Article

2021-12-12 -Short Attention Span Theater-

Obey the authority figure. Yes the man in the white coat.

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Besoeker 2021-12-12 00:00|| || Front Page|| [6 views ] Top

#1 What's really disturbing about these people is they are the same bunch that support planned parent and eugenics. Sure they claim they love minorities, but they love them getting abortions and destroying their lives so that they wear the invisible slave collars of government.

Posted by Silentbrick 2021-12-12 00:36|| 2021-12-12 00:36|| Front Page Top

#2 The Stanley Milgram experiment was caught in the reproducibility problem. The Washington Examiner included it in a long piece on the subject a few years ago. Key paragraphs:

When researchers, journal editors, peer-review panels, colleagues, and popular journalists share the same beliefs, confirmation bias will flourish. It’s human nature! Reading a typical behavioral science study involving race or sex, privilege or wealth or power, you can find it hard to distinguish between the experimenters’ premises and their conclusions. Better to scan the literature for what lawyers call “admissions against interest”—findings that contradict the prevailing creed. These are rare, but they exist, and they have undermined much of what behavioral scientists think they know about human behavior.

The subversion comes in many forms. A finding can often be undermined simply by looking closely at how the experiment was performed. Perhaps the most famous experiment in all of social science—I think we’re supposed to call it iconic—was undertaken in the early 1960s by Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor at Yale. Milgram was struck by the trial of the Nazi mass-murderer Adolf Eichmann, then underway in Israel.

His hunch was that Eichmann wasn’t singularly evil but merely a cog in the Nazi machine—a petty little man following great big orders. Nearly anyone, Milgram mused, could be induced to override his conscience and perform evil acts if he were instructed to do so by a sufficiently powerful authority. Even someone from Yale.

This has since become known as conformity (not confirmation) bias, another elaborate and unnecessary verbalism invented to describe a home truth: We crave the approval of our friends and families, of people we take to be like ourselves. But conformity bias has been stretched much farther. The enormous power it holds to guide our behavior has crystalized as a settled fact in behavioral science.

To test his theory Milgram told his subjects that they were participating in a study of “learning.” A man in a lab coat took the subjects one at a time into a room and told them to turn an electric dial to shock a stranger in a room next door. They were to increase the strength of the shock by increments, finally to the point of inflicting severe pain. (The shock generator was a dummy; no one was actually hurt.)

The results were an instant sensation. The New York Times headline told the story: “Sixty-five Percent in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain.” Two out of three of his subjects, Milgram reported, had cranked the dial all the way up when the lab-coat guy insisted they do so. Milgram explained the moral, or lack thereof: The “chief finding” of his study, he wrote, was “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority.” Milgram, his admirers believed, had unmasked the Nazi within us all.

Did he? A formidable sample of more than 600 subjects took part in his original study, Milgram said. As the psychologist Gina Perry pointed out in a devastating account, Beyond the Shock Machine, the number was misleading. The 65 percent figure came from a “baseline” experiment; the 600 were spread out across more than a dozen other experiments that were variations of the baseline. A large majority of the 600 did not increase the voltage to inflict severe pain. As for the the participants in the baseline experiment who did inflict the worst shocks, they were 65 percent of a group of only 40 subjects. They were all male, most of them college students, who had been recruited through a newspaper advertisement and paid $4.50 to participate.

The famous 65 percent thus comprised 26 men. How we get from the 26 Yalies in a New Haven psych lab to the antisemitic psychosis of Nazi Germany has never been explained.

Many replications of the Milgram experiments have succeeded, many have failed. But its importance to behavioral science cannot be overstated. It helped establish an idea that lies at the root of social psychology: Human beings are essentially mindless creatures at the mercy of internal impulses and outside influences of which they’re unaware. We may think we know what we’re doing most of the time, that we obey our consciences more often than not, that we can usually decide to do one thing and not another according to our own will. Behavioral scientists insist they know otherwise. This is the “mindlessness bias,” a just-invented (by me) term to describe the tendency of social psychologists to believe that their subjects are chumps.

There are other interpretations of Milgram’s results, after all, that are not quite so insulting to human nature. Perhaps the shockers were indeed conscious moral agents; maybe they had been persuaded they were participating in Science and, given the unlikelihood that a Yale Ph.D. student would let them cause harm, they were willing to do what they were told to advance the noble cause. Later interviews showed that most subjects thought this at the time of the experiments and were glad they had participated for precisely this reason. Others said they assumed the experiment was a ruse but went along anyway—some because they didn’t want to disappoint that nice man in the lab coat, some because they worried they might not get the $4.50. The theory that they did what they did “blindly,” as the Times headline said, is an assumption, not a finding.

As one would-be replicator of the Milgram experiment, a heterodox researcher named Michael Shermer, wrote: “Contrary to Milgram’s conclusion that people blindly obey authorities to the point of committing evil deeds because we are so susceptible to environmental conditions, I saw in our subjects a great behavioral reluctance and moral disquietude every step of the way.”

Posted by trailing wife 2021-12-12 01:28|| 2021-12-12 01:28|| Front Page Top

#3 Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
Summary:
- Solo, siloed investigator limited to small sample sizes
- No pre-registration of hypotheses being tested
- Post-hoc cherry picking of hypotheses with best P values
- Only requiring P < .05
- No replication
- No data sharing

Posted by Merrick Ferret 2021-12-12 06:54|| 2021-12-12 06:54|| Front Page Top

#4 Yes, our reality of the times. Not all will drink the cool aide. Followers will follow. Then for some reason some people evade the programing. The end is always the same. They fail massively in one way or another. This error is reoccurring. Perhaps a revolution is actually a good thing. The new growth will occur only to become enlightened and progressive. On and on. The definition of insanity.

Posted by Dale 2021-12-12 09:04|| 2021-12-12 09:04|| Front Page Top

#5 the human race has had a tulip mania. Dot com bust. Y2k. Witch trials. Red scare. The proximate focus of each is different, the overt sameness of the gullibility is repetitive. Just as the left was able to bork Robert Bork but not repeat the feat with Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh (not for lack of trying) they will gnash their teeth when they try to foist Fauxi 2.0 and the majority of people just laugh cynically and move on.

Posted by M. Murcek 2021-12-12 13:46|| 2021-12-12 13:46|| Front Page Top

23:59 Spuck Phavith2468
23:56 Silentbrick
23:14 Herb Jones9420
23:00 Herb Jones9420
22:44 Merrick Ferret
21:44 Cleting Closh2157
21:40 Merrick Ferret
21:32 Jan
21:21 Merrick Ferret
21:06 Angstrom
21:01 Ebbomoger Speaking for Boskone4589
20:53 Merrick Ferret
20:43 Merrick Ferret
20:39 Merrick Ferret
20:37 Merrick Ferret
20:36 Rob Crawford
20:26 M. Murcek
20:04 Woodrow
20:02 Woodrow
20:01 Woodrow
20:00 Woodrow
19:59 Woodrow
19:58 Woodrow
19:57 Woodrow