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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

What has happened to us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Racism "Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Lead_Paint_Study#Aft... "After the study ended, many poor, African-American children ended up with neurological disabilities as a result, often incurring permanent nervous damage."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateville_Penitentiary_Malari... "The international Nuremberg Code of human experimentation ethics, which resulted from the trials, contained clauses directly violated by the Stateville experiments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto...

etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

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Well, strictly speaking this wasn't an unethical experiment in so far as that they tested for covid before, to make it safe, not after, to assess the damage.

But it gives off a certain "scientific whaling" vibe, I can't help questioning the intentions.

This reminds me of arguments against polygamy. Yes, historical examples primarily skew towards abuses of power. But no, those examples do not prove that such arrangements cannot occur consensually and ethically.

The fact that people failed in the past should not result in banning people from trying to do better in the future.

I've heard the same argument for communism. "That wasn't real communism," and I bought into this for a while. But looking at it all objectively now .. no .. China, the Soviets .. it's real communism. Cults participate in high levels of communism too.

I've been to the museums in Moldova with displays dedicated to the people who were taken to gulags. I've read about the people who starved in the Ukraine. People like Adam Curtis liked to say communism/soviets were not as great a threat as they were made out and how Regan's teams overreacted .. but I don't know now.

We are seeing active experiments with polyamory today. It's different because you don't have the legal bindings in polygamy. My hypothesis is if you offered full legal polygamy marriages, it would not turn out well long term. We could try it, sure, but it never worked in the past. You thing you're magically going to get it right this time, like modern day Marxists? I have my doubts.

Stanley Milgram preformed an experiment that was incredibly valuable and has been replicated in many countries around the world. Variations of the experiment with different results helped narrow down important factors.

Today, it's unethical to preform the Milgram experiment. Michael/vSauce did preform the actual trolley experiment for a YouTube video, which is interesting, but it was bad scientifically because the sample size was too small, the experiment changed for one person, and the ethics for the entire thing was questionable.

The Milgram experiment is largely seen as a fraud now[0].

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...

Thanks! I wasn't aware about it being a fraud.

It's not. See the other comments.

This article is about the prison experiments. The Milgram experiments are a small paragraph at the bottom and there have been a number of people trying to discredit the experiments.

I've watched the original in University with the old black and white tapes. There have been interviews with people years later who said, "I really believe I killed that person in the other room," and furthermore, it has been replicated in other countries by other researchers.

We can argue about numbers and percentages, but the idea that you can put up walls of abstraction to get people to kill others is established in other research outside of Milgram.

The Milgram experiment only proved how easy it is to fool the world by publishing lies. Read the validity section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

> The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.[6]

Even if there were problems with the original experiment (and I've read Dimow before and doubt what he's saying; there are interviews from former participants who said they really did believe they had killed the person in the other room), it's been replicated in other countries.

The Milgram experiment is complete bullshit. All it shows, if anything, is that if you put people into extremely contrived, untrustable, bizarre scenarios, you'll get some interesting responses.

That seems pretty relevant to the extremely contrived, non-representative, bizarre scenario the world finds itself in today.

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