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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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