science

A Shocking Revelation About Human Nature

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The results were horrifying. Nobody suspected it could be that bad, not even close.

In 1961 a controversial experiment was carried out that made some chilling discoveries about human nature. Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how it was possible that so many people co-operated to commit the atrocities of the Second World War. They couldn’t all have been sociopaths, yet thousands and thousands of people did unspeakable things to innocent people, and millions more looked the other way.

Is it really that hard to stand up to authority?

Milgram devised an experiment that went like this:

Forty subjects were recruited to participate in an experiment “on learning and memory”, having answered a newspaper ad offering a modest payment for an hour of their time. Each of the subjects were informed that they would be compensated fully as long as they showed up, regardless of their performance in the experiment.

Upon arrival, each subject met with two people. The first was a man in a white labcoat purported to be the scientist conducting the experiment. The second was another person who was supposed to be a fellow subject, but whom was actually an actor. The two subjects drew slips of paper to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” in the experiment.

It was rigged: both slips said “teacher,” so the real subject was always given the role of teacher, though he was under the impression that he’d had an equal chance of being the learner. The actor always played the learner.

The experimenter then announced that the learning was to be reinforced by electric shocks, which would be administered by the teacher on the learner whenever the learner gave an incorrect response to a simple memory test. Each teacher was given a 45-volt sample shock to get an idea of the shocks they would be giving.

The teacher was intentionally allowed to witness the learner being strapped to a chair, with electrodes fixed to him, before being ushered into the adjacent room, where he would be stationed in front of an electric shock generator. The experimenter sat behind the teacher, holding a clipboard. Read More

by David on October 27, 2010
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To My Fellow Skeptics (and Believers Too)

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The first few times I heard about God, I was already suspicious. My earliest clear memory of it was when I was five, leaning against the screen door of our small town home with my older sister, watching a midsummer thunderstorm unfold.

We were in awe, like I have been at every thunderstorm since. I don’t remember if I asked, but my sister said it was God who made the lightning and thunder. Not that she was ever religious, that’s just what her eight-year old mind told me that day. I took note.

At that point, nearly all of my ideas about God had come from Family Circus comics. The kids each prayed every night before bed, depicted casually as if it’s something every normal person does. In one comic, Dolly prays for her father to make it home safely from his trip to New York. The opposite panel shows a rainy street scene in which a six-foot translucent hand stops her Dad from stepping in front of a speeding taxi.

Seriously?

Later on, in my teenage years, I would recognize the Family Circus to be a conservative, unapologetically fundamentalist cartoon, but at the time I wasn’t aware of the play of politics in the things I read and watched. I just knew that the God they depicted didn’t make a whole lot of sense. This was the idea of God I had, and I rejected it, because it made sense to do so.

Sometime in junior high, when I was becoming more politically aware, I remember being shocked one day when I realized that ordinary adults — too old for the likes of the Family Circus — actually still believed in this God thing. Not just the crazies on televangelist shows either, but real, respectable adults who could be found in church on any given Sunday, singing hymns while looking upward with their eyes closed, really believing that they were in contact with this big translucent man, presumably when he’s not busy casting lightning bolts over my hometown, or saving Bil Keane from the natural consequences of wandering into traffic without looking both ways. Read More

by David on August 30, 2010
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What the Data Will Never Reveal

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pie chart hell

Few books have been recommended to me so frequently and gushingly as Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics. After tracking down a used copy in a musty Brisbane book exchange, I devoured it before lunch the next day.

It really is a compelling book. Its premise is that conventional wisdom is often wrong, because society’s experts use their informational advantage to serve their own interests, rather than to give us the truth. This isn’t because they’re particularly selfish, but simply because they are human beings, and like the rest of us, they operate out of personal incentives.

Armed with this insight, the authors, journalist Stephen Dubner and economist Steven Levitt aim to overturn conventional wisdom by looking at what the data actually indicates. Does capital punishment actually deter criminals? Does going to a good school really increase your kid’s chances of career success? They also scoured public records to answer other burning questions: Why do drug dealers live with their moms? Why are so many babies named Madison these days? (Hint: it has to do with a 1984 Tom Hanks movie.)

How much do parents really matter?

One of the most interesting chapters is on parenting. For decades, child development experts have been giving parents hard-worded do’s and don’ts of child-rearing, often in complete defiance of other experts, or even themselves. Should an infant sleep on his front or back? Is a pacifier an indispensable tool, or a dangerous vice? Is spanking essential for well-disciplined children, or does it teach them to be violent?

When it comes to parenting, the conventional wisdom is all over the map, but it does agree on one very broad point: that parenting technique is the crucial determining factor in the child’s success as an adult. The right parenting choices are what make the difference between bright and bleak futures for the child.

This, at least, seems self-evident, but Dubner and Levitt still questioned it. They analyzed a vast set of data about the parents of children in Chicago’s massive public school system to determine which factors matter and which don’t, as far as the child’s success was concerned. They frame this study as the answer to a provocative question: How much do parents really matter? Read More

by David on June 17, 2010
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Nature’s Dominant Creature

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A cross to bear

Though the hysteria surrounding the H1N1 flu has left the entirety of the news-watching world with the encouraging habit of frequent handwashing, it is hard to call it anything but an overreaction.

