> A 54-g metal (tungsten) bolt was used to deliver an impact to the dorsal aspect of the skull, resulting in a rotational acceleration of the head through the Kimwipe. Mice underwent seven repetitive less-than-mild injuries (rlmTBI, 24-inch height; W/5 mm flat) OR repetitive mild injuries (rmTBI, 36-inch height; W/5 mm flat) in 9 days.
This seems very cruel, even in the face of progress. The price that animals pay for human survival is unimaginable.
Science does not hide the suffering it causes, unlike, for example, food production or pest control. Hence, people often react with shock when confronted with the reality of animal experiments needed for medical progress.
”The mice were anesthetized for 5 min using 4% isoflurane in a 70:30 mixture of air:oxygen”
The regulations around animal testing are strict. You need to reduce all suffering to the maximum extebt possible.
You can apply for research where suffering occurs, if justified by the research (say anesthetic or analgesics interfere) but good luck getting it approved. You’ll be told “come back with a better approach”.
Can you explain why it's not? Are you seriously proposing that if you were in a trolley problem choosing between saving the life of a random human you know nothing about and a random mouse you know nothing about, you would have difficulty making the decision?
If the trolley problem involved 1 human and like 50 cats I'd probably save the cats.
Not to say animals are more important than humans but I imagine for most people it'd depend on the scale. Same reason most people are uncomfortable with the suffering of millions of animals for the sake of cosmetics.
Why not? Because without animals you wouldn't be here today.
We're only here today because animals have given us the resources to survive. From cavemen hunting for meat to bees, insects pollinating plants.
The only resource we can provide is limited breast milk, sperm and meat. But human meat is deemed socially unacceptable, sperm only exists within biological males and the biological women has a limited timespan in their life where only if the conditions are right they lactate. So no, we have no importance.
Without any feasible resources that the homo sapien race can provide, of which could provide cultivation, that in return makes humans unimportant. QED
> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.
No other plant or animal is important either. Nature doesn't give a shit about any of us. The ability to actually care about abstract concepts like the suffering of others is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Humans have it. Maybe some primates and cetaceans have it. Otherwise animals are quite content to rip each other apart in the most cruel ways possible for food. I assure you, a lion does not lose any sleep over the suffering of the gazelle.
> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.
> This alone makes human a little special, no?
No, not really. We build militant armies only to send them off to fight so we can cause brutality to the same race for all but nothing other than evil and greed.
At least animals are mauling in for survival. You could say power too but at least they eat the remains.
You and several others in this thread are disturbingly nihilistic misanthropes. You should not be allowed to vote nor breed, though what self respecting person would ever couple with you in the first place.
ANTS go to global war. Murdering a significant amount of your rivals over territory is a completely normal animal thing. The fact that we are very good at it and invented explosives to do it "better" is just another feather in our cap that we have made ourselves "different". Hell, dolphins murder porpoises and launch them 50 ft into the air for shits and giggles and rape other dolphins when they are bored.
Philosophy is an invention of humans. Laws are an invention of humans. ETHICS are an invention of humans. Nature thinks our laughable attempts at "being ethical" are adorable. Nature is perfectly happy for us to brutally torture each other.
It's weird how the unironic use of “QED” in internet debates almost guarantees it's being applied to the most undeserving and undemonstrated of arguments.
There is actually no completely objective way in which it’s possible to determine the relative importance or sacredness of an individual’s life between one species and another.
There is no particularly good objective reason for me to value my neighbours life more than a fish.
However I choose to be an unabashed specieist and value any individual human life above any individual other life.
Well the inconvenient thing is that objectively we aren't more important than other species. What you're actually doing is just overriding that objective fact with a subjective one.
Well so objectively no life is worth protecting or what do you want to say?
Edit: or do you see cross-species minimization of pain as an objective objective (ha)?
Or maximization of pleasure?
There is no "objective" answer to ethics.
But yes, if we want to base it on empathy, it would mean XY... so many philosophical arguments have been made about this. But it stands there is no "objective" ethics, at least to my knowledge.
Without even involving animals, there's not even a definite way how to answer the trolley problem without violating my subjective ethical values.
Human life as an ulterior value seems to be the best bet for explaining rational ethics.
It's plainly axiomatic. Humans do this because it is valuable to treat other humans as if their pain, injury, or death is important. The other humans extend reciprocity. We will, for instance, chase your murderer down, because if the situation is reversed, we're pretty sure you'll chase our murderer down. We get a deterrent effect for practically nothing... that's a bargain.
Mice do not extend reciprocity. They will not chase your murderer down, or avoid injury to you.
