There is a bagel place near where I grew up that had a strange link to a double homicide. Basically one partner owed another partner half a million dollars and the owed partner, along with his wife, wound up dead. The other partner faked his death and fled to California. The police arrested the murdered couple's son and convinced him that he killed his own parents, threw him in jail and locked away the key. It was 17 years before he would be let free of crimes virtually everyone in the community knew he did not commit.
There was a great article in the New Yorker about police interrogation techniques and how they can influence people to confess to crimes (and the studies that explain why people would falsely confess).
This is probably the most important point I remember from "The Demon-Haunted World", in which Carl Sagan repeatedly demonstrates that human memory is completely unreliable, and that false memories can even be accidentally created by a therapist. People who say they've been abducted by aliens usually aren't lying; they genuinely believe it.
There's also this article: [The Reykjavik Confessions – The mystery of why six people admitted roles in two murders - when they couldn't remember anything about the crimes.](http://www.bbc.com/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.htm...)
It gives a great inside how the investigation may have affected the suspects.
Is convincing people they committed a crime really ethical? My self-image as a pretty peaceable, pretty honest person is fairly important to me: if I suddenly "remembered" a time when I stole from or attacked someone (with a weapon, no less) I'd be certainly upset, possibly traumatised.
Can anyone really give meaningful consent for an exercise like this? They paid the participants $50, but presumably they couldn't tell them exactly what was going on, or it wouldn't have worked.
There are a lot of guidelines around the use of deception in research. See section 8.07 of the American Psychological Association's Code of Conduct, for example: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/?item=11#807
In this case, I don't have access to the full text of the paper, but the "supplementary materials" are freely available, including the scripts that were used for the interviews and debriefing process. Some choice quotes:
"We predicted that in a significant proportion of participants, we could convince them that childhood events happened when in fact they did not. There is no reason for you to feel any more susceptible to such processes than anyone else (if applicable). This is a completely normal, common occurrence." ... "If at this point you would like to withdraw your data from the study, you are able to do so without penalty." ... "If you feel that you suffered any distress as a result of this study, please let us know as we can arrange to have a counsellor speak to you. No-one will have access to your identity or specific information you provided except for the study coders."
Well, if the research can prove and point out to the general public that this kind of false memory already widely affects serious matters such as criminal investigation it is probably okay.
As a society we seem to weight positive harm much more heavily than negative consequences averted. It might not be the best way of looking at things but it seems to be a deeply ingrained aspect of human nature.
Well in this case it is weighing up potential benefits for everyone forever vs some negative for a few people. How we respond to that depends on our individual ethical dispositions
Of course. Debilitating a few dozen people is nothing compared to the harm caused by cancer and heart disease, and if we had a choice between the two it would be wrong to pick the greater evil.
Is the premise of the question that choosing inaction adverts culpability, in a situation where either outcome is abhorrent? But inaction has only the appearance of innocence: if you really have the choice of which outcome will occur, you cannot absolve yourself of responsibility by going with a default. The fact that the greater evil is the status quo doesn't make it a more ethical choice.
>> "Of course. Debilitating a few dozen people is nothing compared to the harm caused by cancer and heart disease, and if we had a choice between the two it would be wrong to pick the greater evil."
You say that like it's fact but it's your opinion based on your ethics. There's also information we don't know. Are these people volunteering or being selected against their will? Either way it would also be fine to argue that the rights of those people are so important that society can't debilitate them even if it solves cancer and heart disease. Everybody has to die of something so why ruin these peoples lives when the people saved by not getting heart disease/cancer die from something else anyway?
The first time I watched that video I got disturbed of how easy you can get in trouble. I asked a lawyer friend and he told me the stories you see in the news are more common than people think.
We played a trick on my friend Jerry that I worked with in the military. The previous night we had a few drinks and then called it a night and walked home together.
Jerry, in the morning mentioned to someone that his shoulder really hurt, but he couldn't remember hurting it.
We came up with a plan that morning to convince Jerry that he had been sideswiped by a taxi, and got into a fight with a taxi driver. We emailed everyone we were with the night before, explained to them what we were doing, and started planting that idea in Jerry's mind.
At first he claimed that it never happened. He kept saying he knew we were just fucking with him.
