> Nineteen of the board’s 22 members were Neuralink employees as of late 2022, according to a company document reviewed by Reuters. The oversight board’s chair was the Neuralink executive who led the company’s animal-care program, and at least 11 other members were employees directly involved with animal care or research.
Employees controlling the board sounds highly unusual for most companies, but for maybe not for a moonshot company? Didn’t Zuckerberg negotiate total control of the FB board?
And aren’t most boards incentives linked to company performance?
I’m definitely concerned about the ethics for animal testing, but I’d never trust a company or board to regulate itself. That’s what the government and the law is for. If there are concerns the government should step in.
That's what they're talking about, not corporate governance. If you do animal experimentation, you have an independent board that reviews the protocols, etc., to ensure things are done ethically. Similar to an IRB with human experiments.
The heavy weighting towards employees isn't a sign that it was selected for its independence from the company.
The board isn't sui generous, it's established by the company. But if you're going about the selection process in good faith, you try to balance the membership so the decisions aren't driven by the interests of the company vs the ethics.
I'm not positively asserting that it was unethical, but prima face it doesn't look especially great.
> It's pretty weird watching people fixate on animal treatment at Neuralink, and then stop by McDonalds for a hamburger and chicken nuggets whose lives were vastly, immeasurably worse than any research animal.
You're implying that in the Venn diagram of people fixating on animal treatment at Neuralink and people stopping at McDonalds for a hamburger and chicken nuggets, the first is completely contained in the second which is not the case. You get all kinds of opinions here but they're all made by different people, some eating animals, some not eating animals.
> Feels like we should really align on what we care about?
We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
I’m in agreement with most of this comment but question this:
> We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
The “we” here is the collective we. Humanity and its stance regarding the environment and the animals that live in it. This is absolutely worth caring about.
I find the comparison with McDonalds unhelpful, but the general idea that humanity should evolve beyond the abuse of animals is still valid regardless.
What exactly is helpful about appealing to the “collective we”? There is no single group of humans that can act on any of these things. There are only billions of individuals acting in what they decide are their own self interests.
> There is no single group of humans that can act on any of these things
This logic could be applied to every major advancement throughout human history. Yet here we are. Ideas grow and spread. We no longer accept slavery. Is this universal? No. Better than it’s ever been? Yes. The spread of ideas is the only way that broader collaboration can ever happen.
For a species so self interested, we’ve managed to invent the medium that I’m typing this comment from, and that in itself is proof that self interest led to global advancements that achieved more than any single group of humans could achieve by themselves.
And self interested or not, we’re still fundamentally a social species, clearly capable of understanding that survival of the collective is critical to our own survival.
If you don’t grow your own food, if you drive a car or ride a bus, live in a building you didn’t construct, stopped at a red light, baked food in an oven, and on the list goes, you are already intrinsically linked to and dependent on the cooperation of a large web of other people. And it’s in your own self interest to preserve the conditions that allow that web of support to continue.
Whether one stops to consider/acknowledge this is another question, but the “collective we” is already completely interdependent, and acting in a self interested manner is modulated by education.
So what is helpful? Hopefully a growing awareness of the situations we face and the realities of what we’re doing as a species. When awareness grows, self interested behavior starts achieving new/different results. History proves this.
Thank you for so eloquently conveying that. When a broader set of the world's population understands this, I hope for all our sake that we manage to cooperate effectively enough to address some of those realities you mention.
You can comment “We must stop doing X and Y bad thing!” as many times as you like, but you’re either preaching to the choir, or pulling people into your “we” that don’t consider you part of theirs.
I see people use this “we” a lot. It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?” Well, because there is no we. Some people have jet packs, and it could be said that humanity “has” jetpacks, but that’s not really a useful assertion. Why not say “I wish there were jetpacks I could buy at reasonable prices”? Why bring all of humanity into it?
> or pulling people into your “we” that don’t consider you part of theirs
I think you've missed the point here.
My point is that it doesn't matter who you consider to be part of your "we". They are part of your we whether or not you acknowledge it. Most people never stop to consider the hundreds of thousands of people that impact their lives on a daily basis. Not stopping to think about this or choosing to ignore this doesn't change the reality of what is.
> It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?”
Sure, it's a similar kind of "we", but the impact of these we statements cannot be considered equivalent. Jetpacks and the future of earth are not in the same category. If jetpacks happen, cool! Their existence doesn't have much existential impact on me or you.
"We must stop doing a bad thing" in the context of environmental issues eventually becomes an existential statement whether you like it or not. Pondering the non-existence of jetpacks and pondering the collapse of the ecosystem that supports life cannot be lumped into the came category.
> Why bring all of humanity into it?
Because the survival of humanity depends on it, unlike the creation of jetpacks.
I don’t think either are a surprise. The state of factory farming has existed for a long time and has faded from public consciousness as a concern outside of the subset that still cares.
It’s popular to hate Musk for understandable reasons, and most people still recognize the utility of eating meat while questioning Musk’s plan to put chips in our brains.
The people who fixate on one aren’t necessarily the people who fixate on the other.
Another way to look at this is that NeuralLink is creating an opportunity to raise awareness about animal abuse. The “fixation” on one doesn’t come at the expense of the other, perhaps the opposite.
If you were going to try to exonerate these activities, I would compare it with the widespread practice of grad students conducting amateur brain surgery on monkeys at most major American Universities (where do you think all these people at Neuralink came from?). But comparing livestock and research animals is more apples to oranges. Saying these animals have it vastly better than confined space chickens feels like a stretch based upon my experiences seeing both slaughterhouses and monkey labs. Personally I would prefer the confined space slaughter house (as either a human or an animal), but everyone is different and some people believe that the ends will justify the means (they might be right and they are certainly not altogether wrong on this subject).
> We should have some standard for animal handling, but it's pretty dumb that we're grandfathering an industry that produces 100,000x the harm of the research labs
There're ethical standards for animal handling in meat processing industry. And yes, they should totally be improved.
> holding up potentially revolutionary medical treatment for treatment of the other .01%.
Since when calls for following basic ethical industry standards are bad thing? Especially when they go to a company owned by billionaire, who's know for "bending" the truth about capabilities of his products. Also, there's literally 0 proof for any medical treatment coming out of Neuralink and a lot of proof that they abuse animals.
I am asking that indignation be a genuine reflection of one's moral balance, and not be used as a tactical cudgel on issues where one is actually ambivalent.
That's the same thing I ask for wars, if you abhor one then you should abhor all of them and reject all warmongers, but I'm always accused of "whataboutism".
More like if we're going to accept some amount of animal harm then potentially giving paraplegics a decent life should take priority over your happy meal.
Hey, vegan here. Please don't use people's lack of ethics about eating meat as a justification to encourage them hurting animals in other ways. That is a bad use of veganism. I never want someone to resolve hypocrisy by getting rid of the ethics they do have.
