- "“The interest in protecting the safety of public employees and ensuring research that benefits the public can proceed without risk of violence clearly outweighs the public's interest in viewing said photographs,” the document says."
By that logic, wouldn't you conclude you should censor anything that causes people to protest in the streets?
I doubt this one-sided document written by attorneys representing the Univ. of California is an accurate representation of applicable law—I hope it isn't, this is just awful civics. The public-interest priorities are inverted: stuff that infuriates the public is precisely the stuff that's most strongly in the public interest to disclose.
>>protecting the safety of public employees and ensuring research that benefits the public can proceed without risk of violence
>By that logic, wouldn't you conclude you should censor anything that causes people to protest in the streets?
no, only in cases where you're ensuring research that benefits the public, and also ensuring that things that are legal can proceed without risk of violence. If the photos were to lead only to petition signing, that would be a different matter.
now, you can be cynical about things "the authorities say", and you can be worked up about monkeys and feel that their lives are equal to human lives; but just going on what the words mean, I don't think your interpretation is correct.
It's a pretty big assumption that this research benefits the public. It sounds like the results of said research remain the proprietary property of Neuralink and that's not what I would call a public benefit.
Hard disagree. The only thing these dead monkeys pictures speak to are feelings and we have seen what happens when the public gets animated and the public easily gets animated with dead animal pictures and the name Elon Musk.
Logically, if you want to protect animals rights, focus on factory chickens. The suffering impact of of these monkeys is epsilon compared to that.
If pictures are persuasive, then let people have access to the most persuasive arguments they want, for their civic debates. Whether I agree with them or not, I respect their right to speak, and let them do so in whatever format they please. And gathering and using whatever documentary evidence they think they need—no one has the right to suppress that.
The public indeed has a statutory right to all of this information in California, and to attempt to make an exception to that, for the explicit purpose of suppressing civic debate they don't like and in fact find odious, is a government overreach.
- "we have seen what happens when the public gets animated and the public easily gets animated"
If your disdain for the public extends so far as "and therefore let's control the masses; let's deny them information; let's suppress their overly-animated speech", then there's not much to discuss, as we live in incompatible universes. I hope your contempt doesn't really stretch that far.
I have no issue with them getting all the relevant information (ie not researchers private information) as long as there is no images to take out of context and slap some cheap click bait on.
I have some faith in the public, but we should all know what happens when bloggers optimise for clicks.
- "as long as there is no images to take out of context and slap some cheap click bait on"
We're talking about the relationship between a government actor and members of the public criticizing it. If that criticism is unfair, out of context, or completely wrong, well, that's too bad: but a government actor has no power to tell the public "no, you are not allowed to criticize us in that manner; criticize us accurately, or not at all".
For those of you about to reply with some variation of “the ends justify the means” - this ain’t it.
Plenty of commenters here will defend the idea that bleeding-edge science sometimes requires an uncomfortable amount of actual blood. (edit: I see several already have). If that is what you believe, fine — but this does not have to be the ideological hill you die on.
Nothing about this is redeemable, and your viewpoint gains no credibility by defending this horror show of bad science and worse execution.
I hesitated between flagging and upvoting the submission, flagging for the, unsurprisingly, bad comments. And upvoting for showing the topic on the front page, because as all those ignorant comments show this discussion is necessary.
I settled for upvoting. But the take some peiple, I assume highly priviledged, people on HN have when it comes to short term damage done for potential, or even dubious, long term benefit is problemetic at best. Has something of Lord Farquart...
Are you saying that you are the moral judge of what is an acceptable take on the ethics of this or not, and people who disagree with your moral judgement are "bad comments" and should therefore result in the discussion being censored?
I apologise if I've misunderstood, but if not then that is not a good stance at all.
This is precisely the sort of thing that we do need to hear from all sides without censor.
I am surely not a moral judge, as I am not sitting on any ethics panel monitoring animal trials. What can easily be said so, is that those panel are necessary. And that there are practices aroind those panels, if a company ignores those that is a huge red flag.
Same goes for slaughtering animals for meat, there are rules, lax as they may be, so if those bare minimum rules are ignored it also a red flag.
In questions of doing illegal things or not, there are no two sides to be considered. As long as the laws came into being in a democratic process, but we are not discussing that particular can of worms here.