More and more people corroborated the story. We even had a military police officer call him on the phone to inquire about the incident. We got his boss to sit him down and have a talk with him about his problem with alcohol (he doesn't drink that much).
Eventually as the story was repeated to him by everyone, especially people with authority, Jerry went from:
"this never happened.. I only had two beer last night"
to: "hmm... maybe I was really drunk after all... but I don't remember anything"
to: "Yeah... I remember everything now! How could I have forgotten before? Crazy!?!?"
He turned our story into real memories and even started adding his own details to the story. We thought that was hilarious.
That night we all got together and told Jerry that it was all just a joke. He couldn't believe it. He argued with us that he was sure it did happen. He remembered it. When he finally accepted it he felt really dumb, but it was a really fun day at work for us, so definitely worth it.
This happens conversely as well, where the person would remember a rosy version of events in which they themselves acted quite badly in actuality. Just because a person believes they did not do something bad doesn't mean they didn't. It has led me to automatically put into doubt stories people tell me that I did not witness myself.
If false memories can be planted in those who are accused, it can be done to witnesses too, so that they swear that the shriveled nonagenarian in the courtroom is the same person as the guard in that Nazi camp more than sixty years ago.
It's one of the things that seems extremely weird if you consider humans to be what they say they are ... and dead normal if you realize what humans actually are.
How memory works, according to humanity : we store all data input in our mind, where it stays. Every now and again some data disappears or is overwritten.
5 seconds of thinking about how a mind looks and what it does will leave you with 100 very hard questions about how you could possibly make that happen in a neural network.
How memory works, the real version : you "learn" memory. When a person is presented with a pointer to a specific point in time or a specific event, his mind then reconstructs the memory by repeatedly asking the question "what happened next ?". All the data produced comes from the predictor, not from actual memory.
So what is actually stored in your memory ? Well useful things. Not an index of dates combined with what happened. But "I start my day, then wash my teeth, then make a piece of toast, then ..."
"What did you do yesterday ?"
("conversation" in someone's mind starts happening :
"well obviously I woke up. Then what ?
I washed my teeth. Ok, then what ?
interrogator interrupts
You ate a biscuit
your mind
Ok that sounds reasonable, and I'm not all that sure at all. He may be right. I'll go with it)
Memory changed. Next time you remember it will be a lot easier to go with the changed memory.
When you remember something, the memory is not "recalled" like on a computer, but recreated from scratch. You start with a specific event (that itself may or may not have happened, but it must be quite normal for it to happen so the predictor doesn't see it as too unlikely). Because external persons can both contribute and interfere with the recreation process it can be used to change memories (your mind doesn't separate multiple inputs, so if a person is talking when you're recalling, it influences the recall process). You want your memory to be accurate, spend a while with extremely limited inputs first.
Because of how the predictor works, it "synchronizes" with other people's predictors (nothing magical, it simply predicts what the other person's mind is doing and takes that into account). But that results in that if you have extreme uncertainty about an event and the person you're talking to feels very strongly about it, your mind will be quite likely to follow the other person's convictions.
Keep doing this, and you can convince someone they're a monster (note: requires that the interrogator believes that to be true, builds trust and avoids firing the "bullshit detector" and even then large changes require quite a bit of time)
There are a few more of these things that are quite normal, given that our minds copy others' behaviors, but people find extremely hard to believe. The one I have refused to believe for the longest time was that people who get abused, whether by a military, simply be economic situation, or even when kidnapped, initially want to get out. But if the situation persists, the no longer want the abuse to stop. They want to become the abuser (because that person is the person their mind most often gives attention to). For a behavior copy "machine", this is expected and normal. In psychology this simple fact has been known for centuries. Many other counterintuitive facts become easy to explain (e.g. why commercials work).
Did this moment actually happen previously and your remembering it again, or is a chemical reaction in your brain tricking you into thinking you've had this thought before?
Deja-Vu is actually something else, it's a phenomenon that is apparently triggered by the different lengths of travel that information can take through the brain, causing the same information to be presented twice, once directly from the source and once indirectly.
Any chance of a reference for that? I'm in the middle of adapting a story about this and haven't heard this idea before, I'd love to learn more about it.