It's one thing to point out hypocrisy about the suffering that the meat industry causes as a way to encourage people to think about whether it's necessary for them to eat meat. It's another thing to point out the hypocrisy around the meat industry as a way to say "so therefore you also shouldn't care about animal testing." That's going backwards, not forwards.
You are all allowed to care about lab animals even if you eat meat, I give you my... I don't know, my "vegan blessing" or whatever. Also, you don't need the vegan movement's permission to care about animals anyway, but whatever.
The point is, try to be kind to animals when you can be. And if you want to be more consistent, be more consistently kind, not more consistently cruel.
It's better to view hypocrisy, in many cases (though definitely not all!), as a failure of aspiration. We shoot for the moon, and sometimes fall in the mud puddle in front of us.
If you view life and technology as evolving toward increasing complexity and power as time goes on, then morally we have the opportunity to evolve as well. We can steady state for a while at our current moral development (which is probably more egalitarian than morality was just a few hundred years ago), or we can alter our morality as life and technology advances. Given enough time, technology may become indistinguishable from the old-school gods, so morally the question becomes, are we going to become gods with all-too-human morality, with god-like love, or with demon-like selfishness?
Biasing towards nihilism is picking the demonic route.
> Feels like we should really align on what we care about? Maybe meet in the middle, and hold the same standards to both?
Same standards? Yes, I agree. At least when the species is the same (lab pig vs bacon pig). There's no guarantee that lab rats and cattle share the same answer to the question "can they suffer?"
"meet in the middle"? Strongly disagree. While we should determine the reality of the situation, the only thing I can be sure of is that the middle is the worst of both — either a specific animal is able to experience suffering, or they are not; if they are then testing on them or eating them should be repugnant, and if they are not then it should be done without care.
Unfortunately not only do I not know how to tell if any given animal can genuinely experience suffering (rather than merely act in a way that tiggers my empathy/sympathy), I don't think anyone else can either. (Same basic problem as with "is this AI sentient?")
> Unfortunately not only do I not know how to tell if any given animal can genuinely experience suffering (rather than merely act in a way that tiggers my empathy/sympathy), I don't think anyone else can either.
That tells us about a signalling mechanism, not about an inner subjective experience.
Those insects in that study might be conscious, or they might not be — but as I read it, part of the hard problem of consciousness is that we still don't yet understand the question.
This is also a criticism with respect to other humans. Especially when we start talking about humans in comas, vegetative states, or locked-in syndrome. Or heck, even people with congenital insensitivity to pain.
At the very least, not everyone values their own suffering the same. Masochists can see it as something to be cultivated, even.
The way mainstream chickens are raised is terrible; I'd prefer non-existence to that life, for sure. The finishing lots of mainstream beef are very bad, but before that their life is decent.
None of that comes close to the absolute pure nightmare horror of being an experimental subject of brain chip implants.
I understand the desire to create the technology, and the possible good it can do (tho it also opens the door to some rather intense dystopias), but it seems very cruel to do the research on animals.
Better perhaps to give inmates on death row the option of being test subjects, or recruit volunteers amongst those with terminal illnesses.
There is no “potentially revolutionary medical treatment” that would be held up at Neuralink by holding them to standard animal testing practices. In fact, they would be sped up since the extremely sloppy processes at Neuralink actually slow down the development of medically useful and safe procedures.
For instance there is no medical research benefit to inserting the wrong implant into 25 different pigs. It just requires duplicated work and calls into question the validity of any results they might have as they might be erroneous.
Another reason is that human testing is a critical part of developing a actually useful implant and demands the utmost concern for safety. Having a culture of slapdash, reckless disregard for their animal test subjects means they will be grossly unqualified to operate on human subjects. In fact, we have already seen evidence of this by the fact that the FDA has rejected their applications to begin human clinical testing citing safety concerns.
Causing extra animal suffering while not only getting no benefit from it, but actually causing net harm is the definition of needless. Even McDonald’s is better than that; at least they provide some people something of positive value.
I imagine there's Neuralink, and then animal research facilities that go to great lengths to be as humane as is possible in such a line of work. In the same way, I bet free-range animals live very humane lives, yet factory farms kind of suck: https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-delenda-est
> In response to an inquiry from Reuters, the USDA said it had found no conflicts of interest on Neuralink’s board when the department inspected its animal-research operations during 10 inspections since 2020. The company has passed all inspections with no citations, according to public records and a person with knowledge of the examinations.
I'm not going to get too worked up by a private company doing something that has received no complaints from the federal agency in charge of overseeing it. If you think the USDA's regulations are too lax, that's something that we the people can potentially change.
From what I can tell by looking at the IACUC membership lists for various institutions, it's completely normal to have almost all members of these committees come from the same institution.
For example, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there are only two non-affiliated members out of an IACUC member list of 21 people.
In my opinion, this Reuters article is another manifestation of the anti-Musk media bias that preys on the ignorance of your average person who won't know that this IACUC structure is entirely par for the course.
This article and others are most certainly just baseless hit pieces. They have shown up before, and seem to be extreme animal activists leveraging anti-Musk sentiment.
A neurosurgeon at Neurallink was just on Huberman Lab. He discussed, in detail: why they do the kind of animal testing they do, the humane parts, inhumane practices, the internal culture.
In the interview you mention [1] at 1:27:20 “If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people who would step up.”
Holy shit that is a terrifying opinion for the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink to have. He thinks it is morally acceptable to experiment on humans with untested medical procedures that have demonstrably killed at least dozens of animal subjects and using processes that have resulted in inserting the wrong fucking implants in animal subjects. That is not merely immoral, that is capital E Evil.
If that is the sort of person they keep as the head of neurosurgery then I too will take his word for it and say they should be shut down and entire leadership team banned from management in any medical research as they have no business designing processes that may impact the lives of humans or other creatures when they have such a callous disregard for those same lives.
Also the fact that it is structurally almost impossible for a layperson to give informed consent on a dangerous, highly experimental, early stage medical procedure, let alone a elective, non-medically necessary procedure. We have rules about human clinical testing for literally that reason.
They do not know the percent chance of death during early experimentation. They literally do not understand the procedure well enough to estimate the effects with sufficient confidence for it to be acceptable to do in human subjects. That is why it is called early stage and why we have animal testing, to establish these parameters as best we can for it to be acceptable to attempt on humans. This is literally the blood the human clinical testing rules around consenting to procedures is written in.
And once they do enough animal testing, they can figure out a reasonable estimate for the danger.
And they've probably done enough for that.
The real barrier here is whether it's considered safe enough to let people volunteer, not just whether they can estimate the level of safety.
There's a big range of experiments where informed consent is possible but it's not allowed because it's too dangerous. I think this testing is probably in that range. And anything in that range is not a matter of "capital E Evil". Evil is when you're not getting consent, or similar.
