Hey would you mind killing that patient for me thnx
Links 'n' updates
This is the quarterly links and updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.
(1) HEY WOULD YOU MIND KILLING THAT PATIENT FOR ME THNX
Everybody knows about the Milgram shock experiments, but I had never heard of the Hofling hospital study, which basically did Milgram in the field.
A guy introducing himself as “Dr. Smith” would call into the ward and ask a nurse to administer a mega dose of “Astroten” to a patient. The nurses had never met Dr. Smith (because he was made up), they had never dispensed Astroten (because it was also made up), they weren’t supposed to take orders over the phone, and the bottle itself clearly indicated that Dr. Smith’s requested dose was double the daily limit. When this situation was described to a sample of nurses in a separate study, almost all of them insisted that they would refuse the order. And yet 21/22 nurses who were subjected to the real situation made it all the way to the patient’s room with their overdose in tow before the research team stopped them.
In a sort-of replication 11 years later, 16/18 nurses protested in some way when a “little-known” doctor called and asked them to administer way too much Valium to a patient. Still, most of the nurses got pretty close to giving it, and nearly half of them said they would have continued if the doctor insisted.
People have tried to debunk the Milgram studies, but those debunkings have failed because they miss the whole point of experiments like these. It’s not that people are blindly obedient. It’s that we live in a world where the folks around us are usually acting normal and doing reasonable things, and it would be impolite, weird, and annoying to second-guess them all the time, so we generally don’t.
(2) BACK THAT PAPAL ASS UP
People always think the end times are around the corner (see my recent posts: 1, 2), but to be fair, they sometimes have good reasons. For instance, around the year 1500, there were terrifying reports of “monstrosities” being born—abominable creatures never seen before on Earth, whose arrival could only herald the coming apocalypse. The grandaddy of these was the “Papal Ass,” a Frankenstein of different beasts that supposedly washed up on the Tiber River in 1496.
Word on the street was that the Papal Ass was sent by God to demonstrate the depravity of Pope Alexander VI, AKA Rodrigo de Borgia. Pope Alex had indeed done some non-popely things, like having a bunch of illegitimate children, maybe killing off some of his political enemies, and making his 17-year-old son Cesare a cardinal. He is perhaps best known for appearing in Assassin’s Creed II, where he zaps the player with a magic staff.
(3) YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TOOTH
On the other hand, sometimes weird births could be good omens. For instance, in 1595, a child was born in Silesia (now mostly Poland) with a golden tooth. A certain Dr. Horst investigated and made this report:
at the birth of the child the sun was in conjunction with Saturn, at the sign Aries. The event, therefore, though supernatural, was by no means alarming. The golden tooth was the precursor of a golden age, in which the emperor would drive the Turks from Christendom, and lay the foundations of an empire that would last for a thousand years.
(4) DUI AS I SAY, NOT AS I DUI
On Christmas Eve 2020, the New York State Representative Brian Kolb wrote an op-ed warning people not to drive drunk over the holidays. On New Years Eve 2020, he got drunk and drove his state-issued SUV into a ditch.
(5) LOWER THE BAR
Many people blame scientific stagnation on ideas getting harder to find. A new paper offers another explanation: maybe as more people have gone into research, the average quality of researchers has fallen. This makes some sense—if your company has 100 researchers and suddenly decides to hire 1,000 more, eventually you’ll have to lower your standards.
That said, I don’t think the evidence they present is all that convincing, because they assume they can measure researcher ability by looking at how much people make when they leave their research jobs. As in, if people are leaving their postdoc positions to start billion-dollar companies, they must be pretty smart. But if they’re leaving to go dig ditches, their research probably sucked. This is obviously pretty fraught—it assumes that people always choose the job that maximizes their income, and that the highest earners outside the research sector would be the top performers inside it. It also focuses on the average quality of researchers, when in fact science is a strong-link problem, so we should be asking whether the best has gotten worse.
