People sometimes ask me is how to change the world, in my context in a libertarian direction. One of my answers is that, because of rational ignorance, political outcomes are largely determined by free information, what everyone knows, true or false. One way of changing outcomes is by putting ideas in an entertaining and easily remembered form so that they will be remembered, repeated, spread, become part of what everyone knows.
Remember how Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" and space based anti-missile detection and interception was derided and re-headlined as "Star Wars" -- as if a new technology were fantasy fiction disguised as science?
On going, there is the reference to child-protective school management as "Don't Say Gay" laws, or censoring school books, or abolishing "safe spaces". On the flip side there's enormous push back against efforts call premature sexualization of students "grooming".
How 'bout calling castration and mastectomy "Gender Affirming Care" ? For that matter, what about calling ending an unwanted but accidentally incurred pregnancy "Family Planning"?
Fortunately we've seen the Left flounder in establishing a catchy label for the nexus of their plans for energy and the environment. "Global Warming" gave way to "Climate Change" to "The Climate Crisis" to "Global Weirding" to "The Climate Emergency" to, lately, giving up entirely on the consequences to the Climate and demanding we "Just Stop Oil!" ( But, "No Pressure") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx0YUTUcNpA
A lot of famous psychology experiments - the Stanford prison experiment, the people who said once they had auditory hallucinations who then couldn't get out of an asylum, etc. Just made up.
The Milgram experiment was the only one where I found the takedown unconvincing - subjects later saying they knew it was fake, when they had every inventive to lie to themselves and others about that, isn't great evidence. If they thought it was probably fake, but still kept on pressing the button, that doesn't really invalidate the point of the experiment - thinking there's as little as a 10% chance you're torturing someone, and keeping on going, when there's literally no downside to stopping, is still very disturbing. As it would be if they had thought there was no chance they were actually torturing someone, thereby ignoring the direct evidence of their senses. The experiment may have been simplified in the retelling, but I think it holds up, and remains important. Great shame it could never now be replicated.
I agree about the incentive — we don't know if they really thought it was fake or not. But if Milgram repeated the experiments many times and only reported the one with the most extreme result, he was misrepresenting the strength of his conclusion.
I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Milgram was clear that "the crux of the study is to systematically vary the factors believed to alter the degree of obedience to the experimental commands" (from his 1963 paper). The 1963 paper is the famous one, but he published a number of others (which I haven't read) and in the 1963 paper he refers to the fact that altering the conditions of the experiment (by holding the experiment somewhere other than an impressive laboratory on the grounds of Yale) had in a separate experiment diminished the willingness of subjects to obey authority. He sets out a list of nine factors he believes would alter the willingness of subjects to obey, and states his intention to conduct further experiments - and an endnote in the copy of the paper I managed to find (in chapter 9 of the book Social Influence) states that he had recently published some of these experiments, in a 1965 paper.
In these circumstances, I don't think it's unreasonable for Milgram to have published his most extreme results in a separate paper, clearly setting out the factors which in his opinion had led them to be so extreme, and publishing the results of variant experiments in other papers. Ideally he would have published replications, but you can't have everything. I also don't think it's unreasonable for the most extreme results to have been the most widely publicised - they remain genuinely shocking.
As a side note, having just read the 1963 paper, the statistic that 65% of people obeyed the experimenter understates the results of the experiment. All of the subjects continued administering shocks through twenty increasing levels of voltage, marked from "Slight Shock" (15 to 60 Volts), through "Moderate Shock", "Strong Shock", and "Very Strong Shock", to "Intense Shock" (255 to 300 Volts). They had been told that the shocks could be extremely painful. It was only after the 20th increase in shock level, when the actor-victim "pounds on the wall", and after which the next step up is marked "Extreme Intensity Shock", that 5 of the 40 stopped obeying. From that point on the actor-victim didn't respond to the questions asked in the supposed learning task, and apart from one further incident of pounding on the wall at the 21st voltage level, stopped responding at all (the subject was told to administer a shock if there was no response). There were 30 levels in total; 65% of the subjects continued to press the switch for all of them, despite not having had a response of any kind for nine levels, and no response to the questions (in what they had been told was a study about "the effect punishment will have on learning") for ten levels - these moving through "Extreme Intensity Shock", "Danger: Severe Shock" and "XXX".
Thinking a bit longer, I think David understates the situation on "Subliminal Messaging".
