The most chilling statement out of the article to me is "Musk’s impatience with Neuralink has grown as the company, which launched in 2016, has missed his deadlines on several occasions to win regulatory approval to start clinical trials in humans, according to company documents and interviews with eight current and former employees."
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?
> How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people?
Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.
These animals are intended to simulate humans for purposes of research, though. A disregard for doing the experimentation properly has the potential to carry over into production usage, just like coding newbies who write code with SQL injection holes saying "eh I'll fix it later" are practicing writing insecure code.
"Oops wrong glue/vertebra/implant" folks are not people I want anywhere near my brain surgery.
So do the parents of children but it hasn't stopped flaws in Tesla's FSD. Not entirely directly comparable, sure, but it's the same attitude of "get it to market before it's ready".
If there's one thing we've learned from Elon's acquisition of Twitter, it's that his default response to "you'll get sued" is a confident belief he can beat the rap.
It can work rather poorly in software from a quality perspective too, but in software the game is often to test a business hypothesis very quickly or ship features fast enough to win feature bingo with competitors and quality often goes on the back burner.
It's just that in health care the bar for MVP is way way higher.
I have a whole rant about how consumer software and software for serious things (ie: people can die) need to be treated differently just like civil engineering and building a shed in your back yard should be treated differently. There is no room for agile code in a finished product where lives are on the line. Its fine for non life or death things and its a great way to prototype ideas. But the control system on your car should be developed with more rigor than that.
It actually does, but in a measured way. You have to have a hybrid approach. Agile for stuff like little software features and bug fixes, waterfall for big important (often safety and effectively tied) milestones they often precede an animal or human study. Iterate the smaller less safety critical features (which are often software based) and then align the exit of one of those phases with a hardware freeze that captures key safety and effectivity in the hardware and then do a cadaver, animal or human study to prove it. You don't want to apply agile to the hardware usually.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
I personally know plenty, that's my evidence. I also personally knowing morally bankrupt people. I know morally bankrupt people who aren't CEOs, I know good people who are. These are separate adjectives.
>> Unless you don’t wanna see it, that he’s a sociopathic personality with too much capital fueling his god complex and a brittle long-termism agenda?
> So, he’s your standard CEO, then. Got it.
He's definitely not "your standard CEO." How could you even say something like that with a straight face? Those aren't binary qualities and he seems to have them to a far larger degree than other CEOs. Alternatively, for someone in his position, he is unusually lacking the social skills or self-control needed to mask them.
So Musk, who has done and is doing a lot to reduce air pollution(which is causing 6.5 million deaths per year) and climate change is sociopathic, but all the oil executives get a free pass, got it.
This is the same pope of climate change who wanted to build concrete tunnels underneath cities to transmit a single brand of car and wants to build gigantic rockets to go to Mars in a billionaire pissing contest?
The likelihood of EVs and Tesla in particular impacting climate change is minuscule and much overhyped and oversold.
While fairly true, it isn't really relevant to climate change. If anything, the EV movement has reignited the love of the car, which is harmful to curbing climate change. Building one mile of a one lane road emits 400 times the emissions of building an EV, and building EVs actually emits more emissions than an ICE car. EVs only cross over to be more emissions friendly about 6-24 months into driving ownership, ignoring battery disposal and recycling. EVs are the most overblown response to climate change that will ultimately do nothing.
Rockets are absolutely terrible for climate change. They dump huge amounts of pollutants directly into the atmosphere, including the upper atmosphere.
The fact that people see Musk as actually caring about climate change is disheartening. In fact, it may even be the case that Musk and his companies are a net negative in terms of mitigating climate change.
I was responding to the idea that he is supposedly a savior for climate change.
Regarding sociopathy, I’m not a psychologist, but he seems clearly a narcissist. He almost feels too sensitive and needy to be a sociopath, but who knows.
Wait! Wasn't that the point of these credits in the first place?
Penalizing ICE auto manufacturers who weren't doing enough switching to clean energy alternatives, while also rewarding the competition that were trying embrace these alternatives?
