Monthly Archives: June 2013

Behind the shock machine

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I had actually studied the Milgram experiment before I was randomly chosen to participate in just such an experiment while an arts student at the University of Toronto. And I have always wanted to know how others had reacted to having been part of this experiment so now I will be able to find out. It is one of the main reasons ethics approval is now required and I can tell you that anyone who conducted these experiments ought to be hunted down and their licence to practise psychology withdrawn. This is the text of an article titled, How many people really went through with the Milgram Experiment? by Esther Inglis-Arkell:

We’ve all heard of the infamous Milgram Experiment, in which subjects, with a little pressure from an authority figure, participated in a process that they believed shocked someone to death. But did far fewer people than reported actually go through with it?

The Milgram Experiment is arguably the most famous psychology experiment in the world – probably because bad news travels fast, and it has some very bad news regarding all of humanity. It seems that sixty-five percent of us would torture a human being to death if an authority figure asked us to. For those who don’t know, the Milgram experiment involved subjects coming in and hearing that they would be participating in a memory-improving experiment. A person in the next room – connected via intercom – would be tested on their memory, and the subjects would be in charge of giving them ever-increasing shocks when they screwed up. The person was actually an actor, and not hooked up to anything, but would scream in pain as the shocks got worse. If the actual experimental subject objected to shocking the person, the experimenter would give them more and more menacing orders to continue with the experiment. At last the “line” would go quiet, making the subjects believe that they’d murdered someone.

Although some people considered the experiment a positive experience, and one subject corresponded with Milgram for years and credited the experiment for making him a conscientious objector, others were traumatized. One woman was prodded into participating by her roommate, who turned out to be the one being “killed” in the other room. One hopes that, after the experiment, either the murderer or the psychologist moved out. The Milgram experiment prompted psychologists to call for more exacting standards regarding human experimentation.

The results overshadowed the ethical standards. It appeared that sixty-five percent of people would torture someone to death, if pressured to do so. The results made their way into both psychology and cocktail party conversation. But were they correct? At least one woman doesn’t think so. Gina Perry, for her book, Behind the Shock Machine, traced as many participants in the Milgram experiment as she could, and re-examined the notes of the experiment. Milgram claimed that seventy-five percent of the participants believed in the reality of the experiment, but Perry puts the number at about half. The change makes a big difference in the results. The people who didn’t buy that they were actually shocking people were far more willing to increase the intensity of the shocks. They wanted to know how far the experimenters would go in the ruse, while the experimenters were wondering the same thing about them. Those that believed that they were shocking people were much more likely to keep the shocks down low. While Perry still thinks about a third of the people would crank up the shocks even if they believed, that’s a big drop in overall percentage. While no one can deny that people can do some terrible things, perhaps, overall, people are neither as evil or gullible as we imagine.

The fix is in – Gillard’s going to go

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Reading across the papers todahy and watching my one bit of weekly television the virtual certainty that Gillard will be replaced by Rudd before the next election seems evident. The issue is not the virtual certainty that she will be replaced but when.

Even now, within the hundred days, there is still too much time for the rest of us to remember the kind of PM Rudd had actually been and why so many of us were pleased to see him go. In a policy sense, everything that is wrong with Gillard Rudd has as well but with an apparently poisonous personality that makes him anathema to his colleagues. That many of them had decided their preference to go down with the current captain in charge was only a vague distress call pointing to just how awful working with Rudd must actually be.

And while this far from the election the disastrous polling numbers talk of a rout, there are four considerations.

First, the Coalition does not in any way act as if it’s a lay down. They’re the ones who do the polling and they’re the ones in the focus groups. That they have not, for example, come out against either of the referenda makes me think there is a real trap in them for the Coalition. They do not exude any kind of confidence which may just be prudence but it may also reflect a real sense of their own vulnerabilities.

Second, there will be a switch in sentiment the moment the PM, whoever it is, goes to visit the Governor General. Polling results for the moment are mid-term stuff that reflect only a vague dissatisfaction for many. We will only know what the actual situation is when we are inside the real polling period. Most of the social and professional environments I travel in still talk of “the Mad monk” and almost none of these people would consider voting Coalition under any circumstances. These people make me very nervous as they must do the Coalition as well.

