We allow poor people to mine tiny bits of gold by burning (boiling?) off mercury, poisoning themselves, their family, and the whole ecosystem, as their nervous systems degenerate like a slow form of torture.

This is tame.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/climate/amazon-forest-mer...

Not to mention more than 80% of gold use is superficial. Majority of it is held in banks and reserves.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

Well "illegal gold mining" is banned kind of by definition. Admittedly it seems Peru and places aren't enforcing the laws as well as they could but it's kind of a different category of problem. And I'm not sure you can regard the US as responsible for making gold valuable as it was for thousands of years before the US existed.

I'm just comparing people who intentionally make a choice to poison themselves and so many animals around them for tiny shiny bits opposed to unintentional deaths during medical research. I don't blame US in any way.

Same with "artisanal" cobalt mining.

The justification will be a consequentialist argument, we sacrificed/tortured animals and in exchange we gave this to humanity; the overall calculus is a net positive.

This post shows the very worst of the equation, and they will bring up the best, maybe some people that couldn't walk that now can, or some psychological disease for which this contributed to the cure.

They will probably bring up numbers like, this damaged hundreds, but will benefit hundreds of thousands.

This is not the first time society accepts such a compromise. There are innocent people in jail serving life sentences, because every criteria will have false positives. We can undo this wrong right now, we just have to let everyone out of prison.

Net positive for who? Humans? Only one species but net result is huge negative for all other species.

Only as a selfish species we find this positive.

What if it don't? How can we valuate an uncertainty? Where is the systematic evidence?

Most Nazi human experiments were just atrocities without scientific value but the Dachau hypothermia valuable data. Is that justified? https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006

Personally I don't thinks these questions have good answers and thus I think we (as society) should adopt a values first mode while critically reflecting about where our values will lead us. I understand the consequentialist appeal but it's deeply flawed as expectations are made up and it's just too easy to justify anything.

What worries me about Neuralink is that I don't think the experiments are motivated by base research or will benefit humankind or any kind besides Musk and his partners. It's a private company based on hype. Best case scenario it's just propaganda.

I agree with you these arguments can be used to justify atrocities. Actually they can be used to justify atrocities arbitrarily large as long as you find enough people that you think are being benefitted.

However I don't think they should be entirely dismissed. Specially if at some point the weight on each side of the balance differs by enough orders of magnitude.

I don't think so. We hold a special place for humans only a small minority elevate any other animals to that special place. I don't see that changing over time. I could be wrong I just doubt we will move in that direction.

I think that's inverted. We don't have to elevate any other form of life or ecosystem to develop a social conscience or ethics. I don't see myself as lesser or greater, just part of it all.

As for things changing over time, that has already happened since the rise of ubiquitous communications. Social attitudes have changed drastically since the 1980s.

I have to tell you that while you see it as unethical, I don't.

I think this type of research might bring us a level forward for people who are blind or have parkinson's or other things and that this also might be the way for us humans to evolve further.

If the results of this type of research is fruitless, that will still be a discovery.

I do justify the experiments and death of those handful animals through the type of research, the goal of it and the importance.

It is unethical. You just don't see it because we are selfish and does not care about ethics when there is our profit, humans in a nutshell.

Why wait 50 years? These sorts of experiments are toe-curling and horrible to think about today. If the claims are true and they seem rather specific to be false, I'll never look at Neuralink the same way again.

And Yet I see noone here talking about the (more) cruel experiments on dogs that Faucci supported. People find their principles whenever its convenient to attack someone they dislike for other reasons.