I don't see a single logical argument in your comment about why "nothing about this is redeemable". You just seem to imply that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.
Animal trials are not wrong in and of themselves. There are ruls and best practices around them so, with the goal to minimize animal suffering. Neuralink constantly ignores those.
And no potential benefit justifies these things, because the same benefits can be had by not taking any short cuts. What Neuralink does is ignoring rules, and they din't even have anything to show for it.
Sad so just how many people on HN actively look for excuses and justifications were none are to be found, "move fast and break things" is really strong in some people...
I was about to have a knee jerk reaction to this comment, so I read the article. I wish I just had the knee jerk reaction and skipped the article.
The article is 10 thousand useless words surrounding the fact that 12 monkeys died due to Nueralink research. They didn't tell us for what they died, if any mistakes were made, and for all but one we don't know how they died.
This seems like a case of bleeding hearts bleeding.
Is killing a pig to eat it worse than killing 25 of the 60 pigs in a experiment because you accidentally put in the wrong implant so the experiment is ruined and you learned nothing from killing them?
At least when somebody eats the pig somebody benefits.
You’d be amazed how much livestock goes direct to landfill due to disease caused by overcrowding and poor practice - and of course the meat you throw out because you let it spoil at home. It’s over a third of all animal product - a significantly worse rate than neuralink and other trials - never mind the absolute numbers, which come to hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, and tens of billions of fish, every year - just in the US.
A dozen, even a hundred, or a thousand monkeys are insignificant in comparison.
Where’s your outrage for the side-product of your usefully slaughtered hog?
So is it okay to kill a thousand monkeys for funsies because it is “insignificant in comparison”? No, that would be highly unethical. There is no societal benefit to such a action, so nothing can justify the action. No matter how few animals you killed that is infinitely worse than the meat industry in aggregate.
How about if I kill 1000 monkeys to produce junk science thus slowing the rate of scientific progress? That is even worse since not only is there no societal benefit, there is societal harm. No matter how few animals you killed that is infinitely worse than the meat industry in aggregate.
Well guess what, Neuralink is almost certainly doing junk science as evidenced by their total disregard for basic established scientific protocol. The problem with Neuralink is not that they kill animals. I am okay with killing animals. What I am not okay with is the bad science.
When you are running experiments to validate if your implant is safe, and you use a unapproved adhesive known to be neurotoxic to attach the implant, then the monkey dies to the neurotoxic effects of the adhesive, you did not do any science, you just learned that you should stop ignoring instructions. A child could have taught you that. You are not pushing the boundaries of knowledge through the sacrifice of animals, you are pushing the boundaries of primary school. You do not get to kill animals to learn that.
You know very well that eating animals has a purpose. The very fact that you are arguing that it is okay to torture monkeys means that you do not actually believe that eating animals is wrong.
But you know what does have no purpose whatsoever, killing monkeys because you can not read the instructions. In fact, any organization incompetent enough to do that regularly will invariably kill people during human trials due to avoidable mistakes, fail to achieve anything, and possibly poison the well for actually useful animal testing of brain implants and more.
Stopping Neuralink's total disregard for basic scientific protocol around the ethical usage of animal test subjects saves lives and increases the rate of medical progress. Every time you protect their unethical animal testing you are delaying the discovery of robust solutions to paralysis, and you are okay with that? I am not.
You didn’t read TFA, did you. I’m talking about animals which are killed and sent to landfill as a result of agricultural failure, not animals which are eaten.
But anyway, I hear you loud and clear - “rocket man bad”.
So 12 monkeys are a bigger deal than a trillion animals (global annual food waste & agricultural waste) living, suffering, and dying for no reason whatsoever? This is like being on the titanic as it sinks and complaining that your shower is dripping.
You seem to be saying that 12 monkeys are more valuable than 1,000,000,000,000 other animal lives - and yes, it’s damned hypocritical to be fine with the latter but not with the former.
You are intentionally ignoring the reason for your initial question about eating meat. Why don't you address that before changing the subject? I'm not going to fall for your bait.
If I answered "yes", you would have called me a hypocrite. But I answered "no", and you are still calling me a hypocrite, even though I said nothing else. So what was the point of your question?
I am sad about unnecessary suffering of the animals I eat as well. You should notice the key word "unnecessary" here.