Yes, when they do enough animal testing. That is literally not the case the head neurosurgeon is postulating. Immediately before the quote they say that animal testing is the only available option during early stage. They have no other choice which is why they do it, but if the FDA allowed human experimentation during such early stages it would be a interesting option to pursue in lieu of animal testing. That is literally saying that if they had a procedure that is not ready for humans under existing rules, they would totally do it if the FDA stopped having rules against it.
My understanding is that the existing rules require a lot more pre-human testing than is necessary if your only goal is a good estimate of the danger level.
Trying to get closer to that amount, and risking more people, might be a bad idea but I would not call it evil.
It seems that you're discounting the possibility that this neurosurgeon thinks that the procedure and technology is sufficiently safe to move to human work in an ethical manner.
Yeah, well the FDA does not think so and they have a pretty good track record on both safety and expedience when it matters as seen with the expedited COVID vaccine testing.
Also, it is not like this is even new technology that requires bespoke safety analysis. There are tons of companies making intracranial implants to support brain computer interaction in human clinical testing and in deployment generally. Here [1] is one in 2016 of a man controlling a robotic arm to shake Obama’s hand with sensory feedback.
In contrast, from what I have read Neuralink has used and killed over 10x the average number of animal test subjects and still failed to adequately characterize and reduce the risks to the standard level that literally dozens or hundreds of other researchers achieve routinely. They should ostensibly have 10x the data and experience yet they have failed to achieve even the minimal standard for the easiest step.
So forgive me if I trust the FDA and their rules written in blood over the student who wants the test to be easier.
I think you are so blinded by your animosity that you can't parse the quote you provided
>If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people who would step up.”
Key parts are (1) if it were legal, (2) if FDA approves, (3) some experimentation
You somehow read this as saying they think the FDA is wrong and that they want to do risky and dangerous testing in humans today, which is not at all in the statement.
Furthermore, you go on about FDA rules born in blood. This is not at all the reality. The type, quantity, or nature of preclinical testing required by the FDA is incredibly subjective. Sometimes it is needed, sometimes not. the threshold for "good enough" is also incredibly subjective and not some hard line.
“We do animal research because we have to. There is no other way around it. If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people who would step up.”
There I added some context. He said they do animal testing because they have no other choice as the FDA has said such testing is illegal on humans. If, however, the laws were changed and it were no longer illegal then they would be excited to do it on willing humans.
The law changing does not affect the morality of the underlying act. The underlying act is immoral, that is why it is currently banned. Saying you would do it, without any concern for the underlying morality, just because they unban it is textbook unethical.
I mean seriously, if somebody said: “If tomorrow laws were changed and the government said okay you can murder people who deserve it that would be a very interesting option.” would you also think this person is a fine morally upstanding person because they said (1) if it were legal, (2) if the government approves, (3) people who deserve it. No, because that would be a comically stupid argument as it is obvious to any observer that their moral compass is being guided purely by what it legal and not by what is ethical and they would totally murder people if it was allowed.
> The underlying act is immoral, that is why it is currently banned.
This regulation draws a line in a very wide territory, and you have a lot more faith that it hits just the right spot than I do.
> their moral compass is being guided purely by what it legal
Are you sure you're not letting your moral compass be guided by what is legal? Like, if you came at this from purely moral grounds, with no knowledge of the law or past cases, would you make the same decisions as the FDA? No deviations?
But more to the point, your hypothetical bad person is guided "purely" by the law, but you haven't given evidence that this actual neurosurgeon is guided "purely" by the law. He said he wants to do "some" experiments that aren't allowed. That doesn't mean he wants to go hog-wild.
you are still entirely making up an assumption for what the human testing is and then deciding it is grossly unethical.
>The law changing does not affect the morality of the underlying act. The underlying act is immoral, that is why it is currently banned.
You say it isn't about the law or FDA but ethics. OK, then the ethics depend on the specific act you are performing and it's risk, not the government rules.
You cant have it both ways. You can't claim that anything that differs from current law makes it inherently unethical
> You can't claim that anything that differs from current law makes it inherently unethical
The person you're responding to didn't claim this, and explained in detail why early-stage testing on humans is unethical without reference to current law.
They are using the current state of the law as their definition for what is unethical, not any attribute or characteristic of the act itself. This is circular.
It does nothing to explain what is ethical or not. Have someone who's worked in preclinical testing and clinical trials, my impression is also that they don't have firm understanding of what the current status even is. It isn't a hard line, but negotiated with the FDA on a Case by case basis.
They are making arbitrary assumptions for what is a procedure is, when it is in fact open ended, calling it "dangerous, highly experimental, early stage medical procedure"
They are assuming that the same procedure done in monkeys would be done in humans, which is not supported by the quote, or how the real world works.
You can different experiments in humans than monkeys to achieve the same goal, they need not be identical, or even similar.
They didn't give an argument for the status quo, they gave an open-ended argument based on danger being bad. But the correct tolerance for danger is not zero, so proving something is dangerous is not enough.
For a car comparison, it's easy to argue that going faster is less safe, but that's not enough to explain why a speed limit for a road is specifically 35mph, and doesn't tell you if 35mph is correct for that road. Maybe it should be 25mph or 45mph.
The rest of their argument is making a bunch of assumptions with no evidence shown. They're assuming that the current line is exactly enough to determine the level of danger to the point that you can get informed consent. They're assuming that the current line is an exact match to what's ethical.
But maybe that's not true. Maybe the FDA is 50% too lenient. Or maybe they're 50% not lenient enough. This commenter is failing to make a case for the current regulations being just right. They're making a strawman about changing the regulations a huge amount, jumping all the way to nearly unchecked experimentation. Of course that's bad, but that's not what the neurosurgeon actually said.
The problem is that they're making the claim that X is unethical with zero information on what X is. In this case X is undefined and could be anything that is not currently permitted.
If you claim that X is always unethical, and the only fixed characteristic of x is that it's not currently permitted, then there are only two solutions:
(1) You think that the current rules are a perfect match for ethics OR (2) anything that violates a rule is unethical.
> I don't think they're trying to make a case for the current regulations being just right.
That's sure what it looks like to me when they say "Wanting to do early experimentation, that is currently only allowed to occur on animals due to safety concerns, on humans is definitionally unethical and especially dangerous. We banned it because it is unethical and especially dangerous in basically every case."
"definitionally unethical" based on what is currently allowed. So FDA regulations are a cornerstone of that particular argument.
And as I elaborated upon in my previous comment, their only other argument is a one-sided "that increases danger" argument that isn't enough because it also applies to things that are ethical.
I’m confused. The part of their comment you quote isn’t making a case for the current regulations being just right. It’s not even saying that, let alone trying to make a case for it.
If wanting to do something the regulations disallow is definitionally unethical, banned because it was unethical, then either the regulations are exactly correct wrt ethics or they are actually too permissive.
Right? How else can I interpret that?
And can you quote any argument they've made for the experiments being unethical that doesn't either:
A) base the argument on current FDA rules
B) assume some kind of extreme example like "so experimental we can't even explain the danger well enough for informed consent to be possible"
I would be interested in a discussion of specific issues with specific possible experiments but I don't see that happening anywhere. Just someone taking the neurosurgeon's words and interpreting them in the most extreme way possible.
>If wanting to do something the regulations disallow is definitionally unethical...
Here's what they actually said:
"Wanting to do early experimentation, that is currently only allowed to occur on animals due to safety concerns, on humans is definitionally unethical..."
I don't know why, but you are just persistently misreading or misinterpreting the OP's comments.
If you actually read the rest of the OP's comments, it's completely obvious that they don't think that the current regulations define what's ethical. They very explicitly say that what's ethical and what's in accord with the regulations are two separate things, and even give a hypothetical example to illustrate this.
The only definition for "early" they're giving is the line that is currently set by FDA regulation! They're treating it all exactly the same, as long as it's currently not allowed.
They have not given any other information on where to draw the line.
> even give a hypothetical example to illustrate this
No they didn't. They gave an analogy about how murder is bad. Which is no more helpful than "the most extreme possible interpretation of what the neurosurgeon said would be bad". They haven't given any examples of experiments that are okay or not okay.
All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad, and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that. They are either ignoring the possibility of less extreme examples, or acting like everything the FDA doesn't allow is exactly the same.
I can't tell you which it is, so if you insist it's not the latter then it must be the former. That's just as bad. It's a strawman.
If they gave a non-strawman non-FDA explanation of where to draw the line, then I must be blind, so please quote it.
The point of the hypothetical example was just to illustrate that whether or not something is ethical is a separate question from whether or not something is in line with the regulations (or the law, in the analogy). This is why it’s so odd that you seem to think the OP was saying that the current regulations define what’s ethical.
> All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad
Correct. Or any early experiment on humans (‘extreme’ or not), as the potential benefits don’t justify the risks.
> and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that.
Yes - that’s the impression I get from what the neurosurgeon said.
I don’t understand why you are asking me or OP where to draw the line. You don’t have to know exactly where to draw the line in order to know that certain things are on one or other side of it.
> Or any early experiment on humans (‘extreme’ or not), as the potential benefits don’t justify the risks.
Well that's just it. If 'early' is automatically bad, and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed, then you're using the FDA's definition.
Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical? That's definitely not the meaning of 'early' the neurosurgeon was using!!
The neurosurgeon wants to do 'early'. But 'early' is a vast swath of scenarios, covering orders of magnitude of safety and preparedness. Which is why I think using very extreme examples does more harm than good to having a conversation about this.
I don't think letting people sign up to do a test moderately earlier than they currently can is a huge ethical problem. Even if we assume it's a bad idea, it's not Evil. That's my real objection to the original point. A medium-size change to current regulations is nowhere near "capital E Evil".
I don't think we need to have exact discussions about where the line is, my point is that the great-whatever parent was assuming some kind of crazy extreme and acting like that was the only possible meaning for the sentence. And my asking them where the line is was a way of trying to make that clear, that they're neglecting more mundane scenarios.
>and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed,
Well no, it doesn't mean this. It means testing a treatment that's still highly experimental and a long way from being approved. In other words, a treatment that is in the EARLY stages of its development (in the normal English sense of the term). Listening again to the relevant portion of the interview, I think the claim that the interviewee was using 'early' to mean 'whatever the FDA regards as early' is pretty clearly false. They say 'we can't do early stage testing on humans because the FDA bans it', but that obviously doesn't mean that they define the meaning of 'early' by FDA regulations. That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
>Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical?
No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
> It means testing a treatment that's still highly experimental and a long way from being approved.
If that's the definition, then that doesn't sound evil to me. It doesn't sound like informed consent is impossible.
Also I feel like that definition includes lots of existing allowed clinical trials.
> That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
> No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
Well the word murder does work that way. Something being murder often depends on whether it's ethical or not. If it's ethical self defense then it's not murder, for example.
So you don't need to get upset that I asked just in case.
>If that's the definition, then that doesn't sound evil to me. It doesn't sound like informed consent is impossible.
It's impossible because the risks are largely unknown, so there's nothing much to be informed about. Anyone who wants to take on such unknown and potentially enormous risks is probably acting irrationallty, and it's unethical to exploit such people.
But this is where we get to the "written in blood part". The history of medicine is full of cases of people being horribly exploited in early stage testing. That's why we have the rules. Not because of abstract arguments about informed consent, but because we've seen what happens if we don't. It's all very well to imagine people giving informed consent to this sort of testing and imagine scientists acting responsibly and ethically in this sort of scenario; but we know that this isn't actually what happens.
>What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
The point of the analogy is simply to show that "the rules ban X" doesn't entail "the meaning of 'X' is defined by the rules". So e.g. if someone says "I don't fish in this lake because the rules ban it", that doesn't mean that they take the verb 'fish' to be defined by the rules in question. The same goes for FDA rules and 'early stage testing on humans'.
"Early" just seems like an extremely relative term to me, which is why I ask for examples. I guess not to you in this context. I don't think we're going to resolve this.
As someone who literally would have never existed albeit for human experimentation, I have something of an opinion that sometimes pushing the boundaries of science is worth ethical sausage making.
His quoted words are him frankly admitting to wanting and being willing to do the sort of human experimentation universally prohibited by medical ethics. He is saying he's only being stopped by the oversight mechanisms that are in place to stop exactly that.
I do find that frightening and don't see what you and other commenters gain from downplaying the seriousness of that intention.
there are many countries where assisted suicide is becoming more widely accepted. Many people are willing organ donors and blood donors. Everyone and their bodies absolutely must be treated with the utmost respect, but for many, the highest respect is to be part of even the smallest iota of scientific progress.
Y'all are fucking scary I'm just extremely thankful we actually have rules of medical ethics that are enforced rather than letting you and this wannabe Mengele run wild.
That's where I think you were putting words in his mouth. I don't think they are saying that they would want to do anything unethical or especially dangerous. That's connotation that you are inserting
Wanting to do early experimentation, that is currently only allowed to occur on animals due to safety concerns, on humans is definitionally unethical and especially dangerous. We banned it because it is unethical and especially dangerous in basically every case. There are literal decades of experience and piles of bodies supporting that point.
Obviously there are some exceptions, but whatever Neuralink is doing is not one of them. Their technology and any benefits it might bring is at best wholly speculative and would require years to reduce to practice. There is exactly zero compelling reason why they should be given a pass on human testing safety.
Suggesting that it would be acceptable to replace their animal testing with human testing as long as the volunteers were willing is about as “open and shut” unethical as you can get.
Human-based experimentation without proper research and understanding is unethical. We've seen what happens when that's done multiple times throughout history. That's why we have these guidelines in place. It's unethical, and what he would want to do without the law in place is unethical.
