlikely that we can travel beyond the speed of light, because the speed of light is the speed of cause and effect. You would need to show that cause and effect still hold when we travel faster than light or that our most fundamental assumption about reality is wrong.

The imagination of the 21st century and 20th century has explored the vast conceptual space of technology. It is unlikely that new technology 23rd or 24th century will likely get you hanged for witchcraft in the 21st century.

I think this is well-said! However, I am very much not a he. :')

> And has killed a lot of their own lab animals in experiments

Killed in horrifying ways, in many cases for no reason at all. And definitely too quickly, compared to what would have been expected if they were trying to learn from their mistakes so that, one day, human implants would be successful. And, even then, there would still be all the unknowns you are talking about.

> if it all comes crashing down in 30 years

I give it 3, tops. Save this comment and add to a calendar if you have to.

There's an interesting discussion to be had about informed consent in a medical context, and what really counts.

I think taking a maximalist view of "this person actually knows what they're signing up for" would lead to almost no one being capable of consenting to almost any treatment. Do you actually know the pharmacology of acetaminophen? Are you aware of all the possible complications of an appendectomy? Can you truly grasp the difference between a one in a thousand occurrence and a one in a million occurrence?

The minimalist view of "this person said yes and so the treatment is ethical" is of course, also fraught.

I'm reminded of the potential for COVID vaccine challenge trials. Tens of thousands of people signed up to be deliberately infected with COVID so that we could complete the vaccine trials more quickly, and in the process save far more lives. Medical ethicists ultimately prevailed in not allowing such trials for the vaccines, arguing that no one involved could truly consent given the unknown effects of COVID.

But what about all the people that didn't consent to getting COVID the old-fashioned way, who wouldn't have had they had a vacccine?

Should we let paternalism prevail over heroics?

yeah, the paternalism was out of control, given that billions of people could and were making daily choices to expose themselves.

A nurse could choose (or be strongarmed) into treating sick patients. Parents and spouses can choose to tend the sick. Hell, people could and did go to covid parties to get infected.

Having killed many test animals could be about finding the limits. It certainly isn't a sign that the tech is poorly developed. (Tho another response says that the deaths were irresponsible)

At the same time, killing many test animals says something about the ethical disposition of neuralink. Not that they are unethical. But that they are not on the side of caution with action in the ethical debate, and more on the side of 'not developing life-improving tech is unethical'. Which is certainly a colorable ethical stance.

I wonder how much of the potential connectivity problems the brain would just figure out on its own. Human brains are incredibly adaptable. If a sense is lost then that brain area gets used for other activities. If a nerve is damage for an important process then the brain does figure out a way to send the signal through other pathways.

The way you word it, it's as if they were a bunch of tech bros putting microchips in people's brains and running a remote debugger for fun, in a completely unregulated environment.

The people that accept these kinds of implants during a "prototype phase" are usually in a very bad position, so the risk is worth it for them, as the technology can drastically improve their lives.

It may be good for paralyzed people. Everyone else should probably stay away.

Paralyzed man walks after bluetooth connects his brain and spine (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQyzSZkoYM4

Subtitle at the end says "The researchers hope to miniaturize the devices to make them completely wearable".

>bluetooth

Reminds me of that post from last week about the guy being surprised at an IoT device connecting through wifi.

Surely they could have routed a cat6 cable through some vein!

Other implants like the Utah array have killed just as many animals to be honest. People are upset because the monkeys seem intelligent, are cute and Elon is connected to the company. They stick their head in the sand the moment you mention that in some parts of the world this type of monkeys are kill-on-sight pests beaten to death in droves by people with sticks.

For example, lots of bio things can take a lifetime to have an effect. One crystal clear example of this is the buildup of AGEs in collagen and the like over time as a part of damage accumulation in the process of aging. Tons of drugs have taken decades to show signs of causing cancer, and whatnot.

Which drugs are you talking about? As far as I am aware, while there are pollution in the environment that are damaging, a lot of damage are caused by 'lifestyle' factor(arguably, the cause are still systematic).

Like, I don't have an issue with implants, I really don't. But I have a major issue with a company that comes from a fold of companies who has "plays it fast and loose" as a defining attribute. And has killed a lot of their own lab animals in experiments.

Are you talking about the safety issues from SpaceX's Starbase facility and manufacturing safety at Tesla factories? There's some controversy about autopilot as well. I know there are also controversy at Neuralink, but it doesn't seem clear to me how true it is. In any case, testing on animals isn't the same as testing on humans.

Falcon 9 is one of the most reliable and tested rocket of all time, and NASA is confident about launching astronauts on the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule.