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That's isolated demand for rigor. You're basically saying that "yes, they're doing great work, and the average slaughterhouse is killing the same number of anim

That's isolated demand for rigor. You're basically saying that "yes, they're doing great work, and the average slaughterhouse is killing the same number of animals in a day or two, but they could be 10% more efficient and that makes them evil".

danShumway 4y ago
If the argument here is that they should be allowed to violate research ethics in order to get 10% faster at letting paralyzed people walk, I think it's fair to point out that they way they're conducting research seems to be fairly sloppy and probably isn't actually giving them the productivity/efficiency boost that their defenders claim. thefounder here argues that running experiments in parallel is a moral obligation because we need to get Neuralink out the door as quickly as possible. capableweb responds by arguing that Neuralink's current strategy isn't the fastest way to get that research done. I don't see that as an isolated demand for rigor, I think that's a reasonable objection to the idea that the need to be perfectly efficient outweighs animal ethics.
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  Actually, that's a pretty clear tradeoff of moving faster. You can't say "ok, we want to move faster because we want to heal people faster" and have absolutely no downside. That would mean you were just inefficient before. Truly upping the pressure comes with downsides, which you accept in the name of speed. And one of the most obvious is that you accept a higher probability of things breaking, as long as overall you make better progress. Parallelizing is very similar to the way modern processors do speculative computing: they go ahead and run several branches of code at once, before knowing which one will actually need to be executed. Once they know, they just use that result and discard the others. It's a pretty standard strategy every time you want to trade money for speed. In the first push for reaching the moon, there was mass production of rockets that went a lot faster than a slow build-test-analyze-modify-build. By the time one rocket went kaboom, quite a few were already in various stages of being built or even finished.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    If your argument is that capableweb is wrong and that parallelizing experiments will make research faster, then fine? That's an argument you can make. But either way I don't really see it as an isolated demand for rigor: capableweb is disagreeing about whether Neuralink's strategy is actually optimized for speed, given that thefounder seems to be arguing that optimizing for speed is a moral obligation.
    - thefounder 4y ago
      I believe it's a moral obligation not to trade speed for efficiency when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost). I have a different opinion on human testing of course. It's like banning SpaceX's "sloppy" development because the failure of their rockets create pollution. Polution is bad and causes death but I think we should not get religious about polution where it matters little and the potential reward is high.
      - danShumway 4y ago
        > when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost) I've commented similarly elsewhere, but I really wish people would stop saying "think about the meat we eat" as an argument for more animal suffering in the world. The correct response to hypocrisy is to have consistently better morals everywhere, not to have consistently worse morals elsewhere. Of course, people can disagree whether or not killing animals unnecessarily is immoral. But if you want to take the premise that eating meat is wrong, no vegetarian/vegan is ever going to tell you that they don't want unnecessary animal testing stopped until after everyone stops eating meat. People's hypocrisy around specific moral issues should not be treated like a license to completely abandon other standards; taking that approach to morality is a recipe for rapid societal decay. > where it matters little and the potential reward is high. Again, you can disagree with capableweb's argument, but I just want to characterize correctly what the argument is -- capableweb is saying that the testing here isn't actually going to significantly increase Neuralink's odds of success or their research speed. I would add to that argument that it may in fact lower Neuralink's odds of success if it encourages sloppier research or decreases public trust in the project. I don't have a strong take on that beyond that I think their testing is symptomatic of Musk imposing deadlines and pressures that are going to be toxic to a productive research environment. I don't know that excessive animal testing is going to slow down their research, but based on what the researchers in this article have said, I am pretty certain that the reason why they're doing excessive animal testing in this case is because Musk is pushing them to do sloppy testing to meet unrealistic deadlines that will lead to sloppy results and a worse product, if they get a product out at all. Fast careless testing is sometimes slower than methodical careful testing. That's an argument that's orthogonal to the moral cost of killing animals for research purposes. If you don't think there's any moral tradeoff to killing animals at all, then the only thing that matters is how their decisions impact the end result. And seriously, I just responded on here to clarify what capableweb was talking about and that they weren't making an isolated demand for rigor. I am not interested in getting into an argument about whether all of the research standards for animal welfare should all be dropped so that Musk can theoretically maybe monopolize a market in the future that will likely be inaccessible to most disabled people at a potentially slightly faster speed.
- thefounder 4y ago
  That's precisely my point. It's quite obvious to me that running tasks in parallel produces both more waste and faster results. A good comparison would be Musk's other company SpaceX. You can surely put more rigor into r&d to reduce waste and failures (i.e like NASA) but you will progress slower. Chances are that your company/project will get bankrupt(like so many biotech companies) if you don't move fast enough.