Third, if I read the papers right, it is only until the end of the Parliamentary sitting that the transition supposedly can occur. My memory, however, goes back to 1983 when the Hawke-for-Hayden switch came as Malcolm Fraser was off visiting the Governor-General. The less time there is for the Coalition to switch its campaign strategy to Rudd and away from Gillard, the more difficult it will be to mount a proper campaign.

Fourth, if the election is some kind of blow out but the Coalition does not capture the Senate, then nothing of significance can be changed. A double dissolution twelve months later would therefore take place after at least one Coaltion budget in which “austerity” will be the central issue. And this is not austerity as a notional idea but one in which very specific groups of people will have been affected. Meanwhile, the Coalition will have fixed the boat people issue to the extent that it can be fixed. The ALP will therefore be able to campaign with a better budget outcome and with the boats having been stopped assuming they can be.

Following from all that, even if one assumes that Tony Abbott will win the mandatory two elections, they will occur within four years and not six. Meanwhile, the ALP will have “rejuvinated” itself so that by the 2017 election they will not be all that far from government. Their stategy looking forward to 2017 (or 2019) has been relatively evident. Create as many problems for a Coaltion government as possible and then spend the years in Opposition criticising the various attempts to fix the problems the ALP had created.

Why is this being treated like politics as usual?

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I’m with Rush Limbaugh on this. Why are people not treating what’s going on in Washington more seriously than they are.

The intelligent people were saying, “Nothing to see here. The reaction is way overblown.” Those of us who think there’s something worrisome here are overreacting and we’re too oriented in politics. And the mature thinkers that weighed in and sound reason and levelheadedness assured us that there was nothing to fear here because this was just metadata, and in fact this is something we should all be thankful that the government is able to do.

I have to tell you when I’m listening to all the smart people tell me this, my mind is about to explode, and I’m saying, “Do these people not realize what we just learned in the last three weeks?” We got the IRS starting in 2010 taking action to suppress the political involvement and ultimately votes of Tea Party people and conservative Republicans. This regime, this government, on the orders of the highest level. In fact, that investigation is ongoing. We have Fast and Furious. We have Obamacare. The evidence of the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration is on display undeniably every day and yet in the midst of this, “Well, don’t go off half cocked on this, Rush. Be very levelheaded. Nothing really to see,” as though there’s no context here.

If only they’d been reading Andrew Bolt

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If they had they would then know that global warming stopped sixteen years ago. And strangely, there are other places they could find this out as well, specially if they really do have an interest in climate change. But like with many other things, they start with what they wish were true and continue from there.

Via Small Dead Animals.

Should one teach Marx as part of HET?

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David Henderson had the following blog post today at Economic Liberty

On a short blog post today, Daniel Kuehn, preparing to teach an undergraduate course in the history of economic thought, writes:

I wish I could completely skip Marx… does that make me a bad person? I suppose I shouldn’t. A few in the department would probably be miffed too if they found out.

First, Daniel, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Indeed, my respect for you just rose from what was already a reasonably high level.

Second, that reminds me of a true story. My friend Chris Jehn, while a Ph.D. student in the University of Chicago’s economics program in the late 1960s or early 1970s, took a course in the history of economic thought from the late George Stigler. Many people might have forgotten this, or perhaps never knew it because George was known mainly for his work in industrial organization and regulation, but the history of thought was one of George’s passions and it was an area in which published a lot in the 1940s and 1950s.

Back to the story. The first day of class, Stigler handed out a pretty comprehensive syllabus and started going over it in class. A student with a foreign voice raised his hand. ‘Yes,’ said Stigler (and if I could do the voice in this blog, you would hear a reasonable imitation of Stigler’s distinctive voice.)

‘Professor Stigler, I see that there is nothing on the syllabus by Karl Marx. Why is that?’

Stigler paused and then answered: ‘Marx was a lousy economist.’

So this was my comment on whether or not Marx should be taught as part of an HET course:

My Defending the History of Economic Thought is about to be published next month by Edward Elgar. In it I devote a chapter to discussing how I think the history of economic thought should be taught with one of the main points I make being that Marxist economics should not be. HET in my view is either about how the economics we find in our texts evolved through time into what we see. Or is it about how the mainstream of the profession answered particular economic questions during different periods of time in the past. In neither case would I think that the inclusion of Marxist economic theory would be relevant.

