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I... don't really see a problem with this, at least from the article. The actual complaint as far as I can tell is related to the fact that they moved fast enou

I... don't really see a problem with this, at least from the article. The actual complaint as far as I can tell is related to the fact that they moved fast enough to make mistakes, specifically because they want to get to useful treatments faster. If we lived in a vegetarian world I might object to it, but in this world there's an actual price for a sheep's life.

capableweb 4y ago
> Five people who have worked on Neuralink’s animal experiments told Reuters they had raised concerns internally. They said they had advocated for a more traditional testing approach, in which researchers would test one element at a time in an animal study and draw relevant conclusions before moving on to more animal tests. Instead, these people said, Neuralink launches tests in quick succession before fixing issues in earlier tests or drawing complete conclusions. The result: more animals overall are tested and killed, in part because the approach leads to repeated tests. > On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment > filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys, and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and dying > included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation > staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries Surely they could have a more scientific approach that would avoid having to kill so many animals and also make progress faster because the environment would be more stable. If it's borderline illegal to accidentally kill animals or making them suffer when it could prevented, I'm not sure. As it seems right now, they have something of a cowboy approach to science which will lead to unnecessary pain and death of animals, and walking in circles in their progress as they don't seem to know what they are doing.
- thefounder 4y ago
  I have a better idea: instead to run tests concurrently(kinda what Musk is doing) let's run them sequentially so that less animals are used(even if it takes way more time). We can use the saved animals for some tasty burgers. Nevermind that some people need treatments now. We can give them the saved burgers.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I find it interesting how quickly people resort to a "the ends justify the means" attitude about this stuff when, as pointed out in the article, there are others in the same space doing the same thing who HAVE managed to perform the due diligence required to get the proper approval. Is the assumption their efforts won't lead to anything because they've managed not to screw up the implant sizes or glue?
    - naasking 4y ago
      I think the argument is that they're taking too long. Actual humans continue to suffer with problems that could be addressed by this technology while some people are "hand-wringing" about animal life in a society that raises and kills animals inhumanely because they're tasty.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        We can only assume that this is taking too long if we assume that Neuralink is somehow able to skip the fundamentals and be successful. As I pointed out above Synchron is further ahead, they are making more progress because they were able to meet the required standard, and I think we can all agree standards are important for human trials (or is a few extra human deaths ok if it gets to market sooner?), so I'd suggest it's Neuralink's own fault they can't meet the advancement criteria and not just concerns about animal welfare that are getting in the way.
        naasking 4y ago
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
Reminds me of Kim Ki Duks comments on the animal cruelty in The Isle[0]: "In America you eat beef, pork, and kill all these animals. And the people who eat these animals are not concerned with their slaughter. Animals are part of this cycle of consumption. It looks more cruel onscreen, but I don’t see the difference." I'm vegetarian, but totally condone a (relatively) tiny amount of animal cruelty for art and science. /Especially/ art-- it might make people realize what they are eating. [0] https://www.moviehabit.com/essay.php?story=kim_ki-duk01 https://www.moviehabit.com/essay.php?story=kim_ki-duk01
AlexandrB 4y ago
This argument assumes that "moving fast enough to make mistakes" is actually getting us closer to a usable technology. There's not much reason to think this is the case based on the opinions of other experts in the field. Theranos also "moved fast" - straight into a ditch.
- api 4y ago
  Theranos had other problems, like a fundamentally untenable design that many biologists criticized as being physically impossible. Not hard, but physically impossible. Nevertheless it is true that moving fast increases risk. You either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly.
  - tovej 4y ago
    or barely succeed and have to make up the debt to technical design and process quality later, taking longer in the end than if you had built a solid foundation for your endeavor
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Some of the things Musk has claimed are probably physically impossible using the device Neuralink has constructed. For example, there is indeed a treatment for depression that involves stimulating parts of the brain using electrodes. But the parts you need to reach are way in there[1]. Neuralink's device is not capable of reaching these areas in its current form. However I'm way out of my depth on this. The best I can do is listen to skepticism and try to evaluate it on its merits vs. the things that Musk says and his track record of over-promising. [1] https://www.shockmd.com/2008/01/20/6-different-locations-for-deep-brain-stimulation-in-depression/ https://www.shockmd.com/2008/01/20/6-different-locations-for...
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      I won't speak at all on Neuralink, but you don't necessarily need to stimulate that deep into the brain directly. You can piggyback off existing functional connectivity between that deep area and an area closer to the cortical surface. Functional connectivity is when one area sends activation or inhibitory signals to another area when stimulated. This is the mechanism behind using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to treat depression ([0] as just one example) despite TMS's shallow stimulation depth. Using the functional connectivity also provides an avenue of sending inhibitory signals, not just activation signals. With that said, it requires functional imaging (fMRI) to determine the functional connections. Functional connectivity also isn't indefinitely static and it does change over time. . 0: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2...
hutzlibu 4y ago
"If we lived in a vegetarian world I might object to it" I am not a vegetarian and do not plan on becoming one - but I still want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible. Meaning I would like my meat to have seen the sun and outside and not only on the tightly packed way to the slaughterhouse. But yes you can argue, that the conventional meat factories are horrible, so being horrible here is allright as well. But I think that is a horrible line of reasoning.
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  Scale matters. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference between the things you are comparing. You get one or two orders of magnitude just from the lifespan of animals-- a pig in a factory will spend up to a decade suffering, musks monkeys presumably less than a year. You get the rest of the orders of magnitude from the number of animals involved.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "avoid animal suffering wherever possible" This is the key factor for me. And yes, scale matters. To reduce animal suffering on a global scale, the obvious target are the meat factories. That doesn't mean, that avoiding animal suffering here isn't something that should be done as well. And when there was unnecessary testing, it clearly was unnecessary animal suffering.
    - RupertEisenhart 4y ago
      The problem I have with this discussion is it pretends to treat animal welfare as an absolute, when in fact nobody does that or believes in that (apart form militant vegans perhaps). There is a lot of biomedical research out there killing a lot of animals. Most of it is of dubious utility-- most of the low level stuff can be done in simpler organisms or simulation, lots of it is highly speculative with no applications in sight. This research has a very high expected return, and it can't be done in simpler organisms. I do agree that it could probably have been done more carefully or more slowly and saved a few animal lives, but I am certain that this is a long long /long/ way from the worst example of this.