Sad isn't the right word so, I am rather pissed at the people and companies causing this unnecessary suffering because they cannot be bothered with even trace amounts of ethical behavior in the pursuit of a single dime. Even worse are the people findokg excuses fornthis kind of behavior, at least the perpetrators have some monetary motivation, while the appologists are somewhere between edgy and and morally bankrupt.
No, killing a pig to eat it is much more valuable than killing 25 pigs in your experimental trial because you accidentally used the wrong implant so you completely ruined your experiment and learned absolutely nothing while killing them.
In fact, eating the animal is infinitely more worthwhile than that.
Judgmental comments like this don't serve open and honest intellectual discussion. It is full of moral judgement and shaming meant to suppress the other side. It only shows this commenters privilege to hold luxury opinions at the cost to others. We should learn from the moral policing that happened w.r.t covid discussions that lead to poor decisions with bad science.
Clearly having no ethics nor moral is at least as bad if not much worse, take the nazi eugenics programs and their other scientific experiments on humans. We learned a lot of things but at what price
I would add just how dubious Neuralink looks from the governance side.
CEO has no relevant background [1], no mention on the website about who the scientists, ethics or scientific advisory boards are. Or if they even have them. And their Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee has the company's Web Developer as a voting member [2].
> Around 65,000 NHPs are used every year in the United States, and around 7,000 across the European Union
These are all “kept secret” too. Testing on monkeys is much, much larger than Neuralink and one can imagine there are even more gruesome stories coming from infectious disease and toxicity studies. It is cruel and heart breaking, but we don’t really have an alternative, how would anything get to a safe human trial stage otherwise?
If you look up any pharma or medical device company that has 'pre-clinical' trials that is usually a politically correct term for "N monkeys/sheep/pigs suffered in the process".
Animal suffering should never be frivolous and that is why you have ethics committees but to think that we can advance without their suffering is naive.
Did you read the bit in the article where the law was broken and systematically covered up based on wilful misinterpretation of established law and practice?
I talked with someone who worked at Neuralink years ago. They mentioned that it is a legit horror show, the science doesn’t justify it, and they were looking to get out of there ASAP.
All of which are regulated, also the last two clearly don't belong there. Animal trials are necessary. And regulated and monitored. What Neuralink does is ignoring any best practices and rules, causing unnecessary suffering and, topping it all off, don't even have anything to show for it. Despicable is not really doing that behavior justice.
Call me evil however you want. But they could kill 1000x the amount of monkeys if the outcome is severly disabled humans regaining their life in some capacity. Worse is being done to animals for less useful things.
And what if the outcome is that nothing is achieved or learned. Or that they learned less than they would have with less sloppy practices. Or that their sloppier than average practices on animals translate to sloppier than average practices on humans and result in needlessly killing humans during testing trials and still achieving nothing.
Part of the reason we expect thorough and careful processes on animals is because it is practice. If you screw up during practice what hope do you have during the real thing. Careful animals trials increase the speed of developing medical interventions safe enough for human use. They are not just boneheaded red tape meant to slow down “radical thinkers”.
That is not to say that the current processes and methodologies are perfect, there is almost certainly unnecessary bureaucracy, but the right standard, the one that maximizes the rate of progress, is much closer to what we have than what the “move fast and break things” crowd wants.
> if the outcome is severly disabled humans regaining their life in some capacity
There needs to be some law that says that if you're going to do this research at the expense of the lives of so many sentient animals then it needs to be open and non-profit.
Because I have doubts that this is the real long-term mission of Neuralink.
I don't know how people get their head this far up their own arse, and before anyone flags me for saying that do remember that OP asked for this.
The exact same argument you're making could be used to justify human experiments too. In fact, this has happened - often - in recent history; with the same language and reasoning. And guess what... It was fucking evil.
Our society has already accepted many such evils and you are the beneficiary. We breed/rear sentient animals in very poor living conditions with explicit intent to kill them and eat them. We conduct experiments (clinical trials) on humans. These experiments have significant risk of harm. We also sell for profit, medical treatments and commercial products with significant risks of harm. We make them life-long-dependent or addictive so that our profit flow doesn't stop. We sell weapons/machinery of mass destructions for profit and we foment conflict to ensure we have proving grounds and strong market for those weapons. We externalize costs from our own society to faraway poorer societies for our own selfish interests. Point is, a few elites make moral decisions for all the masses and many times in history we see how these elite decision makers had no skin in the game. So, stop being judgmental. And make scientific arguments backed by data and context if you want to truly improve things.
