The saddest reality of human nature that I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with is the aggressive, unrelenting desire to hold the most competent and boundary pushing people to intentionally impossible standards.

A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.

They are doing the experiments on monkeys, not chickens.

There's a term for that: speciesism.

Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?

Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?

Speciesm is when we care more for one animal species over another. For example people in the west will generally have more of a moral issue over eating dogs compared to pigs.

So - caring more for a human or ape versus a mosquito, for example, would be speciesm?

It would be, at least to an extent. Even vegans (which I am) still recognise that some animals are smarter than others, which can result in different moral weights given to them. And it doesn't normally include humans.

I see, so vegans recognize that speciesism is "true" in the sense that some animals do have more valuable lives than others, and harms to some animals are worse than harms to others? Makes it a bit hard to know what the term is designed to achieve. Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

> Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism

elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.

Don't fall for the rhetorical trick employed here: just because we can call this "specieism", doesn't make it wrong.

That is the point that my example was intended to illustrate.

The thing is that intelligence is kinda orthogonal to the ability to feel pain. Bacteria don't seem to have a nervous system, so that would be a place to draw a first line.

Pork might have been a better food to make this comparison with, and in this particular example I get that monkeys being closer to humans is a lot of what makes this controversial, but the phenomenon I’m describing is still pertinent. There are undoubtably other experiments using monkeys in far less scrupulous ways for far less beneficial purposes, but of course Neuralink gets the spotlight due to Musk.

I used to think a lot of ostensibly moral decision making which had a net detrimental effect was something that would change if people better understood the full picture and where moral outrage would be most impactful, but I’ve seen envy dominate decision making over and over enough to learn that a lot of people are in fact quite content to harm everyone on net if it means the outliers are harmed more.

What beneficial purpose are you exactly talking about here? From what I've read, the science to make the products Neuralink is working on feasible is still decades away, according to most neuroscientists. Attainability of those goals should be a primary factor when deciding whether experimenting on animals, especially highly developed animals such as monkeys, is reasonable.

The beneficial purposes are improving prosthetics.

And the only thing that makes those goals attainable and products better is experimentation.

If they are needlessly experimenting and making no progress, that’d be tragic, and comparable to existing tragedies that happen in labs all over the world.

The timing, intended audience, and flavor of the criticism suggests this is much less about any ethical breaches and much more about reigning in someone who is perceived to be breaking out of bureaucratic control.

People don't get diabetic from overeating meat, that's nonsense, people get diabetic by consuming ludicrous amounts of sugar every single day.

I do agree with you overall point though.

The specific example I gave was bad, yes.

My understanding is that Elon isn’t under fire for being smart, he’s under fire because he’s continued to make statements which are politically disadvantageous to the ruling class in Washington.

Its critical soemeone like Elon posit alternative theories as to the motives of Paul Pelosi’s crazed attacker. Or engage in racist and the now failed Trumpism. /s

You think he's a scientist? You think he's competent?

I think the neuroscientists Musk has hired are scientists, and yes, I think he’s competent at hiring competent people.

Good thing you trust the competent scientists he's hired, because they're the ones blowing the whistle on Musk's operating practices. The lede: "Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid INTERNAL STAFF complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths." (emphasis mine)

Whether or not those quoted are actually representative or cherry picked, and whether they’re as opposed to internal practices as is suggested or simply think there’s room for improvement requires a trusted investigator to determine.

Quite frankly, the vast majority of the journalistic enterprise has been so heavily discredited and so abused for hit pieces and marketing that I don’t trust that the reporting reflects the internal reality they’re depicting.

The timing, the citation of multiple federal boards, citation of a competitor, and the group think Eye of Sauron that used to be aligned against Trump seemingly gearing up to go against Musk makes me highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the complaints.

This is a tragic situation, because it is now very difficult to distinguish between the types of people opposed to high pressure pursuits of excellence in general, regardless of how effective and voluntarily pursued and in good faith they are, and people who are legitimately waving a red flag about a serious problem.