capableweb 4y ago

> Five people who have worked on Neuralink’s animal experiments told Reuters they had raised concerns internally. They said they had advocated for a more traditional testing approach, in which researchers would test one element at a time in an animal study and draw relevant conclusions before moving on to more animal tests. Instead, these people said, Neuralink launches tests in quick succession before fixing issues in earlier tests or drawing complete conclusions. The result: more animals overall are tested and killed, in part because the approach leads to repeated tests. > On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment > filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys, and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and dying > included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation > staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries Surely they could have a more scientific approach that would avoid having to kill so many animals and also make progress faster because the environment would be more stable. If it's borderline illegal to accidentally kill animals or making them suffer when it could prevented, I'm not sure. As it seems right now, they have something of a cowboy approach to science which will lead to unnecessary pain and death of animals, and walking in circles in their progress as they don't seem to know what they are doing.

thefounder 4y ago
I have a better idea: instead to run tests concurrently(kinda what Musk is doing) let's run them sequentially so that less animals are used(even if it takes way more time). We can use the saved animals for some tasty burgers. Nevermind that some people need treatments now. We can give them the saved burgers.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I find it interesting how quickly people resort to a "the ends justify the means" attitude about this stuff when, as pointed out in the article, there are others in the same space doing the same thing who HAVE managed to perform the due diligence required to get the proper approval. Is the assumption their efforts won't lead to anything because they've managed not to screw up the implant sizes or glue?
  - naasking 4y ago
    I think the argument is that they're taking too long. Actual humans continue to suffer with problems that could be addressed by this technology while some people are "hand-wringing" about animal life in a society that raises and kills animals inhumanely because they're tasty.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      We can only assume that this is taking too long if we assume that Neuralink is somehow able to skip the fundamentals and be successful. As I pointed out above Synchron is further ahead, they are making more progress because they were able to meet the required standard, and I think we can all agree standards are important for human trials (or is a few extra human deaths ok if it gets to market sooner?), so I'd suggest it's Neuralink's own fault they can't meet the advancement criteria and not just concerns about animal welfare that are getting in the way.
      - naasking 4y ago

