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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Amnesty is really spending its credit on a rainbow bench, eh? At least the local hardware stores must be doing a roaring trade in paint 😁

And really, if a silly fight over painting a bench is the worst that happens, it's all good.

It’s Milgram and Robbers Cave all the way down.

Both of those were faked, if memory serves.

No? I guess you could say they were “faked” in the sense that all social science experiments are “faked”.

What I have seen are allegations that the experiments were unethical, usually framed in a way that suggests the results cannot be trusted (the suggestion is transparently bullshit. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the scientific method knows that informed consent forms make experiments less reliable). You may have been misled by one of them.

Robbers Cave was the second run at the same experiment, run specifically because the first attempt had too much cooperation between the two 'teams', and this wasn't disclosed in Sherif's paper. Worse and perhaps more critically, the paper heavily concealed the extent Sherif (in the first experiment) and OJ Harvey (in Robbers Cave proper) actively manipulated the participants to make them more aggressive or be more affected by the aggression of other participants. It's not as severely a fake as, say, Stanford Prison, but Harvey was on-record as it being a script with an intended conclusion.

Milgram had a lot of information available suggesting that a significant number of his experiment subjects knew or claimed to know that the actor was acting, enough to overturn the conclusions, along with not actually holding to his claimed experimental protocol very consistently. Which is less severe and more borderline as 'faked', but (hopefully!) worse than all social science experiments.

My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.

I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.

It's significantly realer than most social science experiments, because it's been replicated not just once but dozens of times, by different researchers in different contexts. (Though, as you note, the replications are weaker than the original experiment because there's more informed consent.)

All of these factions are just unwitting pawns of Big Paint.

Has Sherwin-Williams be accumulating seating stock in eastern Europe?

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