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The most chilling statement out of the article to me is "Musk’s impatience with Neuralink has grown as the company, which launched in 2016, has missed his deadl
by SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
The most chilling statement out of the article to me is "Musk’s impatience with Neuralink has grown as the company, which launched in 2016, has missed his deadlines on several occasions to win regulatory approval to start clinical trials in humans, according to company documents and interviews with eight current and former employees."
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?
- warinukraine 4y ago[flagged]
- bheadmaster 4y ago> everything we know about Elon Musk Care to share with "us" what is it that "we" know about Elon Musk?
- camillomiller 4y ago[flagged]
- christophilus 4y ago[flagged]
- iancmceachern 4y agoThere are plenty of regular good people who are CEOs, you just never hear about them in the news.
- ilyt 4y agoOr, hey are just as bad but know when to shut up. There is no evidence for "they are regular good people" and many big companies acting shitty...
- iancmceachern 4y agoI personally know plenty, that's my evidence. I also personally knowing morally bankrupt people. I know morally bankrupt people who aren't CEOs, I know good people who are. These are separate adjectives.
- tablespoon 4y ago>> Unless you don’t wanna see it, that he’s a sociopathic personality with too much capital fueling his god complex and a brittle long-termism agenda? > So, he’s your standard CEO, then. Got it. He's definitely not "your standard CEO." How could you even say something like that with a straight face? Those aren't binary qualities and he seems to have them to a far larger degree than other CEOs. Alternatively, for someone in his position, he is unusually lacking the social skills or self-control needed to mask them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RalfWausE 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- belltaco 4y agoSo Musk, who has done and is doing a lot to reduce air pollution(which is causing 6.5 million deaths per year) and climate change is sociopathic, but all the oil executives get a free pass, got it. Care to expand how he's sociopathic?
- michaelt 4y agocamillomiller didn't say oil executives aren't sociopathic.
- bmitc 4y agoThis is the same pope of climate change who wanted to build concrete tunnels underneath cities to transmit a single brand of car and wants to build gigantic rockets to go to Mars in a billionaire pissing contest? The likelihood of EVs and Tesla in particular impacting climate change is minuscule and much overhyped and oversold.
- belltaco 4y agoHow are those things sociopathic?
- bmitc 4y agoI was responding to the idea that he is supposedly a savior for climate change. Regarding sociopathy, I’m not a psychologist, but he seems clearly a narcissist. He almost feels too sensitive and needy to be a sociopath, but who knows.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoTesla ignited this EV moment. If humanity using EVs will have a minuscule impact on climate change, then you are correct.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4y ago
- bheadmaster 4y ago> sociopathic personality He seems pretty down-to-ground to me, personally, especially compared to other people of similar wealth. What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic? > too much capital I personally agree, but this is still a subjective opinion, not a real criticism. The more general implication of this is that there is such a thing as "too much capital", in which case we need to draw the line - at which point exactly capital becomes too much? A million dollars? A billion? > brittle long-termism agenda Brittle or not, arguing that Elon cares only about long term is factually false - he already delivered many things, including Tesla electric cars and Starlink internet service, which are useful here and now.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago> What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic? Just look at the way he's been treating Twitter employees. For example, making a joke by bringing a "sink in" [1] the company right before making pre-announced firings. That episode right there tells you he's more concerned with making a joke for the lolz than about the emotions of his new employees, which is a pretty clear sociopathic action. [1] https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-purchase-sink-jokes-memes https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-purchase-sink...
- bheadmaster 4y agoWhat would be the acceptable performance when laying people off, from your perspective?
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoFor the specific example I mentioned, it clearly could have been handled much more sensitively. Don't make bombastic jokes when entering a company you're about to eviscerate. It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- benrr 4y agoPrecisely. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago> How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoBut they are proving they can't even be bothered to meet the much lower standard of care required for animals.
- RupertEisenhart 4y agoPresumably they are utility maximizers who assume that the 'standards of care' for animals won't actually be rigorously enforced. Humans sue.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoSo do the parents of children but it hasn't stopped flaws in Tesla's FSD. Not entirely directly comparable, sure, but it's the same attitude of "get it to market before it's ready".
- gvedem 4y ago"FSD", surely
- banannaise 4y agoIf there's one thing we've learned from Elon's acquisition of Twitter, it's that his default response to "you'll get sued" is a confident belief he can beat the rap.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThese animals are intended to simulate humans for purposes of research, though. A disregard for doing the experimentation properly has the potential to carry over into production usage, just like coding newbies who write code with SQL injection holes saying "eh I'll fix it later" are practicing writing insecure code. "Oops wrong glue/vertebra/implant" folks are not people I want anywhere near my brain surgery.
- thereddaikon 4y agoTurns out, Agile doesn't work in healthcare.
- api 4y agoIt can work rather poorly in software from a quality perspective too, but in software the game is often to test a business hypothesis very quickly or ship features fast enough to win feature bingo with competitors and quality often goes on the back burner. It's just that in health care the bar for MVP is way way higher.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoAs it turns out, "Move fast and break software" is in the vast majority of cases less unethical than "Move fast and break people".
- thereddaikon 4y agoI have a whole rant about how consumer software and software for serious things (ie: people can die) need to be treated differently just like civil engineering and building a shed in your back yard should be treated differently. There is no room for agile code in a finished product where lives are on the line. Its fine for non life or death things and its a great way to prototype ideas. But the control system on your car should be developed with more rigor than that.
- iancmceachern 4y agoIt actually does, but in a measured way. You have to have a hybrid approach. Agile for stuff like little software features and bug fixes, waterfall for big important (often safety and effectively tied) milestones they often precede an animal or human study. Iterate the smaller less safety critical features (which are often software based) and then align the exit of one of those phases with a hardware freeze that captures key safety and effectivity in the hardware and then do a cadaver, animal or human study to prove it. You don't want to apply agile to the hardware usually.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andy_ppp 4y agoMove fast and break people.
- concordDance 4y agoMoving fast and break things actually seems like a decent idea in healthcare BEFORE you get to the human trials, then you should slow down. Not sure how hard a change in culture that will be. We kill hundreds of millions of animals a year after incredible suffering for much worse reasons than making the blind see. And healthcare moves very slowly atm, leading to a lot of suffering.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoI agree with the idea in general but some of the errors are just bad science that doesn’t discover anything. Putting the wrong sized chip in a brain? Using a mistaken vertebrae? Not euthanizing as soon as it’s apparent the trial is too flawed to continue? These are just sloppy mistakes.
- concordDance 4y agoYeah, depends whether the checklists slow things down more than the errors.