Experimenting on animals that cannot give informed consent is ok but not when there's a human involved? Arguably, I don't think that humans should get paid for what is essentially an elective surgery experiment when there's a real possibility of death. It should be completely volunteered and compensation should come in the form of a hospital bed, meals, and post-op care.
The same thing happens with organ donations. And sex work, sometimes.
As a society, there are things we don't want people to be coerced into via need for money. Trying hard enough to avoid that coercion gets in the way of fair compensation for those things.
If you can solve that problem (and not by just saying "universal basic income" very loudly) they'll probably give you the Nobel for economics.
Like all the hundred other times he’s lied about things? If anything, just the way he treats his human employees, I’d not be surprised if the animals are treated worse than the raised concerns.
Mistreating animals is a multi-million dollar industry. People in power have been known to cater to those who can spend the most on lobbying efforts. Even if your representative doesn’t get influenced by lobby groups, there is a whole ideology disproportionately popular among the ruling class around lax government involvement. Representation in congress sits at one representative per 4-5 hundred thousand constituents, one of the lowest representation in the world. If your representative is holds opposite ideology from yours or if the majority in congress has the opposite ideology from you and your representative, you have little chance of changing an institution which is independent from congress. If you and your representative and majority of congress hold the same ideology, but the majority of senate or the president don’t, you have little chance of being heard.
No. It is childishly optimistic to thing we the people can change anything about this. Our best shot is complaining on social media and write articles in news magazines, but even that has limited results.
I'm sure writers are reviewed on how many eyeballs their articles bring in. It probably has more to do with how easy it is to bring in traffic when you write a controversial article about anything related to Elon than anything else. Every news org is doing it.
It's more troubling that people are buying into this because of whatever preconceived notions they have of Musk (whether organic or influenced by the media they consume).
People in general should be skeptical of everything they read in the media. No media source I have ever found is 100% honest.
> No media source I have ever found is 100% honest.
It's very hard to constantly caveat everything you communicate with your biases. It can be argued that this same skepticism should be trained on everything anyone communicates.
"The USDA employs 122 inspectors to inspect 11,785 facilities, ranging from zoos and breeders to labs, according to a Congressional Research Service report last July."
Well it's not like a building inspection - how many animals are in each building? You have to assess them to see their welfare - on top of checking that the enclosures and practices are up to code.
Some practices might not get done in those days - and might not be reviewed. Imagine no animals has to be put down during these two days, there will be no actual review of that procedure - and so on.
In slaighterhouses in Canada, we have federal inspectors during all work hours but activists still film abuse happening.
I guess you can broadly split compliance work like this into two categories, spot checks and audits. The former where you're pseudo-randomly checking that they are following the rules, and punishing them where you aren't (taxes work like this), the latter where you are systematically checking that the rules have been followed (I believe building inspections work like this).
1 inspector/100 facilities seems within the realms of reason if you're doing spot checks. It's absurd if you think you need to be doing continuous audits.
It sounds like you're saying there's good reason to think the slaughterhouse business needs the latter (that there is a documented history of abuse despite them happening - I don't really know anything about the industry), but most industries seem to survive on spot checks.
I don't know much about the zoos and breeders that the USDS is inspecting either, maybe continuous auditing would be a good idea, but it doesn't seem absurd to think that spot checks are sufficient. Is there some particular reason to think that they're like slaughter houses and that spot checks are clearly insufficient?
Full disclosure, I'm antispeciesist and an animal rights activist. - also, love your comment and spelling out both types.of inspections.
To me, industries that are responsible for the well being of animals are more similar to old persons homes, hospitals and kindergardens - they are responsible for the well being of individuals that can't care for themselves. Being at the mercy of the workers, the individuals need better protection than is afforded by spot inspections.
Another thing that should raise scrutiny in these context is that animal welfare costs money, and companies are there to maximise profits - which creates a perpetual tension between respecting animals rights and better/faster results/profits.
And a quote : Freedom is the right of all sentient beings - Optimus Prime
I could be wrong about the example entirely, I've never actually been involved in that stage of construction (or most other stages).
My understanding of building inspections in Toronto, Canada was that they were supposed to be reasonable systematic and thorough even for houses, but I'm definitely not a reliable source. Even if my impression was right I definitely have no reason to assume it applies elsewhere.
Anyways, hopefully the point came across anyways even if the example was sub-optimal.
I clarify because, at least in the US (Canadian laws may differ), afaik building inspection is buyer beware.
If an inspector checked something and if they noted the flaw then it would have been addressed. Or they could have just not checked, not noted, or missed it.
Same with home inspectors, who are under no legal liability except for the most gratuitous and obvious flaws.
Which is contrary to how most people assume the system works when they're buying a new-build house.
100 per year add travel time. Easy metrics to hit. Fyi im being sarcastic- thats a bananas amount add in travel time + paperwork + pretravel prep. Maybe every 3 years, maaaybe.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadEmployees controlling the board sounds highly unusual for most companies, but for maybe not for a moonshot company? Didn’t Zuckerberg negotiate total control of the FB board?
And aren’t most boards incentives linked to company performance?
I’m definitely concerned about the ethics for animal testing, but I’d never trust a company or board to regulate itself. That’s what the government and the law is for. If there are concerns the government should step in.
That's what they're talking about, not corporate governance. If you do animal experimentation, you have an independent board that reviews the protocols, etc., to ensure things are done ethically. Similar to an IRB with human experiments.
The heavy weighting towards employees isn't a sign that it was selected for its independence from the company.
I'm not positively asserting that it was unethical, but prima face it doesn't look especially great.
You're implying that in the Venn diagram of people fixating on animal treatment at Neuralink and people stopping at McDonalds for a hamburger and chicken nuggets, the first is completely contained in the second which is not the case. You get all kinds of opinions here but they're all made by different people, some eating animals, some not eating animals.
> Feels like we should really align on what we care about?
We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
> We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
The “we” here is the collective we. Humanity and its stance regarding the environment and the animals that live in it. This is absolutely worth caring about.
I find the comparison with McDonalds unhelpful, but the general idea that humanity should evolve beyond the abuse of animals is still valid regardless.
This logic could be applied to every major advancement throughout human history. Yet here we are. Ideas grow and spread. We no longer accept slavery. Is this universal? No. Better than it’s ever been? Yes. The spread of ideas is the only way that broader collaboration can ever happen.
For a species so self interested, we’ve managed to invent the medium that I’m typing this comment from, and that in itself is proof that self interest led to global advancements that achieved more than any single group of humans could achieve by themselves.
And self interested or not, we’re still fundamentally a social species, clearly capable of understanding that survival of the collective is critical to our own survival.
If you don’t grow your own food, if you drive a car or ride a bus, live in a building you didn’t construct, stopped at a red light, baked food in an oven, and on the list goes, you are already intrinsically linked to and dependent on the cooperation of a large web of other people. And it’s in your own self interest to preserve the conditions that allow that web of support to continue.