"Another theory is based on the way our brain processes new information and how it stores long- and short-term memories. Robert Efron tested an idea at the Veterans Hospital in Boston in 1963 that stands as a valid theory today. He proposed that a delayed neurological response causes déjà vu. Because information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than one path, it is possible that occasionally that blending of information might not synchronize correctly.
Efron found that the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere is responsible for sorting incoming information. He also found that the temporal lobe receives this incoming information twice with a slight (milliseconds-long) delay between transmissions -- once directly and once again after its detour through the right hemisphere of the brain. If that second transmission is delayed slightly longer, then the brain might put the wrong timestamp on that bit of information and register it as a previous memory because it had already been processed. That could explain the sudden sense of familiarity."
The article contains a lot of other theories about the origin of Deja-Vu as well but that one seems to have stood the test of time very well.
If you read it from another source and remember anything else about deja vu, don't suppose you recall anything about this: I don't think I've experienced a pure deja vu since I was a child (so 10-15 years), but since then I do get - not frequently, but every now and then - what I call "double deja vu"s, i.e. instead of thinking I've seen/whatever something before, I think I've had deja vu of something before. So it feels like this is the 3rd time, not the 2nd.
Never found any information on or even many other people reporting this though.
There is a strong correlation between people experiencing frequent deja-vu and epilepsy. The reason I remembered all this is that a friends child was diagnosed with epilepsy a while ago and I read everything I could on the subject and one of the offshoots of all that reading was a bunch of stuff about deja-vu.
Maybe that would be a good starting subject for some 'light reading'.
Original sin was conceived of as a way to explain and deal with the everyday depravity of the time period. It was often described that people had weird, strange urges they couldn't understand or control. Christian atonement (prayer is nothing if not a form of meditation) was thus an early form of personal development. Later on, after people and modern society started to mature this got recast as a tool for social control.
Social justice philosophy does not make the claim that everyone is racist / sexist. The claim is that injustice and prejudice are institutionalized, and so there exist entire lines of thought, patterns of behavior, and such that arose out of the institutionalized bigotry that never would have existed without it.
To take a currently-topical example, the comic book store article. The author of the article came violently face-to-face with institutionalized sexism and what happens when you allow the economy to structure itself with a completely free hand.
You can debate the merits of whether this structure is right or wrong, whether comic book store owners should feel guilty about it and obligate themselves to change, and that's an important discussion to have; but the real issue is the fact that nobody knows about these consequences until they have this kind of enlightening moment.
Sexism is institutionalized in a way that nobody really digs into or understands it and can live their entire lives without appreciating the consequences it has on everyone. Is everyone racist / sexist? The question itself is a red herring, the real issue is this institutionalization.
The solution to institutional injustice being what? I really feel for the folks trying to address the problem, but I've yet to see a solution based on a solid root cause analysis. I completely agree with your point on the "enlightening moment", it is quite an experience when your world view suddenly shifts due to new information.
I would say that the root cause is ignorance at the human level, which gets incorporated into institutions - which are slow in adapting to social evolution. These institutions end up acting as drogues, slowing social progress.
It might be time for us to evaluate the value of these institutions vs the cost. I doubt any of this is novel to somebody who a studied the problem, so I wonder why the solutions posed always seem to be bolt-ons.
The only real solution that could ever be effective is to raise enough awareness of institutionalized bigotry so there's a critical mass of people interested in real change. Realistically this means that issues will get raised and dealt with on smaller scales, slowly bringing awareness to more and more people. Over time more and more people will clamor for the destruction of cultural traditions rooted in bigotry.
Which is precisely what's happening. The tech community, with its forward-thinking outlook, has become a foremost battleground. The larger feminist movement has been grappling with trying to include more men among their numbers, the vast majority of them just tune out feminist ideology.
You can't destroy institutions. What you can do is change peoples' consciousness so social injustices within those institutions gain attention instead of being ignored.
Sounds like the plan is just more bolt-ons. Unless we are converging on a universally preferable society, this is a struggle that will go on forever as society evolves. I do agree that institutions can't be destroyed, as they're simply abstract concepts, but they can be disarmed in such a way that their influence is inconsequential (from the perspective of voluntary association).
I do think the future is bright, the free exchange of information being key.
