Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you not go first? If you are blind it cannot be worse (well it can, but there are always risks). My wife went through semi-expetimental therapy (at that time) for her MS. It was tough but ultimately a net benefit. It all depends on what is at stake - I would consider Ozempic for some weight loss but prefer, for now , go for no sugar and moderate portions. This is not life changing for me so I indeed prefer…
From a game theory perspective it's very rare for it to make sense to be the first to try new medical interventions.
Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
121–130 of 481 posts
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you not go first? If you are blind it cannot be worse (well it can, but there are always risks). My wife went through semi-expetimental therapy (at that time) for her MS. It was tough but ultimately a net benefit. It all depends on what is at stake - I would consider Ozempic for some weight loss but prefer, for now , go for no sugar and moderate portions. This is not life changing for me so I indeed prefer…
> If you are blind it cannot be worse Holy moly.
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#123I'll let other blind people go first, but I'm definitely some one that would love, love, love to be able to see. Driving, knowing body language, playing any and every video game out there, shoot yeah!
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dystopian downside is significant. It is not difficult to come up with half a dozen horrific outcomes of this technology.
Unskippable preroll ads in your dreams. A whole new meaning to "sentiment analysis".
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's exactly what a partisan reddit midwit would say and they're overrepresented when it comes to Elon Musk hatred. There used to be less of that on HN, my theory is younger accounts that are more politically extreme/lefty are now here as the younger generation graduates school and posts more on HN. There's some historical irony too since communism came out of highly educated academic elites and is responsible for an…
Do you think Pew research is a democrat shill body? https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideo... I'm very midwitted. 50% of the planet is below the mean after all..
A lot mediocre students I knew in school stayed on to do more school because they were not able to do something else. A lot of degrees and classes are frankly bullshit and this problem has gotten worse since the 60s - the details matter. Time wasted studying pseudo-intellectual nonsense doesn't imply someone has a better understanding of the world than someone else (often the opposite) - just that they wasted time getting indoctrinated in a particular culture (often subsidized by others if not the taxpayer).
What about the people doing interesting and useful things in society, building stuff, creating wealth - what these people think matters a lot more than someone that got a PHD on olfactory ethics. Not all education is equal.
Even then, the meta analysis matters less than the details of the actual underlying argument. Appeal to authority and experts is a poor substitute for rigorous good faith debate of the actual issues.
There's a reason William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from Harvard.
"I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."
So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#126Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#127I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very far from having a deep grasp of how both the brain and the immune system work. Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object. Many tech professionals work on proje…
> Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object. I get your point but, there's a lot of foreign objects going in by the way of various pores and openings. Biological beings are surprisingly resilient & fragile at the same time.
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#128There is a great podcast with the entire team + Noland on yt. It is ~ 8h long, but IMO it's worth the time. You get to hear things from the perspective of the chief brain surgeon, hardware team, software team, and of course Noland himself. I really recommend it, to get a better understanding of what's possible, what they had to do to get there, and how impactful this kind of research is for people with terrible condi…
Still the same depraved head of neurosurgery, Dr. Matthew MacDougall, who said: "If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people that would step up." [1] That is basically the textbook definition of unethical medical practice, so unquestionably far over the lin…
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope not, I'd rather have fewer narcissistic sociopaths in the world. He only cares about himself and what people think of him. Nothing he does is to benefit other people. He's not Iron Man, he's Lex Luthor. I guess people have always idolized the creeps of the world, though.
It will never cease to amaze me how some people think they can know somebody the've never met as well as you think you do. I attribute it to projection.
Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed
#130I'll let other blind people go first, but I'm definitely some one that would love, love, love to be able to see. Driving, knowing body language, playing any and every video game out there, shoot yeah!
From what I've read, if you are blind from birth, but visual signals were suddenly restored, your brain wouldn't know how to process them. Blind from birth = blind forever. I'm not certain though.