Talk:Neuralink

Nanotechnology?

Is there any good reason to reference nanotechnology in this article? I haven't seen it referenced in any primary source on Neuralink. Is it just very obvious that they would need to use nanotechnology for this kind of thing? Otherwise it seems kind of irrelevant and just kind of thrown in there as some kind of fun fact. 5ives (talk) 12:28, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

no, it was hype. took it out. Jytdog (talk) 22:55, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Hype

There is also going to be all kinds of pressure to add hype about this and speculation about what products the company might develop. We know nothing now. Everything is speculation based on the WSJ reporting and people inferring things from other stuff that Musk has said. Stuff that Musk has said, can go in the article about Musk. Jytdog (talk) 04:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

ok, I see what you mean, thanks. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:05, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Tübingen

About this, what in the world is so special that among all the zillions of labs studying BCI, that this one should be singled out? UNDUE and promotional of that lab. It ~might~ make sense to have some general discussion of BCI research here but it would be entirely OR as nobody knows what the company is actually working on, and there is a WL to the brain–computer interface article for people to go read about what is going on in that field. Jytdog (talk) 20:49, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Jytdog, thanks for the comment. I understand now the issue with promotion. However, I removed the project page, and there is only internal WP citations. Also, the project is not about BCI. It is one of a few ongoing researches (if not the only one) trying to read and write to the brain.Zombehpedia (talk) 22:06, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for starting to talk! Two things. First, everything in WP needs to be reliably sourced -- ideally from an indpendent source to show that the content is what we call "WP:DUE" -- , and secondly, this is content that perhaps should go in the BCI article. There is no particular relationship between the Tübingen program and Neuralink is there? Jytdog (talk) 22:13, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Some bloggers...

this edit and the edit-warred restoration by a different IP here violate WP:CRYSTALBALL and are WP:UNDUE. Wikipedia is not a site for speculation and is not part of the blogosphere. Jytdog (talk) 05:22, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Musk's timeframes

Jytdog partially reverted my edit about Musk's planned timeframes from Neuralink here, saying "time frames are WP:CRYSTALBALL nonsense at this stage. there is no point writing projections or refutations of them". I disagree. I read WP:CRYSTAL before making the edit, and it says:

"It is appropriate to report discussion and arguments about the prospects for success of future proposals and projects or whether some development will occur, if discussion is properly referenced. [...] Predictions, speculation, forecasts and theories stated by reliable, expert sources or recognized entities in a field may be included, though editors should be aware of creating undue bias to any specific point-of-view."

The content I introduced was referenced, and contained opinions from Musk and respected neuroscientists; I also tried to make sure the content was unbiased and phrased as neutrally as possible. I think it belongs in the article. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 10:25, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Would you please explain why this is encyclopedic content? Something that will matter 5 or even 10 years from now? Jytdog (talk) 14:30, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Well basing what content to include on editor's predictions of what will matter 10 years from now certainly would be a violation of WP:CRYSTAL, but for what it's worth, I can easily imagine a "History" section in the article in 10 years time beginning "Musk originally planned to create a BCI for severe brain injures by 2021; despite widespread skepticism, Neuralink's first BCI was released in 2020" or conversely a "Criticsm" section 20 years from now reading "The company has been criticised for failing to reach its goals on time—Musk aimed in 2017 to market BCIs at able-bodied people in the 2020s, a target which was widely thought to be unrealistic at the time, and indeed it was not until 2031 that the __ was released."

As for why it's "encyclopedic content", I think that's a rather vague term but the CRYSTAL passage I cited above mentions that articles can include "Predictions, speculation, forecasts and theories stated by reliable, expert sources or recognized entities in a field". — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 15:25, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I am sorry but would you please answer the question? Your response is about gossip ("oh he said X and it was so stupid" or "oh he said X and he was right!") This is not substantial nor of any long term importance. There is a media circus around this, as there is around everything Musk does. He makes wild predictions, people say he is crazy. (he is not a reliable source for these sorts of predictions as the Verge ref you cited mentions... so this really does fail even the letter of CRYSTAL). But none of that matters. What matters is what actually happens. He has started the company to build BCI for medical and then enhancement purposes. We will see what actually happens (e.g. when there are scientific papers about actual developments) and when things actually happen, we can add content about them. WP is not part of the blogosphere. Jytdog (talk) 16:10, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

