
The Behavioral Sink (2011) - newest
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
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Igelau
That was a lot darker than I thought it was going to be. With a name like
Cabinet Magazine, I thought I was going to read about a better kitchen sink.

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MarkusQ
And apparently no one thought to suggest that the problem was inbreeding?

~~~
gwern
No, people did, and also pointed out the possibility of contagious disease.
Calhoun just ignored them, doing nothing to prevent or check, and ignored the
results when people did similar experiments with less-inbred populations while
not getting the same results.

I looked into Mouse Utopia in part because this article gets shared a lot (
[https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-
utopia](https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia) ), and Wiles did not do
his homework, and makes a lot of false statements. For example:

> He had been building utopian environments for rats and mice since the 1940s,
> with thoroughly consistent results. Heaven always turned into hell.

Completely false. Calhoun's 1940s experiments were not utopia experiments as
Wiles implies, and his utopia experiments were not consistent and he reported
only cursorily on a handful of them (hence Wiles's heavy dependence on the
SciAm popularization) before the NIMH effectively fired him for reasons which
remain unclear.

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keeganpoppen
takes kind of a strange person to make even a single "rat city" on a quarter-
acre plot next to one's house, much less the 24 (presumably) successive rat
"utopias"... what a strange (great) story.