Whether one stops to consider/acknowledge this is another question, but the “collective we” is already completely interdependent, and acting in a self interested manner is modulated by education.
So what is helpful? Hopefully a growing awareness of the situations we face and the realities of what we’re doing as a species. When awareness grows, self interested behavior starts achieving new/different results. History proves this.
I see people use this “we” a lot. It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?” Well, because there is no we. Some people have jet packs, and it could be said that humanity “has” jetpacks, but that’s not really a useful assertion. Why not say “I wish there were jetpacks I could buy at reasonable prices”? Why bring all of humanity into it?
I think you've missed the point here.
My point is that it doesn't matter who you consider to be part of your "we". They are part of your we whether or not you acknowledge it. Most people never stop to consider the hundreds of thousands of people that impact their lives on a daily basis. Not stopping to think about this or choosing to ignore this doesn't change the reality of what is.
> It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?”
Sure, it's a similar kind of "we", but the impact of these we statements cannot be considered equivalent. Jetpacks and the future of earth are not in the same category. If jetpacks happen, cool! Their existence doesn't have much existential impact on me or you.
"We must stop doing a bad thing" in the context of environmental issues eventually becomes an existential statement whether you like it or not. Pondering the non-existence of jetpacks and pondering the collapse of the ecosystem that supports life cannot be lumped into the came category.
> Why bring all of humanity into it?
Because the survival of humanity depends on it, unlike the creation of jetpacks.
It’s popular to hate Musk for understandable reasons, and most people still recognize the utility of eating meat while questioning Musk’s plan to put chips in our brains.
The people who fixate on one aren’t necessarily the people who fixate on the other.
Another way to look at this is that NeuralLink is creating an opportunity to raise awareness about animal abuse. The “fixation” on one doesn’t come at the expense of the other, perhaps the opposite.
Pretty weird are generalizations like this.
By the way I do not eat at McDonalds or meat at all. But that is not relevant.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10130709/NIH-says-b...
There're ethical standards for animal handling in meat processing industry. And yes, they should totally be improved.
> holding up potentially revolutionary medical treatment for treatment of the other .01%.
Since when calls for following basic ethical industry standards are bad thing? Especially when they go to a company owned by billionaire, who's know for "bending" the truth about capabilities of his products. Also, there's literally 0 proof for any medical treatment coming out of Neuralink and a lot of proof that they abuse animals.
It's one thing to point out hypocrisy about the suffering that the meat industry causes as a way to encourage people to think about whether it's necessary for them to eat meat. It's another thing to point out the hypocrisy around the meat industry as a way to say "so therefore you also shouldn't care about animal testing." That's going backwards, not forwards.
You are all allowed to care about lab animals even if you eat meat, I give you my... I don't know, my "vegan blessing" or whatever. Also, you don't need the vegan movement's permission to care about animals anyway, but whatever.
The point is, try to be kind to animals when you can be. And if you want to be more consistent, be more consistently kind, not more consistently cruel.
That's a really interesting way to put it. I definitely am guilty of reacting to hypocrisy by being more and more biased towards nihilism.
If you view life and technology as evolving toward increasing complexity and power as time goes on, then morally we have the opportunity to evolve as well. We can steady state for a while at our current moral development (which is probably more egalitarian than morality was just a few hundred years ago), or we can alter our morality as life and technology advances. Given enough time, technology may become indistinguishable from the old-school gods, so morally the question becomes, are we going to become gods with all-too-human morality, with god-like love, or with demon-like selfishness?
Biasing towards nihilism is picking the demonic route.
Now you made it sound attractive tho
Same standards? Yes, I agree. At least when the species is the same (lab pig vs bacon pig). There's no guarantee that lab rats and cattle share the same answer to the question "can they suffer?"
"meet in the middle"? Strongly disagree. While we should determine the reality of the situation, the only thing I can be sure of is that the middle is the worst of both — either a specific animal is able to experience suffering, or they are not; if they are then testing on them or eating them should be repugnant, and if they are not then it should be done without care.
Unfortunately not only do I not know how to tell if any given animal can genuinely experience suffering (rather than merely act in a way that tiggers my empathy/sympathy), I don't think anyone else can either. (Same basic problem as with "is this AI sentient?")
Biochemical signalling, and pathways, along with neural responses. It helps that so much of animal genetics is similar. Here was a study in fruit flies: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190712120244.h...
Those insects in that study might be conscious, or they might not be — but as I read it, part of the hard problem of consciousness is that we still don't yet understand the question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
At the very least, not everyone values their own suffering the same. Masochists can see it as something to be cultivated, even.
None of that comes close to the absolute pure nightmare horror of being an experimental subject of brain chip implants.
I understand the desire to create the technology, and the possible good it can do (tho it also opens the door to some rather intense dystopias), but it seems very cruel to do the research on animals.
Better perhaps to give inmates on death row the option of being test subjects, or recruit volunteers amongst those with terminal illnesses.
Or simply don't do the research.
For instance there is no medical research benefit to inserting the wrong implant into 25 different pigs. It just requires duplicated work and calls into question the validity of any results they might have as they might be erroneous.
Another reason is that human testing is a critical part of developing a actually useful implant and demands the utmost concern for safety. Having a culture of slapdash, reckless disregard for their animal test subjects means they will be grossly unqualified to operate on human subjects. In fact, we have already seen evidence of this by the fact that the FDA has rejected their applications to begin human clinical testing citing safety concerns.
Causing extra animal suffering while not only getting no benefit from it, but actually causing net harm is the definition of needless. Even McDonald’s is better than that; at least they provide some people something of positive value.
You say this very confidently, but my own experience has been the opposite. Are you speaking knowledgeably here?
I'm not going to get too worked up by a private company doing something that has received no complaints from the federal agency in charge of overseeing it. If you think the USDA's regulations are too lax, that's something that we the people can potentially change.
For example, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there are only two non-affiliated members out of an IACUC member list of 21 people.
https://animalcare.illinois.edu/about/institutional-animal-c...
In my opinion, this Reuters article is another manifestation of the anti-Musk media bias that preys on the ignorance of your average person who won't know that this IACUC structure is entirely par for the course.
A neurosurgeon at Neurallink was just on Huberman Lab. He discussed, in detail: why they do the kind of animal testing they do, the humane parts, inhumane practices, the internal culture.
I’ll take his word for it to be honest.
Holy shit that is a terrifying opinion for the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink to have. He thinks it is morally acceptable to experiment on humans with untested medical procedures that have demonstrably killed at least dozens of animal subjects and using processes that have resulted in inserting the wrong fucking implants in animal subjects. That is not merely immoral, that is capital E Evil.
If that is the sort of person they keep as the head of neurosurgery then I too will take his word for it and say they should be shut down and entire leadership team banned from management in any medical research as they have no business designing processes that may impact the lives of humans or other creatures when they have such a callous disregard for those same lives.
https://youtu.be/3ZGItIAUQmI
And they've probably done enough for that.