It's a messy solution to a messy problem. I do think eventually sexism will go the way of eugenics. Replaced with another social struggle. There will always be some people aware of how things could be better that have the motivation to raise awareness.
Thankfully I am a programmer and not a social worker, because that perspective seems totally unacceptable to me. It feels like the Windows 98 solution - instead of figuring out the cause of infrequent bluescreens, just reboot, save often and hope that the problem is resolved in the next release :)
sighsigh, you appear to have been hellbanned for the first comment in this thread, which was flagged enough times to get it killed. I can't reply directly to your posts for this reason. Your posts won't show up on people's pages unless individual posters have showdead turned on in their profile. I suggest you find a different outlet for your views.
I would suggest you figure out how to have a real conversation with someone instead of just spouting off whatever vaguely-logical, overly-reactionary BS that's on your mind, but it doesn't look like you're interested in that. Best of luck to you.
You got four down votes but also a lot of flags. You won't see the number of flags you got like you do the down votes.
Precision and accuracy aren't always possible within the constraints of a discussion. One has to learn to operate without them.
But I'll indulge you one more time. "Racist" is a highly charged word. It should be reserved for those who truly deserve the label, i.e. Nazis and modern white supremacists. Unfortunately marginalizing just those people doesn't solve the problem. There's plenty of subtle behaviors and attitudes that don't quite reach the level of the white supremacist but still contributes to an overall lower opinion of black Americans than of white Americans.
This phenomenon needs to be studied and understood, because it's a big problem and contributes to generational poverty. A workplace that one wouldn't call overtly racist can still have their black employees make less than their white employees for the same work. The phrase that the social justice movement has decided on to call this phenomenon is institutionalized racism. It's racism, but no one person or group of people is the culprit, instead it survives because people don't care enough to examine how or why they make certain decisions.
> Good to know social justice inquisition can be conducted without actually engaging with someone. Silence the infidel! He speaks heresy!
There does seem to be a quasi-religious aspect to the social justice movement. I consider it a feature rather than a bug. Just be glad it's not a real inquisition. If you think this is bad...
> Institutions can be precisely and accurately defined. We can start with units of individuals.
Okay, let's give this a shot. How about the institution of Hollywood? You have the film makers, actors, film crew, producers. Then you have the major studios, the lawyers. How about the accountants? Are they part of the institution? They work on location in the industry, so let's throw them in.
What about the cinemas? They're not in Hollywood proper, but they license the movies and make a profit off of them. Doesn't feel completely right, but lets add them in too.
The people that go to the cinemas? They're the ones that keep the system going, that ultimately decide what movies get made. Feels even less right, but let's throw them in for good measure.
People that watch movies and television? You mean, "everyone"? That's the problem with your approach. The line that says whether someone's in an institution or not is always going to be at least somewhat arbitrary. Institutions are intended to be this way, to have wide-ranging social effects.
What about the institution of slavery? Is everyone that profited from slavery a part of the institution? If so, you're back at "it's no one's fault". If not, you're ultimately being arbitrary as to who is contributing to an institution.
I hope this satisfies your desire for precision. I spent five paragraphs outlining one specific concept. Imagine if I had to do this for everything you bring up in your long posts. I'd need even more words to be as precise as you'd want me to be. That's why I said precision and accuracy aren't always possible. It was as precise as I could convey that concept without writing a book about it.
Now that I've spilled all these words on one topic, I find myself with little left in the tank for the rest of your points. Now I shall silence and marginalize and conduct a crusade against you by not replying to any of your future posts. Think about that for a moment.
take heart in the fact that this random reader found your exploration of "What is an institution if you can't say who is an is not a part of it?" enlightening and will probably use your words in some later conversation.
Yeah, I think of troll-feeding as an excellent opportunity to think more deeply about things that I hadn't really considered previously. The problem is that, at least in this community, it produces these crazy ginormous threads that totally overtake the rest of the discussion. And to be honest, most people don't do it well at all. So not only is there this huge blob, but there's nothing really interesting in it.
Not every form of discourse is appropriate for every forum.
Makes me wonder if this might be put to more productive use. Like, convincing people that they don't habitually talk during movies thus making them stop?
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Is further research not needed? Is there any reason not to continue to raise the level of awareness by the general public to this phenomenon?
[1]http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm [2]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?g...