I suspect part of what had the idea catch on was the book by Wilson Key, "Subliminal SEDUCTION" that purported to find the "drink Coke" sort of message embedded alongside subtle images of naked ladies or copulating couples disguised in photos of ice fragments or distorted reflections of lake water. Just the whole "seduction" concept, with those sexual / sexy implications, spread the concept to many beyond those who encountered either Key or Vickary.
On the topic of Hoover, it's worth noting that in 1932, Roosevelt railed against his spendthrift ways and campaigned on reducing federal expenditures by 25%:
I think Frank R Kent, a leading political reporter from the 1930's, said FDR fired 200k Hoover Republicans on taking office, then hired 500k and counting FDR Democrats. I can't track down the quote in 'Without Gloves' or 'Without Grease', the collection of Kent's columns I think I read this in.
But if true, then FDR started by cutting overall spending.
re: smallpox-infected blankets, from what I can tell it was 18th century British colonists (rather than 19th C. US army) that attempted this biological warfare (probably unsuccessfully):
Thanks - more please! And 2+ cheers for Warren Harding, who’s served as a whipping boy since Mencken made sport with him. As the pendulum of historical approbation swings he should pick up a few solid rehab points for pardoning Eugene Debs and rescinding Wilson’s executive order segregating the military. So how about more on that interesting bit you cited? The historical record re FDR’s experiments is less than completely positive and the contrasting approach deserves more ink for sure.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is the wire-mother/cloth-mother experiments of Harlowe's, where, if in distress the infant monkeys would run to the cloth "mother" for comfort, even if they had not ever been a source of food.
That left a pretty unforgettable impression on me from when I saw it referenced on Nova or in some documentary, growing up.
I'd like to say "because it was a dramatic illustration that successfully blasted a blind reductionism which... some part of our (intellectual?) culture is shockingly prone to." (though I wouldn't have put it into those words at the time!) The point of that experiment's presence in whatever documentary I saw was: "Hey, it's not ONLY food and water that is needed for sustenance & thriving! The baby monkeys seemed to preferentially choose the 'mothers' that provided NO FOOD but were comfortingly soft to the touch." (I have to wonder if, as technological advances progress, people often wonder, "How many things can we remove* from the traditional processes?") But ACTUALLY, it might have been so memorable because the topic of imprinting young animals was already of fascination to me, and here was someone doing experiments involving something I already knew about.
Because--to go with one of your favorite themes--as I kid, I had chosen to read up on imprinting for reasons of my own! I was interested in birds and horses. I had read about the excruciating process of taming a wild-caught parrot, so the contrast with "However, if you hand-raise a baby bird, it will 'bond' onto you naturally" seemed utterly magical. At first read, that was fascinating and aspirational: I didn't know I'd raise cockatiels or ponies as a teenager.
Much of the info I'd read on imprinting was utterly pragmatic: Explanations of how to hand-feed a clutch of aviary-hatched chicks, or how you should get a newborn foal accustomed to human touch. The wire-mother/cloth-mother experiment came to me from a science documentary that I was forced to watch by my dad--but here it was discussing one of "my topics." (Also, I don't -think- I initially had a strong reaction to the cruelty inherent to the experimental design. When you're reading a mystery story, you're not usually in a mode where you're lamenting that, at the core of the story, a human's life has been taken. In the same way, I think this presentation first evoked my curiosity. Though just having a bottle for milk hanging off of a wire construction is really stark, so maybe my brain was gnawing away at the image?)
* And then some of them we figure out we need to add back in--like niacin and thiamine.
I'm not sure the experiment really shows that what the baby monkeys wanted was a mother soft to the touch. The alternative explanation is that what they wanted was a mother and they had various hardwired rules for recognizing a mother, of which "feels furry" was one. There might be others, such as smell or sound.
I regret recognizing that many of the best examples of this process originate from the Left.
Remember the success of making the name "Santorum" a sexual slur?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_the_neologism_%22santorum%22
Remember how Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" and space based anti-missile detection and interception was derided and re-headlined as "Star Wars" -- as if a new technology were fantasy fiction disguised as science?
On going, there is the reference to child-protective school management as "Don't Say Gay" laws, or censoring school books, or abolishing "safe spaces". On the flip side there's enormous push back against efforts call premature sexualization of students "grooming".