What part of the question do you think I did not address? I answered both questions you posed and cited quotes from policy. Your personal opinion on Musk does not matter, and neither does your view on what is significant – what reliable sources discuss decides what is significant, and they are discussing Musk's plans. You have not cited one policy or guideline (or even an essay) in your favour – you mentioned WP:CRYSTAL, but I have pulled out multiple quotes from it that show it actively encourages content based on reliably sourced predictions (ad hominem attacks on Musk do not mean he is not a notable figure in an article about his own company!). Please quote from any one of Wikipedia's plethora of guidelines one passage which supports your argument. Otherwise you are just using argument by assertion. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 17:28, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I am citing WP:NOT - the goal of WP is to teach - to provide the public with enduring, accepted knowledge, per WP:NOTEVERYTHING. Not to convey gossip nor transient news that will mean nothing four years from now or ten years from now. Please answer -- what is the long-term significance of Musk's current time projections and people calling them ludicrous? (in other words, why is this encyclopedic? To ask another way, why will this be important four years from now or 10 years from now?) This is just media circus trivia as far as I can see. You have not written anything to show it isn't UNDUE gossip/trivia/news. That is what I am looking for. Jytdog (talk) 18:16, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't see any requirement in any policy for article content to have "long-term significance" (WP:NOT makes no mention of it). I have tried to explain why I think that it could have long-term significance anyway (contributes to Neuralink's reputation, shows responses to the first thorough report of Neuralink's ambitions etc.), but one can't predict the future so I don't see how anyone could possibly assert that something will have long-term significance for certain. A plethora of WP articles include content that will most certainly need to be completely rewritten in a few years – Sherlock (TV series)#Future, a section of a GA which will undoubtedly look completely different in a year's time, sprung to mind first. Probably more relevant is Existential risk from artificial general intelligence#Timeframe, several long paragraphs about (reliably sourced) predictions which could be seen as only significant in the short term ("25% chance that AGI will arrive before 2030" – why will this matter in 2030 when either AGI has or hasn't arrived?).

The Verge source quotes "University of Chicago neuroscientist Sliman Bensmaia" and "Chad Bouton, vice president of advanced engineering and technology at the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research" – these people are not "gossip[ing]"; they are discussing the future of neuroscience. As for your claims of "trivia", well that's your opinion and my opinion is that it is non-trivial (to argue "this is not significant because it is trivia" is circular, as "trivia" is a synonym of "insignificant"; "media circus" has the same problem as it refers to media covering topics which someone perceives to be insignificant, so it is just another way of arguing "it is not significant because I say so"). WP:UNDUE requires that "each article [...] fairly represent[s] all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources", which does not justify omitting content based on one editor's opinion (UNDUE is solely about how much to write about various opinions on a topic, not about whether to cover the topic at all). — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 19:17, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

The company coming into existence is a fact. What it was created to do, is a fact. These things will never go away. Things like how long Musk predicts today it take them to do it, how many scientists think that is ridiculous today, how much money and time it might take, whether their products will even work, this is all airy fairy trivia CRYSTALBALL stuff. I did not deny that there is a media circus - there are plenty of people who are happy to give their opinions about all kinds of trivia and plenty of sources recording that. There are entire articles about celebrities and pop culture, filled with trivia and sourced to twitter and TMG and similar gutter sources. Articles about serious topics should not have gossip and trivia and meaningless CRYSTALBALL projections in them. You have not said anything about why this matters. You have undermined your argument by making analogies with pop culture trivia. And this is nothing like timeframes on the AI thing, where an entire field is thinking through its development. This is one guy talking about one company (apparently ridiculously, which is apparently what he tends to do when it comes to time projections). Jytdog (talk) 19:32, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

If your standard for content is "things [that] will never go away", these predictions meet those criteria – it will always be true to say "In 2017, Musk said ... and commentators responded ..." Whether you consider a topic to be "serious" is not relevant – every Wikipedia article should be held to the same standard (certainly there are articles whose sole sources are tweets, but they should be sent straight to AFD). I have not used "gutter sources" – I used the LATimes and Verge (and would like to add MIT Technology Review as well). Also irrelevant is whether Musk's claims are "ridiculous": Forbes considers him the 21st most powerful person on the planet, which I think makes his opinion quite significant. I am not saying it is more important than speculation on AI, but I would say it is as important to an article on Neuralink as those AGI predictions are to an article on AI.