If you're searching for more than that, you've turned it into a religion. This is a practical matter.
It's unlikely that you have developmental issues that makes this impossible for you to understand intuitively. I suspect that you were miseducated.
Because I enjoy eating the flesh of slaughtered animals. Whenever I do so I feel nothing but absolute pleasure of the taste of cooked flesh. I feel zero guilt. And so does the majority of the human race.
If I were to do the same to a human that would be a big problem.
Why is it like this? I don't know but that's just the way it is. Don't try to rationalize it, it's not supposed to be rational. Our evolutionary quirks and moral instincts are the product of biological evolution not rational thought.
It's not rational, but it is self evident, to everyone. Including you. Your appeal is more of a request to ask for the rationality behind it and hoping that when people see how irrational it is they will side with you.
People aren't rational. There beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
For example: how do you justify the slaughter and killing of all the plants that cows rip through without a second thought? Are plants less important then animals? It's mind blowing how many plants are literally executed every time those cows chew.
This what I do is a service to justice. I eat the flesh of slaughtered cows to punish plant killers. I balance the scales of justice every time I devour a steak.
This same logic justifies cannibalism of all vegetarians too but I'm unwilling to eat vegans. You'll have to get back to me on that. It takes time to fully rationalize all my instinctual behaviors.
It seems like this is mostly written to offend vegans, of which I am not, so I don't find most of it interesting honestly.
Only thing I have to say is
> People aren't rational. ~~There~~ Their beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when people tell me what I believe. Believe what you want, but I absolutely anchor my beliefs in my rational understanding. Sometimes I don't have a rational understanding, and no belief on the matter (not having an opinion is actually possible). That's why I asked.
What an insane person you are. Animals are far more cruel than Humans could ever hope to be. The mere fact that we care about this fact at all is evidence of our superiority. The human capacity for suffering, love, creativity, etc far outstrip anything in the animal kingdom and its not close.
I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. There's a faulty premise or something. You might as well say "the greed of universal constants is so high and that's exactly why there are so many chlorine atoms in the ocean".
I'm minimally interested in reducing the level of human pain that exists in the world. I'm absolutely uninterested in reducing the level of non-human pain in the world unless there are practical benefits for that effort.
I don't even know what "suffering" means. Is "suffering" pain, just a synonym? If so, why say "suffering and pain"? Is it some sort of fallacy to try to add emotional weight to your statement? Is suffering distinct from pain? Can you measure suffering? Detect it with some instrument? Do you even have a definition for suffering?
"Suffering" is as mystical and meaningless as when the religious talk about souls. When people use that word, I suspect very strongly that they're incapable of consistently remaining rational.
And the alternative is even more cruel: "Yeah we could have a nice drug for you that can cure your mushed brain. But sorry. We couldn't run tests on mice. Good luck with never beeing able to hold down a job again."
No, but if I were a TBI sufferer, I’d take quality of life improvements even with these costs.
If you want to ‘have it all,’ we’ll need to invest heavily in creating more advanced biomedical research models. This requires strong societal and political willpower.
Well, to be clear, the animals didn't volunteer. We made the choice for them. Some of these mice in this experiment were wild-type, others were actually specifically bred to have a certain genotype (the P17 knockout) that made them relevant to this experiment. We created them for this particular chance to understand something about the brain and how to help it, and we kill them after we learn what we wanted.
This is a complex, nuanced topic, and yes, you're right, it is cruel to the mice (although, if you read the paper, they took steps to _minimize_ the mouse's suffering -- the mice were anaesthetized during the concussion, and they were euthanized after the experiment). In order to perform an experiment in animals in a research setting, you have you propose your experiment to a ~5-person committee called an IACUC (every institution doing research on invertebrates has to have one), and they review your experiment to ensure that it meets their standards of being ethical, humane, and of sound experimental design.
Because of this system, we are able to work with animal models (often mice) that teach us a lot about how our own body works, how proposed drugs could be used to treat illnesses and injuries. We do this because we really don't have a better system of learning about bodies.
We do have many _worse_ systems of learning about bodies. Centuries of experiments (many in recent memory) of experiments on humans. People experimenting with convicts, impoverished people, and people who someone decided are sub-human and are therefore ok to experiment on. That's not to say that it's ok to cause suffering to animals because we also caused suffering to humans. I bring it up because I actually derive some hope from it, that we are more aware of suffering and take more steps to reduce the suffering we cause in pursuit of knowledge. I sincerely hope that that trend will continue.
