Where the discussion goes off the rails and becomes less enlightening in my opinion is railing against using and ultimately killing animals in the pursuit of sc

Where the discussion goes off the rails and becomes less enlightening in my opinion is railing against using and ultimately killing animals in the pursuit of scientific advancement in general versus something unique or specific about how Neuralink uses animals. My personal belief is that animals are absolutely crucial at this point for many scientific purposes. Some things which animals were used for in the past can reasonably be done without killing animals, thru computer simulation or modeling, and certainly animals should not be needlessly killed, or intentionally left to suffer. Animal use should be reduced when reasonable, but particularly in the case of animals which are also feedstock, it’s logically absurd to even minimally constrain scientific research to reduce the number of pigs and sheep killed worldwide by a few hundred or thousand animals when they are bred by the millions to be slaughter and eaten. What’s interesting to me is the nuanced discussion of serial versus parallel testing, and the need for sometimes re-testing. When you have a matrix of potential choices, you can minimize the number of tests overall by serializing the process, at the expense of maximizing the duration of testing. If you parallelize the testing, similar to branch prediction in CPUs, you will end up running tests that would not have been needed, but you complete the overall experiment faster. The trade-off of time is not merely a matter of impatience. The capital costs must be absolutely tremendous, and the likelihood we even get to the point sometime in the future where there’s a life-altering treatment that is FDA approved, and the ultimate cost of that treatment, is highly dependent on how long it takes to achieve the fundamental research objectives and overcome the extraordinary challenges they are facing. So it’s not simply arrogance or apathy, a serial approach could very well either make the treatment uneconomical, or even make the R&D costs and timelines un-fundable. As someone who had rack of lamb for dinner last week and bacon for breakfast this morning, this research is absolutely on a higher moral plane and IMO it would be abhorrent to tell paraplegics that Neuralink is doing anything even remotely wrong by trying to accelerate this research while American pig farms produces 2 billion pounds of bacon every year.