The real barrier here is whether it's considered safe enough to let people volunteer, not just whether they can estimate the level of safety.
There's a big range of experiments where informed consent is possible but it's not allowed because it's too dangerous. I think this testing is probably in that range. And anything in that range is not a matter of "capital E Evil". Evil is when you're not getting consent, or similar.
Trying to get closer to that amount, and risking more people, might be a bad idea but I would not call it evil.
Also, it is not like this is even new technology that requires bespoke safety analysis. There are tons of companies making intracranial implants to support brain computer interaction in human clinical testing and in deployment generally. Here [1] is one in 2016 of a man controlling a robotic arm to shake Obama’s hand with sensory feedback.
In contrast, from what I have read Neuralink has used and killed over 10x the average number of animal test subjects and still failed to adequately characterize and reduce the risks to the standard level that literally dozens or hundreds of other researchers achieve routinely. They should ostensibly have 10x the data and experience yet they have failed to achieve even the minimal standard for the easiest step.
So forgive me if I trust the FDA and their rules written in blood over the student who wants the test to be easier.
[1] https://youtu.be/rqD-I1ehf5E
>If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people who would step up.”
Key parts are (1) if it were legal, (2) if FDA approves, (3) some experimentation
You somehow read this as saying they think the FDA is wrong and that they want to do risky and dangerous testing in humans today, which is not at all in the statement.
Furthermore, you go on about FDA rules born in blood. This is not at all the reality. The type, quantity, or nature of preclinical testing required by the FDA is incredibly subjective. Sometimes it is needed, sometimes not. the threshold for "good enough" is also incredibly subjective and not some hard line.
There I added some context. He said they do animal testing because they have no other choice as the FDA has said such testing is illegal on humans. If, however, the laws were changed and it were no longer illegal then they would be excited to do it on willing humans.
The law changing does not affect the morality of the underlying act. The underlying act is immoral, that is why it is currently banned. Saying you would do it, without any concern for the underlying morality, just because they unban it is textbook unethical.
I mean seriously, if somebody said: “If tomorrow laws were changed and the government said okay you can murder people who deserve it that would be a very interesting option.” would you also think this person is a fine morally upstanding person because they said (1) if it were legal, (2) if the government approves, (3) people who deserve it. No, because that would be a comically stupid argument as it is obvious to any observer that their moral compass is being guided purely by what it legal and not by what is ethical and they would totally murder people if it was allowed.
This regulation draws a line in a very wide territory, and you have a lot more faith that it hits just the right spot than I do.
> their moral compass is being guided purely by what it legal
Are you sure you're not letting your moral compass be guided by what is legal? Like, if you came at this from purely moral grounds, with no knowledge of the law or past cases, would you make the same decisions as the FDA? No deviations?
But more to the point, your hypothetical bad person is guided "purely" by the law, but you haven't given evidence that this actual neurosurgeon is guided "purely" by the law. He said he wants to do "some" experiments that aren't allowed. That doesn't mean he wants to go hog-wild.
>The law changing does not affect the morality of the underlying act. The underlying act is immoral, that is why it is currently banned.
You say it isn't about the law or FDA but ethics. OK, then the ethics depend on the specific act you are performing and it's risk, not the government rules.
You cant have it both ways. You can't claim that anything that differs from current law makes it inherently unethical
The person you're responding to didn't claim this, and explained in detail why early-stage testing on humans is unethical without reference to current law.
It does nothing to explain what is ethical or not. Have someone who's worked in preclinical testing and clinical trials, my impression is also that they don't have firm understanding of what the current status even is. It isn't a hard line, but negotiated with the FDA on a Case by case basis.
No, they're not. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35837498
>It isn't a hard line, but negotiated with the FDA on a Case by case basis.
Of course it's not a hard line, but this particular case falls way over on the 'not allowed' side. It's not any kind of borderline case.
>No, they're not. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35837498
They are making arbitrary assumptions for what is a procedure is, when it is in fact open ended, calling it "dangerous, highly experimental, early stage medical procedure"
They are assuming that the same procedure done in monkeys would be done in humans, which is not supported by the quote, or how the real world works.
You can different experiments in humans than monkeys to achieve the same goal, they need not be identical, or even similar.
For a car comparison, it's easy to argue that going faster is less safe, but that's not enough to explain why a speed limit for a road is specifically 35mph, and doesn't tell you if 35mph is correct for that road. Maybe it should be 25mph or 45mph.
The rest of their argument is making a bunch of assumptions with no evidence shown. They're assuming that the current line is exactly enough to determine the level of danger to the point that you can get informed consent. They're assuming that the current line is an exact match to what's ethical.
But maybe that's not true. Maybe the FDA is 50% too lenient. Or maybe they're 50% not lenient enough. This commenter is failing to make a case for the current regulations being just right. They're making a strawman about changing the regulations a huge amount, jumping all the way to nearly unchecked experimentation. Of course that's bad, but that's not what the neurosurgeon actually said.
I don't think they're trying to make a case for the current regulations being just right. The point here is very simple:
1) X is unethical.
2) This guy said they'd do X if it wasn't against FDA regulations.
The key point about X is that it's unethical. Whether or not FDA regulations are perfectly calibrated is beside the point.
If you claim that X is always unethical, and the only fixed characteristic of x is that it's not currently permitted, then there are only two solutions:
(1) You think that the current rules are a perfect match for ethics OR (2) anything that violates a rule is unethical.
That's sure what it looks like to me when they say "Wanting to do early experimentation, that is currently only allowed to occur on animals due to safety concerns, on humans is definitionally unethical and especially dangerous. We banned it because it is unethical and especially dangerous in basically every case."
"definitionally unethical" based on what is currently allowed. So FDA regulations are a cornerstone of that particular argument.
And as I elaborated upon in my previous comment, their only other argument is a one-sided "that increases danger" argument that isn't enough because it also applies to things that are ethical.
Right? How else can I interpret that?
And can you quote any argument they've made for the experiments being unethical that doesn't either:
A) base the argument on current FDA rules
B) assume some kind of extreme example like "so experimental we can't even explain the danger well enough for informed consent to be possible"
I would be interested in a discussion of specific issues with specific possible experiments but I don't see that happening anywhere. Just someone taking the neurosurgeon's words and interpreting them in the most extreme way possible.
Here's what they actually said:
"Wanting to do early experimentation, that is currently only allowed to occur on animals due to safety concerns, on humans is definitionally unethical..."
I don't know why, but you are just persistently misreading or misinterpreting the OP's comments.
If you actually read the rest of the OP's comments, it's completely obvious that they don't think that the current regulations define what's ethical. They very explicitly say that what's ethical and what's in accord with the regulations are two separate things, and even give a hypothetical example to illustrate this.
They have not given any other information on where to draw the line.