How 'bout calling castration and mastectomy "Gender Affirming Care" ? For that matter, what about calling ending an unwanted but accidentally incurred pregnancy "Family Planning"?
Fortunately we've seen the Left flounder in establishing a catchy label for the nexus of their plans for energy and the environment. "Global Warming" gave way to "Climate Change" to "The Climate Crisis" to "Global Weirding" to "The Climate Emergency" to, lately, giving up entirely on the consequences to the Climate and demanding we "Just Stop Oil!" ( But, "No Pressure") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx0YUTUcNpA
A lot of famous psychology experiments - the Stanford prison experiment, the people who said once they had auditory hallucinations who then couldn't get out of an asylum, etc. Just made up.
The Milgram experiment was the only one where I found the takedown unconvincing - subjects later saying they knew it was fake, when they had every inventive to lie to themselves and others about that, isn't great evidence. If they thought it was probably fake, but still kept on pressing the button, that doesn't really invalidate the point of the experiment - thinking there's as little as a 10% chance you're torturing someone, and keeping on going, when there's literally no downside to stopping, is still very disturbing. As it would be if they had thought there was no chance they were actually torturing someone, thereby ignoring the direct evidence of their senses. The experiment may have been simplified in the retelling, but I think it holds up, and remains important. Great shame it could never now be replicated.
I agree about the incentive — we don't know if they really thought it was fake or not. But if Milgram repeated the experiments many times and only reported the one with the most extreme result, he was misrepresenting the strength of his conclusion.
I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Milgram was clear that "the crux of the study is to systematically vary the factors believed to alter the degree of obedience to the experimental commands" (from his 1963 paper). The 1963 paper is the famous one, but he published a number of others (which I haven't read) and in the 1963 paper he refers to the fact that altering the conditions of the experiment (by holding the experiment somewhere other than an impressive laboratory on the grounds of Yale) had in a separate experiment diminished the willingness of subjects to obey authority. He sets out a list of nine factors he believes would alter the willingness of subjects to obey, and states his intention to conduct further experiments - and an endnote in the copy of the paper I managed to find (in chapter 9 of the book Social Influence) states that he had recently published some of these experiments, in a 1965 paper.
In these circumstances, I don't think it's unreasonable for Milgram to have published his most extreme results in a separate paper, clearly setting out the factors which in his opinion had led them to be so extreme, and publishing the results of variant experiments in other papers. Ideally he would have published replications, but you can't have everything. I also don't think it's unreasonable for the most extreme results to have been the most widely publicised - they remain genuinely shocking.
As a side note, having just read the 1963 paper, the statistic that 65% of people obeyed the experimenter understates the results of the experiment. All of the subjects continued administering shocks through twenty increasing levels of voltage, marked from "Slight Shock" (15 to 60 Volts), through "Moderate Shock", "Strong Shock", and "Very Strong Shock", to "Intense Shock" (255 to 300 Volts). They had been told that the shocks could be extremely painful. It was only after the 20th increase in shock level, when the actor-victim "pounds on the wall", and after which the next step up is marked "Extreme Intensity Shock", that 5 of the 40 stopped obeying. From that point on the actor-victim didn't respond to the questions asked in the supposed learning task, and apart from one further incident of pounding on the wall at the 21st voltage level, stopped responding at all (the subject was told to administer a shock if there was no response). There were 30 levels in total; 65% of the subjects continued to press the switch for all of them, despite not having had a response of any kind for nine levels, and no response to the questions (in what they had been told was a study about "the effect punishment will have on learning") for ten levels - these moving through "Extreme Intensity Shock", "Danger: Severe Shock" and "XXX".
Google "replication crisis".
I think you're mistaken in your views on Hoover, Harding, and the Great Depression. See https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-great-depression-from-the-perspective-of-today-and-today-from-the-perspective-of-the-great-depression.html, https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/more-on-1921/, https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/07/what-was-herbert-hoovers-fiscal-policy.html
>Brad Delong
>Paul Krugman
Bruh
You haven't dealt with the arguments. Bruh.
Thinking a bit longer, I think David understates the situation on "Subliminal Messaging".
I suspect part of what had the idea catch on was the book by Wilson Key, "Subliminal SEDUCTION" that purported to find the "drink Coke" sort of message embedded alongside subtle images of naked ladies or copulating couples disguised in photos of ice fragments or distorted reflections of lake water. Just the whole "seduction" concept, with those sexual / sexy implications, spread the concept to many beyond those who encountered either Key or Vickary.