Not to dismiss the crushing impact of even one person’s death to their loved ones, but when we venture into the realm of cold numbers, H1N1 just doesn’t warrant this level of acute, global paranoia. Thus far, the worldwide toll is just short of eleven thousand. That’s equivalent to about a summer’s worth of highway deaths in the US alone, or about 18 hours’ worth of tobacco-related deaths. But that’s not news.

I won’t delve into the media’s reprehensible M.O. of manufacturing widespread panic in this article, though. The point I want to make has more to do with our place in the world. From our presumed throne at the top of the food chain, we often take it somewhat for granted that we’re a more advanced creature than any other, certainly better than anything with no brain and no face. Read More

by David on December 14, 2009
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How to Be Right All the Time

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an idea

Yesterday I came across a familiar quote on Twitter:

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

~ Thomas Edison

Then today I came across an equally interesting quote from another historical figure:

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

~ Ben Franklin

Oh.

With the information age in full swing, I see a lot of this nowadays. Two versions of the truth emerge, each as unassuming as the other.

So are we to just pick one? I guess. Which one do you believe, that’s the real question. And once you pick a belief, are you going to call it knowledge? Read More

by David on October 26, 2009
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I Won’t Kill Jake

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Jake the beetle

Meet Jake. Jake is a black-and-beige beetle I found in my bathroom garbage pail about a week ago. He seems in no hurry to leave. I don’t know what he’s been up to all week, but for now he’s residing in the maze of tissues and toilet paper rolls in my little white bucket.

For some reason, I would have killed him for this a few years ago. I always figured bugs in the house had to be executed for their trespassing. This is just what people do, but I don’t know if there’s really a good reason for it. So I’ll let him hang out in there.

I suppose the usual pretense for these killings is that bugs represent filth and disease, and it’s just not safe to let them live with us. Well, in spite of my greatest fears, Jake has never once given me a disease, or crawled in my mouth while I was sleeping. To my knowledge he has not laid eggs in my brain. He has not interfered in my life in any way.

In fact, compared to any dogs, cats or people I’ve roomed with, he’s been an outstanding guest. He doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t borrow my things, doesn’t shed on the upholstery or play bad electronic music. He doesn’t eat very much, apparently satisfied with whatever scraps remain on my spent strands of dental floss.   Read More

by David on August 3, 2009
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How I Found the Secret to Happiness While Totally Naked

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Hidden somewhere in a pile of my own bad prose and abandoned bucket lists, in a tattered grocery bag in my storage room, lies the secret to happiness and peace.

It’s scrawled on a fifty-cent note of Canadian Tire Money, in dark purple Jiffy marker. Just four potent words, but they triggered a flood of insights into my life, and started me on the long and winding road to happiness.

The night I wrote those words down, I was in trouble. I was marching down a career path that made me nauseous to think about, I had no friends nearby, no passions, no ambitions, no confidence. I had lost, by that time, any real belief in a bright future.

The optimism I’d carried so easily through grade school was a distant memory, by then as alien as photos from someone else’s life. Small obstacles completely derailed me, I expected to fail at everything, and human beings generally scared me. It was a particularly bad night in a bad year, and I was in mourning for myself.

I was also totally naked. Read More

by David on July 31, 2009
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100 Years Hence

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I’m fascinated with how our world changes over a relatively short time.  Technology, infrastructure, culture and fashion just can’t stay put for long.  Humans are so amazing because they have a habit of completely reinventing their habitat every generation or so.

Undoubtedly this is also a big reason why we are so troubled.  Every generation is faced with an environment for which their parents could not prepare them because it never existed before.  Old-fashioned values don’t always work so well when the world is continually being fashioned by the new.  “Always eat everything on your plate” may not be such great advice when today’s average portion size is triple what it was in 1950.

I guess what is most interesting to me is that the human being — the animal itself — stays more or less the same, but its tools and toys and general way of life change so completely.  I wasn’t around before 1980, but even in that short time, technology has completely revolutionized our lifestyles, with some interesting complications.  For example, who in 1991 could have predicted that by age 28 I would be spending twelve hours a week and writing on a “blog”? Read More

by David on July 13, 2009
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9 Thoughts Worthy of Immortality

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Halls of immortality

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross

I am indeed prone to hyperbole, but I’ll go ahead and say it: the advent of writing is by far the greatest tipping point in all of civilization.  Often I think about the instant in which it happened, that very first moment when a primitive person scored a few strokes on a rock face, in order to demonstrate some idea, however simple, to another cave-dweller.

It floors me that there was a specific point in time (maybe at seventeen minutes after sunrise on the 25th day of the year 42,128 B.C.) when a few people convened to attempt to relate something to each other with markings on a wall.  They could never have imagined the epic, world-changing sequence of events triggered by this tiny, innocuous act, but I suspect that each of those individuals left that little gathering with an as-yet-unprecedented sense of understanding and closeness to their peers.

That first instance of symbol-scrawling unlocked an incalculably powerful ability in humans.  Suddenly, knowledge was no longer confined to an individual’s memory.  It could be transferred, replicated, stored and accumulated.  It could be displayed in a public area, for an entire community to see and absorb into their own personal knowledge.  Each individual could now contribute their own exclusive insights and experiences to a collective, whereby everyone could gain from them.

Whatever happened that day exactly, it marked the point in time when knowledge became bigger than any one person.  Finally we could accumulate information and insight outside of our addled, vulnerable brains.  Writing made thought permanent, immortal.

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by David on April 13, 2009
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