The concern isn't about trading monkey lives for human lives, but instead that the component of needless torture and suffering is okay if it aids progress regardless of the effecacy of the outcome. I don't think people have as huge of a problem with monkeys being tested and dying in their trials more than they do about the lack of humanity and care about their position to the point of being dismissive.
yeah, I'd always trade monkey lives for human lives, but I'd also like the lives I trade to have been considered viable and worthwhile decisions to make from an ethical approach instead of being another number correlating to a large amount of attempts done. Saying similar to "I don't care if we kill 1000x more if anything at all improves" shows more of a lack of care to monkeys (i.e. their lives are being considered meaningless) than it does to defend the stance that killing more would be necessary to improve human lives.
I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive. Because they are less sentient and less closer to human. I’m not fine with cooking chicken alive. There is a grey area about eating dogs and cats. I am generally fine with that, other people aren’t.
Monkeys are closer to human.
I think some amount of experimentation is necessary and can be good for science experiments. Monkeys are not human after all, never will be; but they are close.
I think excessive and useless experiments are bad.
But there is a gradient and I guess it’s hard to define. I don’t think sacrificing one monkey is evil. I also don’t think that needlessly torturing it is fine. There are gradients.
You can’t make parallel with experiments on human in 2nd world war though; that is a mockery of those people actually tortured back then. Saying that they are on monkey level
> I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive
Just want to point out here: No, they don't need to be cooked alive. The human way to cook lobster is to run a knife through its head first. But most people don't have the stomach for this and choose to believe that boiling it alive is more humane.
It is also pretty bad calculus. Monkeys have almost the same level of intelligence we have (and probably more in some departments) so killing even one monkey is a debt that cannot be equalised with even one saved human.
They'll kill thousands for sure but your "if" is a very big "if" given the current trends in technology I bet they'll be displaying ads straight in your optical nerves way before they cure anything, and even when they'll cure anything you won't be able to afford ot
And then the bleeding hearts bled, and pleaded for me to wander down another path.
> Google: neuralink federal investigation
> Dec 2022, pigs and sheep died, no explanation of how, no explanation of to what purpose, no discussion of what law or ethic was broken.
> Feb 2023, contaminated hardware shipped improperly
Can you please cite anything specific? All I want is an instance of some animal being butchered; not by some bureaucratic corporate mistake; not by some individual slip, but by actually evil behavior or causing unnecessary pain to an animal.
How is everyone crying so hard when there is essentially no information of what actually happened? 60 pigs died- ok, how and why?
I'm surprised that HN is pretty much a single voice against Neuralink. How many chickens do you think it is ok to sacrifice to potentially help some paraplegic humans? How many monkeys? Is sacrificing a human life worth it? I mean surely depends on the probabilities involved, whether or not we can find some other path which is better at minimizing sufferring etc.
These are difficult questions, so I'm surprised people so quickly jump to an answer. And why focus on Neuralink. Here I found some animals usage report [1]. I'm too lazy to analyze it properly, but eyeballing it I don't think Neuralink datapoint is even meaningful. In 2017 75,000 monkeys were used in research [2]. It does not say for how many of these pain was minimized as [1] does, but ugh.. can somebody present a good case why Neuralink specifically is worth focusing on when discussing this issue? I'd also be happy to listen to good arguments for not experimenting on them at all, since it's not at all obvious to me. I've read Mama's last hug [3] and I understand why we may not want to, but at the same time, the trolley.
In my twisted mind we should probably be experimenting on humans more [4]. If after psychological evaluation somebody gives they full consent, moving science forward can be some way to live a meaningful life, if you think monkeys are very much like humans then with humans we can at least clearly communicate and better minimize suffering.
4. I'm sure Nazi Germany surely fires for some after such statement as it does for me, but they did not minimize suffering. We should. We should just allow people to take risk if they want to. We allow skydiving and trying to climb Mount Everest. Why not allow to take it with benefit to other humans.