RupertEisenhart 4y ago

Reminds me of Kim Ki Duks comments on the animal cruelty in The Isle[0]: "In America you eat beef, pork, and kill all these animals. And the people who eat these animals are not concerned with their slaughter. Animals are part of this cycle of consumption. It looks more cruel onscreen, but I don’t see the difference." I'm vegetarian, but totally condone a (relatively) tiny amount of animal cruelty for art and science. /Especially/ art-- it might make people realize what they are eating. [0] https://www.moviehabit.com/essay.php?story=kim_ki-duk01 https://www.moviehabit.com/essay.php?story=kim_ki-duk01

AlexandrB 4y ago

This argument assumes that "moving fast enough to make mistakes" is actually getting us closer to a usable technology. There's not much reason to think this is the case based on the opinions of other experts in the field. Theranos also "moved fast" - straight into a ditch.

api 4y ago
Theranos had other problems, like a fundamentally untenable design that many biologists criticized as being physically impossible. Not hard, but physically impossible. Nevertheless it is true that moving fast increases risk. You either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly.
- tovej 4y ago
  or barely succeed and have to make up the debt to technical design and process quality later, taking longer in the end than if you had built a solid foundation for your endeavor
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Some of the things Musk has claimed are probably physically impossible using the device Neuralink has constructed. For example, there is indeed a treatment for depression that involves stimulating parts of the brain using electrodes. But the parts you need to reach are way in there[1]. Neuralink's device is not capable of reaching these areas in its current form. However I'm way out of my depth on this. The best I can do is listen to skepticism and try to evaluate it on its merits vs. the things that Musk says and his track record of over-promising. [1] https://www.shockmd.com/2008/01/20/6-different-locations-for-deep-brain-stimulation-in-depression/ https://www.shockmd.com/2008/01/20/6-different-locations-for...
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    I won't speak at all on Neuralink, but you don't necessarily need to stimulate that deep into the brain directly. You can piggyback off existing functional connectivity between that deep area and an area closer to the cortical surface. Functional connectivity is when one area sends activation or inhibitory signals to another area when stimulated. This is the mechanism behind using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to treat depression ([0] as just one example) despite TMS's shallow stimulation depth. Using the functional connectivity also provides an avenue of sending inhibitory signals, not just activation signals. With that said, it requires functional imaging (fMRI) to determine the functional connections. Functional connectivity also isn't indefinitely static and it does change over time. . 0: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2...

hutzlibu 4y ago

"If we lived in a vegetarian world I might object to it" I am not a vegetarian and do not plan on becoming one - but I still want to avoid animal suffering wherever possible. Meaning I would like my meat to have seen the sun and outside and not only on the tightly packed way to the slaughterhouse. But yes you can argue, that the conventional meat factories are horrible, so being horrible here is allright as well. But I think that is a horrible line of reasoning.

RupertEisenhart 4y ago
Scale matters. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference between the things you are comparing. You get one or two orders of magnitude just from the lifespan of animals-- a pig in a factory will spend up to a decade suffering, musks monkeys presumably less than a year. You get the rest of the orders of magnitude from the number of animals involved.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "avoid animal suffering wherever possible" This is the key factor for me. And yes, scale matters. To reduce animal suffering on a global scale, the obvious target are the meat factories. That doesn't mean, that avoiding animal suffering here isn't something that should be done as well. And when there was unnecessary testing, it clearly was unnecessary animal suffering.
  - RupertEisenhart 4y ago
    The problem I have with this discussion is it pretends to treat animal welfare as an absolute, when in fact nobody does that or believes in that (apart form militant vegans perhaps). There is a lot of biomedical research out there killing a lot of animals. Most of it is of dubious utility-- most of the low level stuff can be done in simpler organisms or simulation, lots of it is highly speculative with no applications in sight. This research has a very high expected return, and it can't be done in simpler organisms. I do agree that it could probably have been done more carefully or more slowly and saved a few animal lives, but I am certain that this is a long long /long/ way from the worst example of this.