> even give a hypothetical example to illustrate this
No they didn't. They gave an analogy about how murder is bad. Which is no more helpful than "the most extreme possible interpretation of what the neurosurgeon said would be bad". They haven't given any examples of experiments that are okay or not okay.
All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad, and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that. They are either ignoring the possibility of less extreme examples, or acting like everything the FDA doesn't allow is exactly the same.
I can't tell you which it is, so if you insist it's not the latter then it must be the former. That's just as bad. It's a strawman.
If they gave a non-strawman non-FDA explanation of where to draw the line, then I must be blind, so please quote it.
> All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad
Correct. Or any early experiment on humans (‘extreme’ or not), as the potential benefits don’t justify the risks.
> and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that.
Yes - that’s the impression I get from what the neurosurgeon said.
I don’t understand why you are asking me or OP where to draw the line. You don’t have to know exactly where to draw the line in order to know that certain things are on one or other side of it.
Well that's just it. If 'early' is automatically bad, and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed, then you're using the FDA's definition.
Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical? That's definitely not the meaning of 'early' the neurosurgeon was using!!
The neurosurgeon wants to do 'early'. But 'early' is a vast swath of scenarios, covering orders of magnitude of safety and preparedness. Which is why I think using very extreme examples does more harm than good to having a conversation about this.
I don't think letting people sign up to do a test moderately earlier than they currently can is a huge ethical problem. Even if we assume it's a bad idea, it's not Evil. That's my real objection to the original point. A medium-size change to current regulations is nowhere near "capital E Evil".
I don't think we need to have exact discussions about where the line is, my point is that the great-whatever parent was assuming some kind of crazy extreme and acting like that was the only possible meaning for the sentence. And my asking them where the line is was a way of trying to make that clear, that they're neglecting more mundane scenarios.
Well no, it doesn't mean this. It means testing a treatment that's still highly experimental and a long way from being approved. In other words, a treatment that is in the EARLY stages of its development (in the normal English sense of the term). Listening again to the relevant portion of the interview, I think the claim that the interviewee was using 'early' to mean 'whatever the FDA regards as early' is pretty clearly false. They say 'we can't do early stage testing on humans because the FDA bans it', but that obviously doesn't mean that they define the meaning of 'early' by FDA regulations. That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
>Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical?
No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
If that's the definition, then that doesn't sound evil to me. It doesn't sound like informed consent is impossible.
Also I feel like that definition includes lots of existing allowed clinical trials.
> That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
> No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
Well the word murder does work that way. Something being murder often depends on whether it's ethical or not. If it's ethical self defense then it's not murder, for example.
So you don't need to get upset that I asked just in case.
It's impossible because the risks are largely unknown, so there's nothing much to be informed about. Anyone who wants to take on such unknown and potentially enormous risks is probably acting irrationallty, and it's unethical to exploit such people.
But this is where we get to the "written in blood part". The history of medicine is full of cases of people being horribly exploited in early stage testing. That's why we have the rules. Not because of abstract arguments about informed consent, but because we've seen what happens if we don't. It's all very well to imagine people giving informed consent to this sort of testing and imagine scientists acting responsibly and ethically in this sort of scenario; but we know that this isn't actually what happens.
>What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
The point of the analogy is simply to show that "the rules ban X" doesn't entail "the meaning of 'X' is defined by the rules". So e.g. if someone says "I don't fish in this lake because the rules ban it", that doesn't mean that they take the verb 'fish' to be defined by the rules in question. The same goes for FDA rules and 'early stage testing on humans'.
And it's not cruel on purpose, it's dangerous because the tools are limited.
I do find that frightening and don't see what you and other commenters gain from downplaying the seriousness of that intention.
Obviously there are some exceptions, but whatever Neuralink is doing is not one of them. Their technology and any benefits it might bring is at best wholly speculative and would require years to reduce to practice. There is exactly zero compelling reason why they should be given a pass on human testing safety.
Suggesting that it would be acceptable to replace their animal testing with human testing as long as the volunteers were willing is about as “open and shut” unethical as you can get.
So the researchers "benefiting" should keep the volunteers alive, but actual compensation for time and suffering is somehow dismissable?
I think the people who say animals are sentient beings deserving of respect are less horrible
As a society, there are things we don't want people to be coerced into via need for money. Trying hard enough to avoid that coercion gets in the way of fair compensation for those things.
If you can solve that problem (and not by just saying "universal basic income" very loudly) they'll probably give you the Nobel for economics.
Like all the hundred other times he’s lied about things? If anything, just the way he treats his human employees, I’d not be surprised if the animals are treated worse than the raised concerns.
No. It is childishly optimistic to thing we the people can change anything about this. Our best shot is complaining on social media and write articles in news magazines, but even that has limited results.
People in general should be skeptical of everything they read in the media. No media source I have ever found is 100% honest.
It's very hard to constantly caveat everything you communicate with your biases. It can be argued that this same skepticism should be trained on everything anyone communicates.
What? Jesus that's so absurd
Some practices might not get done in those days - and might not be reviewed. Imagine no animals has to be put down during these two days, there will be no actual review of that procedure - and so on.
In slaighterhouses in Canada, we have federal inspectors during all work hours but activists still film abuse happening.
1 inspector/100 facilities seems within the realms of reason if you're doing spot checks. It's absurd if you think you need to be doing continuous audits.
It sounds like you're saying there's good reason to think the slaughterhouse business needs the latter (that there is a documented history of abuse despite them happening - I don't really know anything about the industry), but most industries seem to survive on spot checks.
I don't know much about the zoos and breeders that the USDS is inspecting either, maybe continuous auditing would be a good idea, but it doesn't seem absurd to think that spot checks are sufficient. Is there some particular reason to think that they're like slaughter houses and that spot checks are clearly insufficient?
To me, industries that are responsible for the well being of animals are more similar to old persons homes, hospitals and kindergardens - they are responsible for the well being of individuals that can't care for themselves. Being at the mercy of the workers, the individuals need better protection than is afforded by spot inspections.
Another thing that should raise scrutiny in these context is that animal welfare costs money, and companies are there to maximise profits - which creates a perpetual tension between respecting animals rights and better/faster results/profits.
And a quote : Freedom is the right of all sentient beings - Optimus Prime
For residential, building inspectors certainly don't work systematically, at least in the US.
When and what they check is pretty spotty.
My understanding of building inspections in Toronto, Canada was that they were supposed to be reasonable systematic and thorough even for houses, but I'm definitely not a reliable source. Even if my impression was right I definitely have no reason to assume it applies elsewhere.
Anyways, hopefully the point came across anyways even if the example was sub-optimal.
If an inspector checked something and if they noted the flaw then it would have been addressed. Or they could have just not checked, not noted, or missed it.
Same with home inspectors, who are under no legal liability except for the most gratuitous and obvious flaws.
Which is contrary to how most people assume the system works when they're buying a new-build house.
Breeders and remote zoo-like facilities are probably the most difficult to get to.