(6) HOW 2 LIKE
Before I started a blog, I thought I would write a post like “How to like more things” and I never did, and now I’m glad because
recently wrote a better version: How to Like Everything More(7) SMALLPOX, BIG DEAL
Smallpox is the only human disease that’s ever been eradicated. It used to kill an estimated 5 million people every year; now it kills zero. That’s in large part thanks to the smallpox vaccine developed by Edward Jenner. And yet Philosophical Transactions—one of the most prestigious scientific outlets of its day—rejected Jenner’s paper describing his results. And here’s how people felt about his vaccine:
(8) MAD ABOUT MADOFF
The other day I was like, “wait, who lost money in Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme?” I did not expect the list of victims to include...Nobel Prize winning author of Night, Elie Wiesel. He apparently entrusted both his life savings and his foundation’s finances to Madoff, who then made them disappear. Here’s the punishment Wiesel recommended for his erstwhile friend:
I would like him to be in a solitary cell with a screen, and on that screen ... every day and every night there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, always saying, “Look, look what you have done.” ... He should not be able to avoid those faces, for years to come.
He added, “This is only a minimum punishment.”
(9) THIS IS BANANAS
On a single day in London, 1902, “fourteen people slipped on banana skins on Fleet Street and the Strand alone, and were injured enough to need treatment.”
(10) TURNIP FOR WHAT
I love this post from Uri Bram at Atoms vs. Bits. Hoeing a field is no fun, and so we’d love to know how much hoeing is necessary for maximizing crop yield, and do exactly that much. But nobody knew the optimal amount of hoeing until Jethro Tull (the inventor, not the band) designed the world’s simplest experiment. Just plant some seeds all in a row, hoe a little bit around the first seed, hoe a little bit more around the second one, and so on, like this:
Then watch ‘em grow. Wherever their growth plateaus, that’s how much you need to hoe. Someone could have done this a thousand years earlier, and if they had, we would have way more turnips by now.
(11) SUBSTACK REC
One turnip I’m glad we have:
, a Substack that posts rarely but always posts good. Their most recent: Mechanisms Too Simple for Humans to Design(12) SUBSTACK REC PART II
Another sporadic-but-never-miss Substack is Desystemize. I thought I was tired of hearing about AI, but actually I was tired of hearing the same takes over and over. His recent post (If You’re So Smart, Why Can’t You Die?) is very good and comes with some useful tools for thinking that I hadn’t encountered before.
(13) YOU GOT A FRIEND IN ME
The sociologist Claude S. Fischer casts doubt on the idea of a “loneliness epidemic”:
We can provisionally conclude that, over the last half-century or more, friends have remained roughly constant, probably even expanding their roles in Americans’ lives. Yet, as we saw, that long history has usually been accompanied by repeated alarms about the loss of friendship.
(14) PLENTY OF ROCKS TO GO AROUND
Speaking of things that were supposed to be running out, the journalist Ed Conway intended to write a series about “the world’s lost minerals.” He now reports that he failed: “So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything.”
(15) OH NO-LITA
According to
of , after the film adaptation of Lolita came out in 1962, a few hundred parents decided to name their daughters “Lolita”. I wonder if they...watched the movie.
(16) THINGS UNEXPECTEDLY NAMED AFTER PEOPLE:
PageRank (Larry Page)
Taco Bell (Glen Bell)
shrapnel (Henry Shrapnel)
I would add boycott (Charles Boycott)
(17) THESE BIRDS ARE OUTTA THIS WORLD
The French scientist Pierre Borel was one of the first people to argue that life exists on other planets. In A New Treatise Proving a Multiplicity of Worlds, published in 1657, he suggests that aliens are real and they’ve come to Earth—we call them “birds”. Specifically, birds of paradise:
This Bird is so beautiful, that no one in the Earth is to be compared to it; its figure is of so rare a form, and so extraordinary, that never the like hath been found […] no body ever saw its eggs, nor its nest; and it’s asserted, that it lives by the Air; this Bird never being found upon Earth, is it not consonant to Reason, that it may come from some other Starre, where it lives and breeds
When people are like “psychology is simply too complicated, we’ll never understand it much better than we do now,” I think of Dr. Borel, who was like “we’ve never seen this bird’s eggs, so we never will, so it must be from another planet.”