On the topic of Hoover, it's worth noting that in 1932, Roosevelt railed against his spendthrift ways and campaigned on reducing federal expenditures by 25%:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-address-the-federal-budget-pittsburgh-pennsylvania
I think Frank R Kent, a leading political reporter from the 1930's, said FDR fired 200k Hoover Republicans on taking office, then hired 500k and counting FDR Democrats. I can't track down the quote in 'Without Gloves' or 'Without Grease', the collection of Kent's columns I think I read this in.
But if true, then FDR started by cutting overall spending.
I thought the nuclear winter idea was true. The only issue I could see with it is that it would instantly correct any global warming.
So I figured the pro - global warming people would be unwilling to push it, because it would make people worry less about global warming.
So I figured it must be true.
Also, I enjoyed the proof that you went viral. Very economist of you!
re: smallpox-infected blankets, from what I can tell it was 18th century British colonists (rather than 19th C. US army) that attempted this biological warfare (probably unsuccessfully):
https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/faq#lordjeff
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
Not colonists but British military. And it isn't clear if it was done or only proposed.
I mentioned it in a footnote to my post, although I thought it was in Canada.
Thanks - more please! And 2+ cheers for Warren Harding, who’s served as a whipping boy since Mencken made sport with him. As the pendulum of historical approbation swings he should pick up a few solid rehab points for pardoning Eugene Debs and rescinding Wilson’s executive order segregating the military. So how about more on that interesting bit you cited? The historical record re FDR’s experiments is less than completely positive and the contrasting approach deserves more ink for sure.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is the wire-mother/cloth-mother experiments of Harlowe's, where, if in distress the infant monkeys would run to the cloth "mother" for comfort, even if they had not ever been a source of food.
That left a pretty unforgettable impression on me from when I saw it referenced on Nova or in some documentary, growing up.
Do you know if it's true? I don't.
Why is it interesting? Aside from reacting to the cruelty of the experiments, why did reading about it leave an unforgettable impression?
I'd like to say "because it was a dramatic illustration that successfully blasted a blind reductionism which... some part of our (intellectual?) culture is shockingly prone to." (though I wouldn't have put it into those words at the time!) The point of that experiment's presence in whatever documentary I saw was: "Hey, it's not ONLY food and water that is needed for sustenance & thriving! The baby monkeys seemed to preferentially choose the 'mothers' that provided NO FOOD but were comfortingly soft to the touch." (I have to wonder if, as technological advances progress, people often wonder, "How many things can we remove* from the traditional processes?") But ACTUALLY, it might have been so memorable because the topic of imprinting young animals was already of fascination to me, and here was someone doing experiments involving something I already knew about.
Because--to go with one of your favorite themes--as I kid, I had chosen to read up on imprinting for reasons of my own! I was interested in birds and horses. I had read about the excruciating process of taming a wild-caught parrot, so the contrast with "However, if you hand-raise a baby bird, it will 'bond' onto you naturally" seemed utterly magical. At first read, that was fascinating and aspirational: I didn't know I'd raise cockatiels or ponies as a teenager.
Much of the info I'd read on imprinting was utterly pragmatic: Explanations of how to hand-feed a clutch of aviary-hatched chicks, or how you should get a newborn foal accustomed to human touch. The wire-mother/cloth-mother experiment came to me from a science documentary that I was forced to watch by my dad--but here it was discussing one of "my topics." (Also, I don't -think- I initially had a strong reaction to the cruelty inherent to the experimental design. When you're reading a mystery story, you're not usually in a mode where you're lamenting that, at the core of the story, a human's life has been taken. In the same way, I think this presentation first evoked my curiosity. Though just having a bottle for milk hanging off of a wire construction is really stark, so maybe my brain was gnawing away at the image?)
* And then some of them we figure out we need to add back in--like niacin and thiamine.
I'm not sure the experiment really shows that what the baby monkeys wanted was a mother soft to the touch. The alternative explanation is that what they wanted was a mother and they had various hardwired rules for recognizing a mother, of which "feels furry" was one. There might be others, such as smell or sound.
Not a huge fan of self-serving "research" but entirely right about old Ehrlich:
https://www.mattball.org/2023/01/wrong-about-everything-yet-still.html