These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.
If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.
Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.
It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.
How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?
Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.
Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.
So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?
You're trying too hard to find suffering. It should have been clear I was comparing to "short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten" and "torture", not to a paradise without disease.
Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
The claim above is about mice. I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim.
I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.
You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.
> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?
> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim
We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.
It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:
"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab
But your attempts to equate it to the human experience are a waste of time. Nobody actually thinks humans (or cats, or bison) face the experience that SoftTalker was trying to describe. When we go by the actual intent of the statement, either it's true and mice but not humans face that, or it's false and neither mice nor humans face that. Any experience that you can say is the human default in full honesty, is not the experience SoftTalker was trying to convey.
> short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten
Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.
Humans have always enjoyed objectively long lives, and mouse lives are objectively short. Relative to what? Let’s not think about that and while we're at it take the implication for granted that length of a life grants it weight.
This is why we have always honored the fact that tortoise lives are more valuable than those of humans after all.
Borderline starvation is definitely not something millions of humans face every day, or something most of humanity faced for most of history.
Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab. Thankfully that has never happened to humans in the wild. Meanwhile, dying of war, famine, cancer or diarrhea is comparatively great, which is why using you in a lab would of course be unthinkable.
Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
That sentiment is a dismissive, incurious oversimplification of the entire existence of other species. It has so many blind spots, and is seemingly oblivious to the fact the same reasoning could be turned on us. If a hard, short, dangerous life justifies putting a creature in a lab, then a large share of humanity, past and present, would qualify for the same.
> Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.
You can criticize it but you can't strawman it to oblivion and back.
> objectively
You know what they meant though.
Lines can be set.
And the higher you set the quality of life line, the nicer your lab needs to be to meet the "better than life outside" standard! It's not an excuse for unlimited torture.
> millions of humans
Again, this is about the default. "millions" is 0.1% of humans. And the real number is higher than that but not that much higher.
> Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab.
No, that wasn't the argument. And lots of animals we eat do live perfectly good lives.
> Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
Much much less struggling and starvation and fear fear fear.
You're mocking the statement without trying to understand it. That's rude and extremely unproductive.
Criticize what they meant, not the dumbest interpretation you can think of. Prove their actual intended meaning wrong.
Isn't it insane that even in the face of complete annihilation through one of our inventions, we go "that wasn't us"? We deserve that shit ten times over
Their X post[1] indicated that they've been trying to combat reselling subscription plans via token API gateways and at the same time many, many people, myself included, have seen a drastic drop in available weekly capacity for the same amount of queries/tokens, all else being equal. So they may be trying to make subscriptions and API access more equal to each other from both ends.
Hm, seems to be a bit of a contradiction between what you’re saying in terms of “insurers want to pay more” and the infamous tendency of insurers to deny claims as much as possible?
Well, they also need to ensure they aren't spending past their premiums coming in...
Alot of insurers the past few years have actually gone bankrupt from ballooning costs and claims.
So, they want costs to go up, so the next year they can up the premiums, so they can then up their admin spend, but the costs still need to below the premium. And they can't just up the premium without an associated rise in cost, because groups are owed their premium money back if it isn't paid out.
Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
The funny thing is it doesn’t even code well. It’s still worse than OpenAI, Anthropic, and the leading open source models.
So you get worse outcomes while also financially supporting one of the most prolific pushers of race wars, the destruction of labor rights, environmental protections, and general misinformation.
Truly a win-win?
Contrary to your framing it seems to only reason to use Grok at this point would be ideological.
It's a better deal compared to those is what I said. It codes well enough so that's why people use it. As I said, go to r/cursor and you'll find loads of people using it while OpenAI and Anthropic are more expensive per token and give less usage.
OpenAI and Anthropic need to just go ahead and give people access to the cyber models.
Otherwise we have a world of attackers using open and closed source models against a much smaller group of maintainers that are likely heavily dependent on Anthropic and OpenAI and for whom it may not be a simple matter to just get approval to start using the open model flavor of the month.
I've been building a harness for security work, and had to switch to GPT 5.5 when even Opus started refusing security work. Then 5.6 Sol arrived, and it refuses security work, too. So, I switched to Kimi K3 and DeepSeek for API testing just because it's so much cheaper. But, if GLM is better, I'm here for it, as I think GLM is also cheaper than K3.
OpenAI seems to understand that these guardrails hurt the good guys. This is why they released Daybreak Blue, which is a step in the right direction (but the model itself is weak as it's just Sol with fewer guardrails). Anthropic seems to believe that harming defenders is worth it if it means they can achieve regulatory capture. They do a lot of mental gymnastics to try to pretend that this is not actually what they are doing. As a result they have lost a lot of customer goodwill, which hasn't yet caught up with them yet, but absolutely will IMO.
What about people from Gaza?
Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?
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