Effectively having those that weren't doing anything subsidize those that were.
But if he'd not sold them, then the other manufacturers would have been forced to reduce emissions even more - otherwise it's just a cost of business (passed on to consumers).
It's not some altruistic move - it propped up Tesla's balance sheet when it was needed, and makes a mockery of his green credentials.
(1) Reducing localized air pollution by offsetting it somewhere else. The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car.
(2) Musk actively hampers government investment in one of the best pieces of infrastructure for reducing transportation related climate change and pollution. See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
(3) as for the sociopathic tendencies. The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of. Dude doesn't even have a physics degree but doesn't correct people. He is actively promoting the great man of history theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory] which is complete bullshit. It takes a group of people to accomplish most great things of history. Hannibal crossing the Alps by himself wouldnt even be a foot note in history of Rome... But with his officers helping him push his military through and into Italy... Well one of the greatest enemies of Rome in her history. Same thing with spaceX, Elon musk didnt design and make his companies rockets... He hired great leaders to dedicate to who made it happen. He is just a 21st century salesman.
>The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car
EVs replacing gas guzzling cars and SUVs is a win for the environment. You're just regurgitating the oil lobby's misinformation.
>See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
Do you have a source for "how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California"?
>The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of.
Trivially debunked, he gives Karpathy the limelight on AI Day, and lets the battery engineers talk on stage on Battery day.
He seems pretty down-to-ground to me, personally, especially compared to other people of similar wealth. What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
> too much capital
I personally agree, but this is still a subjective opinion, not a real criticism. The more general implication of this is that there is such a thing as "too much capital", in which case we need to draw the line - at which point exactly capital becomes too much? A million dollars? A billion?
> brittle long-termism agenda
Brittle or not, arguing that Elon cares only about long term is factually false - he already delivered many things, including Tesla electric cars and Starlink internet service, which are useful here and now.
> What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
Just look at the way he's been treating Twitter employees.
For example, making a joke by bringing a "sink in" [1] the company right before making pre-announced firings. That episode right there tells you he's more concerned with making a joke for the lolz than about the emotions of his new employees, which is a pretty clear sociopathic action.
For the specific example I mentioned, it clearly could have been handled much more sensitively.
Don't make bombastic jokes when entering a company you're about to eviscerate. It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
There are dozens of stories that show Musk is at least a narcissist with very little empathy, not necessarily a sociopath, but it's the same for the rest of the world.
Elon's callousness is legendary -- read what his first wife had to say about him, people close to him and the way they were fired, the way he named his son with Grimes, the way he baselesly insulted a hero diver as pedophile, the fact he has so many children he barely sees them.
> It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
Sure, but is it enough to call a person a sociopath? By that definition, every rich person sheltered from ordinary working man's reality is a sociopath.
There are other reasons why I think he's likely to be a sociopath, from his bullying behaviour to his increasingly out-of-control impulsive tendencies.
I'm not a doctor so I can't make a diagnosis, but if you really are interested in whether he's a sociopath or not there's plenty of material online with indications on that. Here's a list of signs of sociopathy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/signs-of-a-sociopath/
So the world in which this incident shows sociopathic behavior is the exact world that Musk (and I, for that matter) disagree with.
My impression of prestige tech is that large parts of the industry are children because the money tree kept everyone in cold brew hop teas and catered lunches regardless the usefulness of your product or your monetization strategy.
Moving fast and break things actually seems like a decent idea in healthcare BEFORE you get to the human trials, then you should slow down. Not sure how hard a change in culture that will be.
We kill hundreds of millions of animals a year after incredible suffering for much worse reasons than making the blind see. And healthcare moves very slowly atm, leading to a lot of suffering.
I agree with the idea in general but some of the errors are just bad science that doesn’t discover anything. Putting the wrong sized chip in a brain? Using a mistaken vertebrae? Not euthanizing as soon as it’s apparent the trial is too flawed to continue? These are just sloppy mistakes.
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?