> I'm sure Nazi Germany surely fires for some after such statement as it does for me, but they did not minimize suffering. We should. We should just allow people to take risk if they want to. We allow skydiving and trying to climb Mount Everest. Why not allow to take it with benefit to other humans.
The problem is that incentive structures of profit, monopoly, and power accumulation mean that people will get put into economic situations where they might do this to get out of desperation or not being well informed enough. Regulation will not work well enough, and we can't proceed assuming it might.
We can't engage in such risky/dystopian behavior unless we can reduce the risk of systematic abuse, and right now we definitely can't. For example:
We now are so much more productive than any time in history because of automation, but our work-life balance has not significantly improved. The US (and I'm assuming other) economies are structured in a way that 0 employment would mean extremely high inflation, so they intentionally increase unemployment instead of curtailing price-gouging.
The impact will not only be abuse in terms of negative outcomes for "volunteers", but the ugly psychological impact on everyone the more hellish the bottom of the economy becomes as people become desperate to avoid it.
Why don't we slice apart one perfectly healthy human to save 10? Maybe their family will be rich. Suicide becomes noble. Blood, kidneys, livers, eyes, etc. What if someone is coerced?
The practical consequences of what you are suggesting are abhorrent.
That is clearly an issue with my viewpoint. I think it could be more heated than practically impactful (just like "kill tor because pedophiles"). Nuanced issues are not easy to regulate, but then, how about using monkeys instead?
FWIW since we are discussing suffering, it's worth noting that for humans we are maximizing longevity over minimizing suffering.
> “If you want to split hairs,” a former employee tells WIRED, “the implant itself did not cause death. We sacrificed her to end her suffering.”
What an awfully stupid way to think. "I didn't kill her your honor, I sacrificed her to prevent her suffering from the bullet wound."
> As it is a public records law that UC Davis is fighting, its arguments against greater transparency are centered around what’s best for the public. According to the school's attorneys, that means the public should not see images of Neuralink’s work.
"What we did is so horrific that we can't tell you, because you might get violent about it. So don't worry about it, don't ask, and keep giving us money."
I'm sure the photos will look terrible, but if you have ever seen this kind of work in photos or papers, it is unpleasant, but as another poster points out: this is not neuralink specific. Far more animals are sacrificed for much more mundane science than what neuralink is trying to achieve, which could enormously improve quality of life for a lot of people.
This was Neuralink specific though. Neuralink have been breaking the laws which govern animal trials, and then cynically hiding the evidence of this from the public.
That animal needed to be 'sacrificed' - after a day or so of horrific suffering - directly because Neuralink leaked toxic glue directly onto the animal's brain. They took notes on the horror show which followed instead of killing the animal immediately, and then took steps to hide all this from the public as well as the law.
> Far more animals are sacrificed for much more mundane science
Guess what - I don't agree with that either. But Neuralink are breaking the law, deliberately, and then deliberately covering that up. It's not the fucking same, and it's wild how y'all aren't getting that.
Not apologizing or justifying the event with the monkeys, I've had to put down animals that have broken their hind legs, damaged intestines and been gnawed at by local dingo (or wild dog) populations. I _could_ have kept that sheep or cow alive, but the quality of life would be so low that it wouldn't be cruelty. There is a certain point where the compassionate thing is to terminate the life.
I imagine some researcher was in the very same position, they may not have been the cause, and they could save the animal but at that point its not going to have any life that isn't all torture for every day of the rest of its life.
I kind of envy people who have never had to make these kinds of choices. The fact that it was this bad from a lab procedure makes the situation even more saddening.
I’m not for a second justifying needless animal suffering, but you’re picking on the wrong thing, presumably due to a lack of understanding of the area under discussion.
A solidly established concept in regulated animal trials (e.g. of human drugs in early development) is to prevent further suffering, once a line has been crossed, by way of killing the animal quickly and cleanly. It isn’t palatable but this fundamental concept, and the term ‘sacrifice’, aren’t issues here.
By that logic, wouldn't you conclude you should censor anything that causes people to protest in the streets?
I doubt this one-sided document written by attorneys representing the Univ. of California is an accurate representation of applicable law—I hope it isn't, this is just awful civics. The public-interest priorities are inverted: stuff that infuriates the public is precisely the stuff that's most strongly in the public interest to disclose.