(18) IT’S IMPOLITE TO TELL THE TRUTH
When I wrote about the fraud scandals surrounding Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino, some folks wondered how anyone could get away with fraud for very long. Doesn’t anyone notice? One answer: yes, people notice all the time, but nobody’s willing to speak up about it. A graduate student named Zoé Zaini originally noticed inconsistencies in Gino’s papers, but according to Zaini’s retrospective, her dissertation committee told her to bury her doubts instead of airing them:
After the defense, two members of the committee made it clear they would not sign off on my dissertation until I removed all traces of my criticism of [Gino’s paper] [...] one committee member implied that a criticism is fundamentally incompatible with the professional norms of academic research. She wrote that “academic research is a like a conversation at a cocktail party”, and that my criticism was akin to me “storming in and shouting ‘you suck’”
This is a classic case where we were missing the second bravest person.
(19) WHISTLEBLOWERS UNITE
is launching a program to promote investigations into research fraud and other serious misconduct.” If you’re in Zaini’s position, consider reaching out to them.(20) NATURE SAYS ESP IS REAL
Most histories of the replication crisis (including mine) begin in 2011 with Daryl Bem publishing a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology “proving” that ESP is real. I didn’t realize that Bem was old news by then: in 1974, Nature published a paper confirming that the magician Uri Geller could read minds and see through walls.
(21) INTERESTED IN THE LAWS OF PHYSICS BUT LACKING A Y CHROMOSOME? TRY NEWTONIANISM FOR LADIES
The book was banned by the Catholic church in 1739.
(22) MIND THE WHEEL
Lastly, my friends Slime Mold Time Mold have a new series out called The Mind in the Wheel, which proposes a cybernetic paradigm for psychology. I’m extremely excited about this project and I’ll have a lot more to say about it in the future.
NEWS FOR LIZARDS
News ‘n’ updates from the burgeoning science-on-the-internet movement. Original post here; email me if you have an update.
Alex Chernavsky is doing lots of self-experiments and is looking for collaborators. Some of his recent studies include: the effects of creatine on reaction time, and potassium for weight loss. I love seeing work like this; if you join forces with Alex (or do similar stuff on your own), please send it to me and I’ll link to it here.
- : Doing Research Part Time Is Great
Another replication of putting your toaster in the dishwasher:
- is pulling together people interested in putting memetics to good use—reach out to him if you want to collaborate.
An abundance of ways to write about science on the internet:
- , an official Experimental History-recommended Substack, publishes a terrific Best of Science Blogging series. Now they’re sharing their revenue with everyone they publish.
Asimov Press has a list of stories they’d like to publish. That includes a piece on “Alternatives to Peer Review,” which I of course would love to read myself. Asimov’s editors are lovely, so if you’re itching to do some science writing, don’t sleep on this.
A little out of date, but you can also pitch Works in Progress.
NEWS FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ
I was on Derek Thompson’s Plain English podcast talking about the lack of progress in psychology.
Chris Turner is a very funny standup comedian and also my friend; I went on his Godforsaken podcast to talk about the time we got chained up in a Hungarian basement as Brexit happened.
I contributed a piece to THE LOOP, which I would describe as a cross between Teen Vogue, a scientific journal, and a fever dream of the internet.
And finally, from the vault: in 2022, I started wondering, “is every popular movie really a remake these days?” I analyzed the data and discovered: yes, but it’s not only movies. It’s everything.
Also named after a person: German chocolate cake.
16) There is also the Ferris wheel, one of my favorites. Also gerrymander, from Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, and (sala)mander.
My son and I have a running joke where we will comment on something being ironically named after it's inventor. For example, Dr. Blunt Instrument died after being struck with one. Anyway, I mentioned the Ferris wheel and my son thought I was joking until I insisted that he Google it.
We also pretend that "shenanigans" is named for an Irish family who were always up to no good, Mr and Mrs. Shenanigans and all the little shenanigans.