This does not strike me as a serious problem, this strikes me as a hit piece.

I'm aware that we don't have all the evidence yet - this is why there's a federal probe. So far, the quotes we see from employees (those competent scientists that you said you trust) suggest extreme malfeasance.

Regardless of your opinion of the current state of journalism or the "Eye of Sauron" or Trump or whatever else you're trying to drag into this conversation, Elon Musk's company is being investigated by the federal government after his employees have alleged widespread ethical abuses in his company.

As a counterpoint to your lament of geniuses being persecuted, I don't think Musk is particularly "excellent" in any way except being rich, which affords him opportunities and platforms far beyond the reach of the average person, including being able to hire the smartest people in the world who do the actual work in his companies.

Maybe you don't think it's a serious problem, but enough employees do and so does the federal government. It's not "tragic" in any way that Musk's companies are regulated the same way other companies in those domains are regulated. I find that Elon Musk doing something unethical/illegal is far more plausible than what you suggest - a conspiracy by journalists and the employees of Neuralink (again, the competent scientists which you claim to trust) to defame him.

The team at Neuralink is excellent - both the original team and more recent hires.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Partially agree, but I think a lot of the public outrage is over the use / killing / botched experiments on monkeys, which are widely acknowledged to be among the most intelligent and human-like of non human animals.

Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be.

In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.

Pigs are really smart.

Widely accepted to be smarter than dogs.

The number of chickens will blow your mind. There was a world clock I saw once counting like population and a bunch of random statistics including chickens in approximated real time.

Wait until you see the number of fish:

https://considerveganism.com/counter/

Those numbers for fish cannot be right. Thats basically 1 whole fish per day for each of 8 billion people on the planet.

Smaller fishes reproduce faster and in greater numbers so most of deaths are probably fish like anchovies and minnows that go mostly to a variety of processed fish products and cat food

The numbers sound crazy because anchovies and sardines are tiny.

Have you seen what primarily seafood eating cultures consume? There’s a lot instances of a large fish like a tuna being shared amongst many, or even something like a salmon that can feed one. When my in laws would prepare a meal it would usually be 50+ smaller fish or crabs for 4 people

In South India, The Indian oil Sardine fish is something people eat like 5+ fish/meal.

People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.

Estimates put it around 2 trillion fish (or saline overall) killed each year.

I once ordered a sampler plate at a Korean place and ate a bunch of what I thought were little noodles, but quickly realized were tiny fish. So I probably ate 20 or 30 fish that day and brought the average up a bit.

That’s https://animalclock.org/

The state also spends tax payer money on things like this:

According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...

How else would we test an experimental drug and what makes that bad or cruel?

And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.

Valid point. Hypocrisy is real. I say this as a vegan for 17 years.

this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government.

When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.

when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.

I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.

All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.

/cynical rant from someone going through it.

I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.

you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side:

https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-thr...

>One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy.

judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.

This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer.

Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture.

That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all.

I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans.

The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison.

Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom.

Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.

Don’t forget that the horses are basically a living breathing pharmaceutical factories for the specific anti-venom they are used for, they are incentivised to look after the horses very well in order to avoid not only replacement cost, but wasted hours of specialised labour, and future lost revenue from the sale of harvested anti-venom products.

The “harvest” is basically a horse sized version of the sort of blood donation we do routinely for humans.

So why don’t the same people want Tim Cook to fail? Maybe if Elon was not tweeting obscenities at US Senators about their penises and ejaculation, perhaps like, maybe, people would not be having knives out for him? Just a thought.

Tim Cook doesn't have the entirety of the oil industry, the automotive industry, the power industry, the aerospace industry, (formerly) the payment processing and banking industry, and now the medical industry standing to lose trillions of dollars from stuff that he's doing. Tom Cook's scope and influence is also massively smaller than Elon's and tremendously lower stakes.