It’s not whether Marxist theory is good or bad economics but whether it fits into the point of an HET course which is to understand the evolution of mainstream economic theory.

We now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are

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Anything the American Government wants to know about what you have said or written, they apparently know:

Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years.

And this is from The Guardian‘s story itself:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

Even The Guardian has more evident concern about government intrusion in the private lives of American citizens than almost every media outlet in the United States. It’s not “it can’t happen here” but rather, “sure it can happen here but who cares since it’s our fellow travelers on the left who are doing it?”

Bang, bang you’re dead

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Watching the US from a distance (and I have consciously not described this as a safe distance) you sometimes forget that it is all really happening. The quiet pace at which the left in the US has been snaking its way through every institution of power makes it seem as if it ought to be stoppable but somehow is not. There was therefore what I think of as a very subtle piece of work on what has been taking place that I have discussed in a piece at Quadrant on Line.

The author at the American Thinker, Daren Janescu, describes the experience of living in the United States as like living on the inside of a Kafka novel. But his approach is to begin from the people persecuting five year olds for making guns out of pop tarts and then saying “bang, bang”.

No one ever mistook a half-eaten Pop Tart for a weapon. And that is precisely why you are forbidden from saying ‘bang, bang’ while wielding a half-eaten Pop Tart. If this still makes no sense to you, that is because you are not crazy. But try, for a moment, to put yourself into the twisted psyche of a progressive authoritarian, and ask yourself this question: What is the message being sent through such rules, and the lesson being taught through their enforcement?

Jonescu, of course, notices these people are insane but he also makes the larger point that there is a method in their madness. Their larger if unconscious aim is to make us uncertain of our own instincts, in this way to surround us with rules of what’s impermissible for actions that were once commonplace as a form of social control.

She’s right to be terrified

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http://youtu.be/0N8TykuZvTY

This is quite exceptional. It is from the Ann Althouse blog picked up via Instapundit. I will know that the problem is beginning to recede when you can see this on CBS and NBC. Until then the problem of gigantic government will remain a threat to liberty and our democratic way of life. It is also worth noting the point raised by the first of the commenters:

Gerritson also dropped a bombshell on the committee: Her group received an inquiry letter bearing Lois Lerner’s signature. Lerner has claimed that the IRS abuse of groups like Gerritson’s was the work of a couple of “rogue employees.”

I might note the particular part of the testimony that Ann has herself highlighted:

I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy.

I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being, and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered.

If the culling stops at the doors of the IRS this will be a job not even one tenth done.

imin2013

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imin gillard

This is taken from Andrew Bolt but as tawdry as it is, this is a direct steal from the Obama campaign last year. If you go to the imin website you will see there is the “Dinner with Julia” ad, an invitation to volunteer and a bit of information requested. It is the information that is the entire point of the process.

Note, that if you fill out the form what they will then know is:

  • your name
  • your likely gender (based on your name – ie Fred or Ginger)
  • your street address
  • your postal code
  • your mobile number with “send me text messages” already ticked
  • your email address with “send me email updates” already ticked

These are bits of data that can be cross referenced with who knows what other information that may have been obtained in no end of other ways (although surely not from the ATO).

I dealt with exactly this in my Quadrant article in January this year, The New Politics of Data-Driven Elections. In it I discussed the data mining and information gathering processes used by Obama last year which is exactly the same as the one now being used by the ALP:

My favourite operation was the $3 donation strategy. It was the ‘win a date with George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker’ by donating only $3. Focus groups had shown that no one worried about $3 as a sum of money to spend, but people still felt it to be a meaningful contribution. But in sending in your $3, you also had to provide a considerable amount of information. The money meant next to nothing to the Obama campaign but the information was pure gold.

Now here the same. And because they have your phone and your email address, they can tailor the message just for you. A woman from a working class suburb will be targeted with one set of messages and a male from a more middle class suburb will be getting a different message instead.

The Obama techniques will now be used here and while the ALP will fall short at the election, it will certainly help wind back the Coalition advantage. This is one part of the democratic processes the Libs better get themselves into in a very big way because this is the way of the future.