danShumway 4y ago

If the argument here is that they should be allowed to violate research ethics in order to get 10% faster at letting paralyzed people walk, I think it's fair to point out that they way they're conducting research seems to be fairly sloppy and probably isn't actually giving them the productivity/efficiency boost that their defenders claim. thefounder here argues that running experiments in parallel is a moral obligation because we need to get Neuralink out the door as quickly as possible. capableweb responds by arguing that Neuralink's current strategy isn't the fastest way to get that research done. I don't see that as an isolated demand for rigor, I think that's a reasonable objection to the idea that the need to be perfectly efficient outweighs animal ethics.

radu_floricica 4y ago
Actually, that's a pretty clear tradeoff of moving faster. You can't say "ok, we want to move faster because we want to heal people faster" and have absolutely no downside. That would mean you were just inefficient before. Truly upping the pressure comes with downsides, which you accept in the name of speed. And one of the most obvious is that you accept a higher probability of things breaking, as long as overall you make better progress. Parallelizing is very similar to the way modern processors do speculative computing: they go ahead and run several branches of code at once, before knowing which one will actually need to be executed. Once they know, they just use that result and discard the others. It's a pretty standard strategy every time you want to trade money for speed. In the first push for reaching the moon, there was mass production of rockets that went a lot faster than a slow build-test-analyze-modify-build. By the time one rocket went kaboom, quite a few were already in various stages of being built or even finished.
- danShumway 4y ago
  If your argument is that capableweb is wrong and that parallelizing experiments will make research faster, then fine? That's an argument you can make. But either way I don't really see it as an isolated demand for rigor: capableweb is disagreeing about whether Neuralink's strategy is actually optimized for speed, given that thefounder seems to be arguing that optimizing for speed is a moral obligation.
  - thefounder 4y ago
    I believe it's a moral obligation not to trade speed for efficiency when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost). I have a different opinion on human testing of course. It's like banning SpaceX's "sloppy" development because the failure of their rockets create pollution. Polution is bad and causes death but I think we should not get religious about polution where it matters little and the potential reward is high.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      > when you consider the raw material(animals) are almost "free" as far as ethics are concerned(i.e we kill them for the taste of their meat with almost no ethical cost) I've commented similarly elsewhere, but I really wish people would stop saying "think about the meat we eat" as an argument for more animal suffering in the world. The correct response to hypocrisy is to have consistently better morals everywhere, not to have consistently worse morals elsewhere. Of course, people can disagree whether or not killing animals unnecessarily is immoral. But if you want to take the premise that eating meat is wrong, no vegetarian/vegan is ever going to tell you that they don't want unnecessary animal testing stopped until after everyone stops eating meat. People's hypocrisy around specific moral issues should not be treated like a license to completely abandon other standards; taking that approach to morality is a recipe for rapid societal decay. > where it matters little and the potential reward is high. Again, you can disagree with capableweb's argument, but I just want to characterize correctly what the argument is -- capableweb is saying that the testing here isn't actually going to significantly increase Neuralink's odds of success or their research speed. I would add to that argument that it may in fact lower Neuralink's odds of success if it encourages sloppier research or decreases public trust in the project. I don't have a strong take on that beyond that I think their testing is symptomatic of Musk imposing deadlines and pressures that are going to be toxic to a productive research environment. I don't know that excessive animal testing is going to slow down their research, but based on what the researchers in this article have said, I am pretty certain that the reason why they're doing excessive animal testing in this case is because Musk is pushing them to do sloppy testing to meet unrealistic deadlines that will lead to sloppy results and a worse product, if they get a product out at all. Fast careless testing is sometimes slower than methodical careful testing. That's an argument that's orthogonal to the moral cost of killing animals for research purposes. If you don't think there's any moral tradeoff to killing animals at all, then the only thing that matters is how their decisions impact the end result. And seriously, I just responded on here to clarify what capableweb was talking about and that they weren't making an isolated demand for rigor. I am not interested in getting into an argument about whether all of the research standards for animal welfare should all be dropped so that Musk can theoretically maybe monopolize a market in the future that will likely be inaccessible to most disabled people at a potentially slightly faster speed.
thefounder 4y ago
That's precisely my point. It's quite obvious to me that running tasks in parallel produces both more waste and faster results. A good comparison would be Musk's other company SpaceX. You can surely put more rigor into r&d to reduce waste and failures (i.e like NASA) but you will progress slower. Chances are that your company/project will get bankrupt(like so many biotech companies) if you don't move fast enough.