You have still not quoted anywhere in WP:NOT that backs up your point. Please point me to a passage that supports your argument. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 20:17, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Please don't mis-state my perspective, which you do in several ways above. With respect to your request, I have pointed to several parts of NOT and NPOV that reflect the community consensus I am trying to communicate to you. The policies and guidelines aren't some kind of law, and this is not a court of law where prooftexting is relevant. There are things we can do as editors; it doesn't mean that we should. Jytdog (talk) 21:29, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I apologise if I've somehow missed previous references to it, but this is the first I've heard you mention NPOV. I have also yet to hear anything more specific than WP:CRYSTAL. Until you provide me with quotes from the guidelines that illustrate your point, I just don't understand your argument. It seems like you're citing the names of policies and then describing your own opinions on the topic, which are different to what the policies actually say. I honestly do not understand how you went from WP:NOT to "the goal of WP is to teach" or the requirement of asserting "long-term significance". — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 21:53, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

UNDUE is part of NPOV. Jytdog (talk) 22:07, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough; my apologies. We're clearly not going to agree on this so I want to find a third opinion. WP:3O doesn't seem very active but I've been bold and posted to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Companies and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Neuroscience; I hope the wording seems fair to you. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 22:16, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks that was a good idea. And neutrally executed too. Jytdog (talk) 22:25, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Although I can concur that some of these references aren’t stellar due to lack of verifiable research for a relatively new organization, in what way is this article from MIT considered a low quality source? Most importantly, you’ve mentioned that the time frame stated by Musk himself is more or less speculation but the revert you’ve made seems otherwise contradictory to that. The key point I want to make here is that there is skepticism surrounding the project with that statement substantiated by examples directly stated by that reference which was previously mentioned.CubeSats4U 08:13, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I didn't say they all were low quality! :) I wrote "Some low quality refs as well"... Yep I read your edit. It teed up his projection to knock it down. As discussed above, all that is media circus triva. In the long term it doesn't matter. What will matter is if and when the company produces something and it works or doesn't work. There is going to be a lot of breathless hype and hot air huffing and puffing over the next few years and none of it will matter. This is a startup with no published science and there will be almost nothing encyclopedic to say about it for a pretty long time. (btw I am just loving the categories below "unknown importance California article" etc. Exactly.  :) Jytdog (talk) 08:22, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Hm. So you restored. As I noted above I considered nominating this for deletion since it was clear from day 1 that any time this company farted, the blogosphere would light up and people would rush here to add a bunch of echo chamber hot air about what was said by X and what person Y thought about that, ad nauseum. It has begun. It will continue to happen. Not sure what the best way to handle is. Perhaps an RfC on scope. So far I have just been addressing it case by case. Jytdog (talk) 18:49, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Bilorv and Jytdog: Hi guys/gals/cats. I'm a new contributor to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Neuroscience. I'm also a BSc. Psych graduate (MSc hopeful) and have a pretty focused interest in neuroscience, so I do kind of geek out about the science and keep my eye on stuff like this. I'm a longtime Wiki user as well. Personally, I appreciate Musk's relative bravado and ambition compared to academia, and think it does great things for drumming up interest in the sciences, and Neuralink is definitely exciting. That said, I don't feel comfortable with a page that is essentially based on a patent and media hype being created around a problem which represents a very serious obstacle in neuropharmacology- that is, the Blood Brain Barrier. If we look at this source, for example, we see that the suggested approach involves a noninvasive "neural lace" introduced through the jugular vein- but in order to cover any appreciable cortical "real estate", the device would have to penetrate the BBB or at least be designed in such a way that electrostimulation is precise enough to reliably and consistently reproduce motor output through electrostimulation alone. The BBB presents a fundamentally important obstacle, as it is essential in protecting the brain from harmful extracerebral molecules. So as someone who has studied issues in neuropharmacology and neurophysiology, my educated opinion is that this article should ultimately be a redirect to the relevant section on the Elon Musk page, as Neuralink does not currently represent a company that has notably/tangibly impacted the fields of neurophysics or neurorehabilitation through any concrete research or prototype that overcomes a core challenge in drug/treatment delivery to the CNS from the blood stream, until this approach is validated through a proof-of-concept preclinical study (at the very minimum) or a working prototype. If you need any further clarification, you can ask me (and I'll try to dig up sources for you), or you can approach someone else on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Neuroscience, as there are people there with more credentials and theoretical knowledge than my own. I just wanted to give my input. Cheers! Di4gram (talk) 23:56, 28 April 2017 (UTC)