1. It doesn't sound like the extra animal suffering is actually helping their odds, it sounds like if anything it's going to reduce customer trust in Musk's abi

1. It doesn't sound like the extra animal suffering is actually helping their odds, it sounds like if anything it's going to reduce customer trust in Musk's ability to implant electronics in their brain without killing them. 2. It's possible to do this research without this extreme level of reckless testing on live animals. 3. It's not clear that Neuralink's approach will actually be better for society in the long-term. Musk's policies towards consumer freedom and privacy in every single one of his businesses he's been a part of from Paypal to Tesla has been atrocious; I would prefer another company that's not owned by Musk build neural implants because I don't trust Musk not to screw the people who are getting the implants. The correct questions here are: - Will sacrificing 1,500 animals actually increase Neuralink's odds of doubling the quality of life for paralyzed people in 20 years by 1%? I don't think it will. - Will other companies be able to produce the same results in 20 years without that suffering? Probably, yes. Nueralink is not the only company researching this. - Do we want Neuralink to "win" the market of neural implants in the first place? I would argue that we probably don't, the best-case scenario for neural implants would be if they came out of an Open ecosystem in cooperation with more traditional companies who have less of a startup/move-fast-and-break-things vibe. - Is the sacrifice that Neuralink wants to make generalizable as a moral principle? No, we know what it looks like when animal testing is deregulated, and it looks awful, and Musk shouldn't be given a special pass on those rules. The problem with doing quick math on whether suffering is "worth it" is that it can be used to shut conversations about how to get the same outcomes with less suffering. It's an argument that's been in play basically ever since activism around animal testing began, and repeatedly, the people who argue "it's worth it to save everyone" have been proven wrong -- both because it's been repeatedly proven that we can do the same testing without Musk's extreme level of disregard for animal life, and because the outcomes very often turn out to be over-exaggerated or gloss over serious caveats. People are very bad at estimating the odds of success of a venture, and very bad at estimating what the potential benefits or downsides of an outcome will be, and so animal testing without moral boundaries tends to lead towards people killing a bunch of animals for no good reason. In practice, saying "anything goes as long as the research is important enough" hasn't really born out well morally, so it's good for us to have standards that apply to everyone, regardless of what they are working on or how important they think the project is.