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Comment by bio-s | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment

It’s a mouse. If you think feeding one to a snake is ethical, then it’s a little strange this would be unethical. At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

Not saying that this resolves the broader issue, but I'm not aware of any vegetarian snakes. It seems possible to differentiate this from animal experimentation.

Are you vegan?

Folks who eat meat but wring their hands about animal testing: I accept your illogical downvotes!

I don’t personally agree with the stance, but it’s not prima facie illogical to consider raising and killing animals for food to be potentially more humane than animal testing, and thus to be a fan of one but not the other. See the thousands of reddit posts about small farms, raising your own etc etc.

no, it is completely illogical. Animal testing at least has amortisation properties and is utilitarian at its core. Factory farming and eating animals for food can be completely avoided.

But why would I want to when they're delicious?

If we're cherry picking statistically insignificant examples, we can also select the most warm & fuzzy examples of animal testing too.

That’s not quite equivalent. For one, a responsible owner is not feeding live mice to a snake. There’s at least an opportunity to ethically euthanize the mice prior to the act.

> At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

You don’t know this to be true

Lots of owners feed fully aware "live" prey. Many snakes will refuse prey that doesn't move.

And this is considered really creepy and weird by many people.

This is a good way to injure your snake, it definitely depends on the species and the individual temperament of the snake, but there are ways to entice a snake to eat dead mice (you can warm them, and wiggle them).

It helps to understand how snakes detect and catch prey.

The term "lab rats" exists for a reason. This is in the bottom 10% of weird shit people do to animals for research.

Is it more ethical to systematically shoot cows in the head, have 2000 chickens share a 500sqft enclosure, have pigs raped to create offspring, etc?

The amount of cruelty humans inflict on other animals has very little bounds, this is fairly benign in the big picture honestly.

Oh well, when we talk about animal cruelty, the paradoxes of what groups of humans think is ethical is mind bending. Because humans (most of them), love to eat meat or use animal products and don't really care where it comes from.

It's a deep subject.

If we can even have robots that can perform critical surgeries with total precision and save more lives would that be bad?

It’s the process that’s unethical, not the outcome. The ends cannot justify the means in the scientific process.

What is unethical about the process of using emerging technology in medical procedures?

This is not a test or experiment by any measure. Someone is playing around with claude using a living animal.

At the risk of being a pedant, was this not literally a test to see if Claude could/would determine and then take the appropriate steps in administering an injection?

With a veterinarian conducting part of the procedure and overseeing the rest of it, and the mouse reportedly making a decent recovery, I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

> I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

And presumably you are going to keep failing, because you're not trying. You're handwaving the subject away looking for some bright red "lapse" rather than seeing the everpresent contours.

I've come to see this type of indignant/defiant language as a tell that someone is refusing to consider an issue (ie ignorance).

I've considered the potential harm versus the realities of medical science and study.

Starting on epileptic mice versus humans seems like a reasonable starting point.

You're failing to identify any actual ethical issue beside a blanket problem with animal testing. Which I can partially agree with as there's plenty of needless abuse and inhumane treatment.

This specific case does not seem like that.

First, you seem to be confusing me for the commenter who originally raised a concern.

Second, you're not really addressing my comment, rather just responding with a more polished version of your previous comment deny any issue.

My point is where are your own ethical boundaries here? For each aspect of the situation, what would have to be different to run aground of your own ethical concerns? In order to say that something is on a specific side of a line, you must know where the line actually is, right?

Third, and this doesn't apply to you as an uninvolved commenter per se, but it definitely applies to the original "experiment" - the onus is on the person performing it to demonstrate how it is ethical. A xit that reads like a kid buying some fancy equipment and playing around to see what might happen, "18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this", and a "licensed vet" as an accountability crumple zone does not inspire confidence!

I would say I did address your comment, I just don't seem to be spelling it out in a way that you would prefer. Which is to say I'm not sure how you can't extrapolate my ethical boundaries and considerations from my previous comment.

> potential harm versus the realities of medical science and study

> needless abuse and inhumane treatment.

> This specific case does not seem like that

How much issue do you take with animal testing in the rest of medicine? We already, more or less, torture an unfathomable amount of animals to get where we are.

I take great issue with animal testing. I find that unethical too.

I appreciate the consistency

At which point from testing with non-animals do you go from simulated surgeries with robots to actual surgeries though? I don't want it being done unethically, but how do you promote the effort / research ethically?

Welcome to the central tension in ethics! Where is the line and why?

At some point you have to rip out the bandaid, if they did everything possible before operating on actual test subjects, then I don't personally have an issue.

It seems to me that ethics evolve to suit the process, and not the other way.

Did they start with brain surgery or did they warm up on less consequential things like stitches?

That ship sailed a long time ago. Science decided that killing mice for experiments (regardless of the experiment) is fine. In fact, a large amount of the mice killed are just redundant (not needed for a particular experiment)

Oh don't worry, they made sure to have a human acting as an accountability crumple zone: "A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent."

(/s)

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