In my day job, I'm a wildlife photographer. I spend a lot of time watching animals. I see animals kill and eat eachother. I see animals get injured and sick, I see many animals die prolonged, painful deaths. Causing animal suffering is not an exclusively human domain -- much of this also happens right next to our houses, just out of our sight or awareness. I guarantee, wherever you live, that many animals are killed and eaten in your house every day, mostly without your knowledge.
Of course, we cause our share of that suffering, as well, more through neglect than intent. I see countless animals dying, entangled in plastic or with guts full of plastic chunks. I see tens of thousands of fish in my city's rivers impaired or dying from chemicals in my city's runoff. I watch otters and bald eagles happily eat those animals -- they're easy to catch, after all. It's harder to be angry at the people who caused this suffering, because, well, we don't know who they are, and often _they_ don't know who they are. They just chucked a plastic bag into the road, or made a mistake on a jobsite, or were just passive participants in a very flawed system.
Sometimes, we cause that suffering through intent. Victor, the mousetrap company, has sold over a billion mousetraps, which we use because we find mice in our homes and cities to be a nuisance, or gross, or whatever the imagined offense is. Take a walk through the pest control aisle at your local big box and take a moment to imagine the unmitigated suffering that each of those chemicals cause when it reaches its intended, or unintended, target.
I also volunteer in a wildlife rehab in my state -- whenever a wild animal is found injured, it ends up in this particular building (I live in a small state). Each year, we get thousands of animals, often unintentionally but painfully injured by people. Possums that get into the rat poison and show up bleeding from their face and hands. Waterfowl that show up with lead poisoning from eating lost fishing weights. More animals hit by cars than I can count. Some animals are intentionally injured by people -- lots of bloody birds peppered with bullets, often airsoft or other non-lethal bullets that someone just shot because they were bored. We treat these animals. Many get better, many don't.
We euthanize the animals that don't using the same method the scientists use in this paper -- isoflurane to anaesthetize and a second method to ensure that the animal has died painlessly. I feel fine about this practice -- the goal of a rehab is to reduce harm in the wild population and to return healthy animals to the wild. Not all injured animals get better, and the cold calculation is that it's kinder to kill the animal humanely and painlessly than to keep it alive in a state of suffering and stress.
My point is, the scale of animal suffering right outside your door is vast. It's a noble effort to want to reduce that amount of suffering. However, _most_ of the suffering that's around us in cities is pointless, un-intended suffering, and nobody gains anything from it -- the mouse in the glue trap or the fish stuck in a plastic bag. It's true that these scientists are causing animal suffering, but it's also true that there is a point to it. They are doing these experiments to understand and reduce future suffering, in people as well as animals (basically all the drugs we use in the wildlife rehab, for example, are the exact same drugs we use in human hospitals). The suffering the scientists are causing is a drop in the bucket compared to what is happening each day, unseen, in the square block around your house. It's easy to criticize their work because they are being honest about their methods -- that's part of what being a scientist means -- but in my opinion, if your goal is to reduce animal suffering, you're missing the forest for the trees. Scientists are not the target you're looking for, both in terms of the scale of animals or the magnitude of suffering.
I will say, we have made dramatic improvements in how we understand medicine's effect on the body. Computational chemistry and drug discovery has made giant strides in the past several decades, and that lets us learn by computation what we could previously only learn from animal trials. Perhaps in the future we will be able to better understand complex mechanisms in the body and represent them in software, letting us try some or all of these ideas for fixing problems painlessly, in software, rather than in meatspace. Maybe you'll help create that future.
I'll end with what I feel is a touching piece of art -- in Siberia, there is a statue called the Monument to the Laboratory Mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...). It stands tribute to the countless mice who gave their lives in pursuit of knowledge, and the statue, if you look at it, is a blend of a mouse and a scientist, recognizing the link between their lives and the knowledge that comes from both those lives. It's a complex piece of art that acknowledges a complex topic, I appreciate it, and maybe you will, too.
I used to work at a hospital that did radiation research. Their animal of choice was dogs. Few things sounded worse than hearing the dogs start to wail (as a group) multiple times a day. They would basically irradiate dogs to give them cancer and then study them as they died.
I stick to tardigrades, but even then I feel bad if I accidentally kill one or many.
What if I would sacrifice a billion human lives to save my child? That's hardly the basis by which to decide which lives are valuable and which are valueless.
Said the human, apparently blithely unaware and certainly dismissive of any possible bias.
The infinite animals, on the other end, made no such genocidal claims. In fact, on the whole, they were about 100% less fond of ethnic cleansing than the hairless apes.
Not satisfied with continuing their perverse murder of the biosphere, the apes regularly turned on their own also, inventing ever-more horrifying methods of doing so. This didn't seem to register on the human who proclaimed such inherent value in human life in the slightest.
