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Oh don't worry, we have plenty of empirical, repeated evidence to suggest humans are willing to abuse, torture and murder for spurious reasons. :)

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Peter Todd

@peterktodd

Jun 11, 2018

TIL the famous Standford Prison Experiment was a unreplicatable fraud: medium.com/s/trustissues/ and the Milgram experiment had severe errors that mean the actual torture compliance rate was probably much lower than reported: psmag.com/social-justice Hopeful for humanity really.

Cinder

@Triquetrea

Jun 15, 2018

Seriously though, the weakness of the Stanford, Milgram experiments et al. is that they suggest explanations that are deeply suspect. We know humans do bad things, but our scientific understanding of why remains bad. There are some obvious answers, but they're not comprehensive.

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the stuff they're saying about Stanford I already had heard... it was known.

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Since forever. But, you know, it doesn't mean Nazism never happened, doesn't mean the US army isn't torturing people all over the place... etc.

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and

Pretty difficult to claim people *don't* follow orders for fucked-up reasons, abuse authority and so on. It's all the explanations of motive, phenomenology etc. that is suspect. We know it happens. We don't know how or why, or at least these studies provide no plausible answer.

12:24 PM · Jun 15, 2018Twitter Web Client