I don't understand how anyone can say this when Musk has been granted preferential treatment by the government across multiple cases. He's received very lucrative contracts that fund and subsidize his company, Neuralink has received expedited treatment by the FDA for their research. This has held true across multiple administrations.

This is just not at all in touch with reality.

preferential treatment over whom? he had to sue for the right to even compete for launch contracts. he's gone through hell getting Boca chica through an environmental review, and he was only recently considered to be right of center. at best it could be argued that he received preferential treatment until he publicly politicized himself.

Most of that is BS of course but I get your point. His companies have received billions in tax breaks and NASA contracts, then supports Trumpism, Kanye and segregation.

he doesn't support any of those things and never did. but even if he did, it is still worth supporting him because of the actual positive change in the world he has manifested by having the balls to try. results are what matter, not his political beliefs or personal associations.

Preferential treatment over who? He's the only game in town for half the things he's working on and still has to fight tooth and claw for support. The guy is funding Starlink for Ukraine out his own pocket (or at least was last I heard).

People are so envious that Elon is a genius and one of the greatest men of our time (and not them) that they can't think straight about him.

Name one entrepreneur who has close to the track record of success he has had? He was even a major key funder of OPENAI that is all the rage these days.

Politicans hate him because people can see he actually cares and is competent in a way they aren't and so is respected and applauded for it. While they are more often than not mediocre men who can barely fix a kitchen sink.

> The guy is funding Starlink for Ukraine out his own pocket (or at least was last I heard).

You hard kinda wrong, it's a bit of a wash, but USAID paid a significant amount of the cost for starlink.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...

what, really? not even spacex turns profit with it's gvmt contracts...Tesla turned a profit by his manipulation of initially the market, then latterly the crypto market, but despite making the cars dirt cheap (and it shows), he still couldn't make any money for over a decade.

He consistently misses but he knows where to make his money: conning vc, and getting his fans to dance on crypto.

He's a two-bit conman whose success is not in being an innovator but sometimes being ftm, he's going to be pushed out of every industry he's playing in eventually.

His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.

A clown who gets high off his own hype and the worship of smooth-brained fanboys.

> His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.

Assuming you mean The Boring Company, this has been revealed to be explicitly a ploy to torpedo support for high-speed rail in California.

I believe it but I thought that was just a conspiracy.

I don't have sources handy just at the moment, but I've seen it reported by (what appeared to be) some fairly reputable outlets. It's possible it's untrue, but it all seemed to check out.

It would be a lot easier if he had used the SBF strategy. I worry that will be the lesson for everyone else.

But those animals are not unnecessarily cruely treated. It's one thing to farm animals, it's another to deliberately treat them more poorly than is strictly needed to get the value out of them. That's what neuralink is accused of - unnecessary cruelty.

I defy you to watch any videos of factory farming and tell me that is anything but cruelty.

Agreed, but this has nothing to do with the article

I recommend Dominion (2018): https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

I'm waiting on the federal probe into Fauci's beagles. Talk about cruelty.

Not a fan of nuerolink and Elon, but it seems political.

A couple years ago a friend of mine was working in govt medical research, and said his whole research facility was panicking because they were doing blast trauma research -- as in exposing pigs to explosions and putting them on life support -- but a hurricane had just swept through and knocked out all power. I think a lot of those pigs died prematurely.

This article absolutely reeks of retaliation.

> The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down?

Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals.

What you should be angry about is not the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966, but the, as far as I can tell, nonexistence of federal laws regulating the treatment of farm animals (they are excluded from that law, and https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protecti... says there aren’t similar federal laws regulating their welfare. The list of state laws at https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_... also is very short)

Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.

Hypocrisy doesn't absolve those acting in very questionable ways at Neuralink.

Film recommendation: Okja

these are just puff hit pieces at this point.

I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.

> When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled?

If it ever works.