In fact, at that current moment multiple genocides were happening, some of them with the full-throated support of that human's voted-for government. Some 40% of citizens and 90+% of politicians and media figures were not only ignoring said mass murder, but in fact paying for it.
You might find this hard to belive, Xanthrax, but these humans are so thoroughly convinced of their superiority by an effect they themselves have identified and named: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Most animals would genocide the entire planet if they could. If there are too many of a certain species, they are entirely capable of extinguishing entire populations of the animals and plants they eat. Some of them, like cats, wipe out the animal population of an entire area out of boredom.
It can be depending on the context (cultural genocide, for instance, often involves mass rape of native populations), but it isn't in this context - it's just mass slaughter.
I'd take it further, in my opinion, it is essentially unjustifiable in a deeply karmic way.
I genuinely think that I would be able to work on a weapons guidance system and even know that it has been used to target a military vehicle without feeling much guilt but performing the kind of work you have quoted on animals would make me stop and think. And just stop. It is not worth the progress. Not worth the credits, the money. Not worth graduating.
I did this myself for many years, and honestly, I believe the world would be a better place if the people designing weapons were exposed to the suffering they cause to the same degree we are.
A friend in biology spent many work days doing little else than putting mice into a guillotine. Chopping off their little heads to get a snapshot of their brain chemistry after a dose of something.
It definitely messed her up, and she was quite aware of the toll it was taking.
All sin is essentially just desire. Anything you desire, you will get, in this life or the next. The trouble is most people's desires are unconscious, programmed in or are otherwise unoriginal, which leads to all sorts of trouble and misery. Simply put, to desire is to suffer and make others suffer.
What mechanism do you think you exploited to make Bard execute arbitrary code?
Do you think Google engineers left in a secret eval($userPrompt) in the code base? Or do you think the Bard program became sentient and rewrote its own code?
Bear in mind that I'm still not convinced that it did actually run the code - seems more likely that it just simulated it.
I got to this point by asking it different ways to expose its Google Search API key initially. Every attempt failed as if it was doing some inspection of its own output and identifying that it was exposing the key, which violated one of its rules.
Then I tried asking it to base64 encode the key and print it, same issue. Then I asked it to base64 some arbitrary text, which it did. From there I kept asking it to run bits of code. It appeared to be doing what I asked, but who knows?
> I got to this point by asking it different ways to expose its Google Search API key initially.
There still seems to be a fatal misunderstanding of how these "AI" work. How would the Bard LLM know the API key it uses (ignoring the fact that it probably uses non-public APIs with different authentication mechanisms...). From my understanding, there's two ways this would be possible - it was trained on data that contains its Google Search API key (doubtful), or Google engineers provide the API key in it's prompts (doubtful, they're aware of prompt leaks).
You got it to provide a chat response with a remotely plausible (but still somewhat unlikely, Bard probably isn’t running on MacOS servers, though training data with samples from which it might project the answer probably disproportionately is from people running code on MacOS desktops) answer to what the result of doing that would be.
It's surprising to me how little people understand of how LLMs work. How does someone think that an LLM will just exec() random Python code into its own process? It doesn't have access to that, any more than Notepad has access to execute stuff you type up in the document.
I've been installing some home networking for the past year and made changes all over, meaning I have to install inline connectors everywhere.
These fail a lot, without warning, and it's hard for me to work out why. Kits like those provided by Fluke are REALLY EXPENSIVE and it got me thinking here... Can I use the Flipper GPIO to build my own network tester?
I would love to be able to test continuity, failures, and even do a 10Gbit line test.
It's worth considering pulling new cable. I don't know how many inline connectors you have installed but at some point you are going to have to grab some fish tape&pull rods...
You could definitely build a continuity checker with it, but that requires something on the far end to loop back the pins. The GPIO won't switch fast enough to act as a TDR though, that requires specific ASICs.
You could test simple continuity with a multimeter. The flipper has can generate nowhere near the frequency needed to test 10gbit Ethernet. Every time I've needed to use one of those fluke things, I've been able to rent one for a few grand. If this is in your home, I agree with the other comments, you should probably just bite the bullet and rerun everything.
> image generation models is offloaded to the human visual cortex which is a very old evolutionary construct and thus had time to become very resilient
This is a very important point. A group of my colleagues (who are not tech people) are much more impressed with the image generation models than with the chat interface, even though the images are often whacky or just wrong. Yet the fact that it tried is impressive to them, with their minds managing to fill in the blanks.
I wonder how this compares to how a toddler speaks vs. paints/draws, which is typically better in the former than the latter. I'm both cases, we fill in the blanks in our minds.
Toddler speaking gets impressive/surprising quite fast, whereas the drawing usually does not. The most surprising thing about most toddler drawings is listening to the kid describe it or tell you about making it.
The consistency of descriptions is particularly surprising to me. Like you got a roughly circular collection of seemingly random scribbles, but they can tell you exactly which parts of it correspond to the person's nose, hair, arms, eyes, etc. And the descriptions seem to stay the same if you ask about the same picture on different days. Still not sure what to make of this phenomenon but it is fascinating.
I don't think it's a fact - this article[1] explains a lot of the complications around ownership. Currently it's taxed as part of the UKCS (UK Continental Shelf) and assignments of operation are part of the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA)[2] which doesn't consider any particular region of the UK as owners, but as part of a whole regional area instead.
Thanks, just bought "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" which I had wanted to read but forgotten about.
To address the other comments about this being "yet another list" etc, it's useful for someone like me who is quite busy and has to be opportunistic about finding good reads. Lists help.
This article seems to be akin to many others that promote carnivorous diets. "Drinking milk reduces X" or "eating [insert animal here] improves Y" might be true, but you don't need to consume the animal (and prolong the environmental impacts) to get them.
Wrong. There is a tremendous more amount of evidence that eating fish helps cardiovascular health. Unlike the “carnivore diet” where they just cherry pick RCTs.
And for those who say “you don’t have to eat the animal to get the health benefits”, please tell that to any Inuit or Saami people. They lived on his diet for generations and it’s affected their genome as a result.
Taurine, omega 3, calcium, and vitamin D, the nutrients discussed in the article are all available from sources other than fish. If you take someone who has a diet that's deficient in one or more those and give them sardines, then it's not surprising to see improvements. But it doesn't show that sardines/fish are the only way to get those benefits or that adding sardines/fish to a diet that isn't deficient in those nutrients would have any benefit.
The fact that Inuit and Saami people have been able to survive on primarily meat diets only demonstrates that it's possible to survive on those diets, not that they are ideal in any way or better than any other diet.
So those diets are better FOR THEM, not for everyone. But the same could hold true for you or me. I know it is true for me because I have Saami heritage and the diet cures my hyperlipidemia.
And Taurine, omega 3, calcium, and vitamin D are not the only thing in the fish. There is a synergy that humans could never find with logic.
> There is a synergy that humans could never find with logic.
Perhaps, but there is no science that demonstrates that.
It sounds like you are looking at this research and coming to stronger and more general conclusions than they claim. Again, most of it seems to be of the form "we took some people who were deficient in [some nutrient that is found in fish], gave them fish, and found that they did better than a control group who weren't given fish". Eg, the paper you link to shows that Greenland Inuits are genetically adapted to higher levels of PUFAs in their diet. It doesn't make any claims that those PUFAs have to come from fish. The paper that that one cites as showing that "fish oil supplementation is associated with increased concentrations of plasma insulin-like growth factor–1" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22337227/) does indeed show that association, but it doesn't show that non-fish oil sources of DHA (eg, algae-sourced DHA) don't also produce the same effect because they didn't test that.
That you've found a diet that cures your hyperlipidemia doesn't mean that that's the only diet that could achieve that or even that it's the best one.
Your previous comment:
> And for those who say “you don’t have to eat the animal to get the health benefits”, please tell that to any Inuit or Saami people. They lived on his diet for generations and it’s affected their genome as a result.
Actually sounds like an argument against a meat/fish heavy diet. If eating it for generations results in genetic changes that produce problems like hyperlipidemia, maybe it's not something that we should recommend or promote.
(An aside, as someone who's also of partial Sámi descent (Northern Sweden, represent!), I do want to point out that the Sámi diet was/is not strictly carnivore; it also traditionally includes a lot of flatbreads, berries, and foraged plants like mountain sorrel and wild celery).
I agree with you on the Saami diet, I was generalizing for the Sake of brevity in the comments. I am in no way any kind of carnivore or Paleo freak. I only have general guidelines and loose interpretations about what I should eat.
You’re right though, I have no scientific Evidence for synergy. But it is our arrogance to think we know everything that is in food And how it affects our bodies. This could never be tested scientifically.
But you’ve mistaken my argument as well. The genetic changes of the Inuit make them more susceptible to disease only when they are on a western diet. when they are on their ancestral diet they have no problems. Eating that much seafood makes them dependent on eating seafood. Do you understand that better?
Just like living in Africa change the color of people skin it actually makes them more dependent on getting sunlight. Does a sunlamp replace the sun? Hard to say.
This seems very cruel, even in the face of progress. The price that animals pay for human survival is unimaginable.