Hah! That's pretty funny, actually. I was really just more making a snide comment on the author's statement that he liked MOND and then DSR & DSR II with no real explanation of why, but I didn't phrase it right to carry off the joke and the sarcasm.
Maybe if I'd said, "...because I just really want a space drive to be possible. Zoom!"
Ah, well. I always knew in my heart of heart's that some of the predictions of Heim theory were probably too good to be true, but darn it if they weren't fun!
After all, it's probably the only reason that a good percentage of Slashdotters would even care about the poor lady's death. Not too many people are aware that you can die from excessive drinking of water. This would just be an "Oddly Enough" story "unworthy" of Slashdot's attention if there wasn't a geeky angle to it.
I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II.
Personally, I've been a fan of Heim theory, not necessarily because I think it's definitely true even though it makes nice predictions about particle mass, but because I just really want a space drive to be possible.
To the extent that poverty is intergenerational it is mostly because parents teach bad attitude.
So, again, the question is, "Should those children be allowed to suffer from the poor choices of their parents when we could provide them with opportunities to avoid making the same mistakes?"
If parents aren't competent enough to be worth more than minimum wage, a higher minimum wage will get them fired. That'll really help make ends meet, won't it?
Right now, practically no one works minimum wage that has the skills to work a better job. If you're willing to pay within about $1/hour of minimum wage, you're practically willing to hire anyone. If minimum wage was eliminated, you could probably pay people $2/hour and still have people willing to work 14+ hrs/day, 7 days/week just to scrape by, even if they couldn't afford shelter. Does that make it a "fair" wage for the labor given?
My answer is, "No." A wage should be enough to enable a person to make ends meet and to care for their family. "Charging what the [labor] market will bear" is neither fair and just nor the most efficient way to run a society outside of the narrow and single-minded metric of the immediate cost of goods and services. Failure to account for externalities is a central problem of any argument against raising the minimum wage.
This is the fallacy of Misleading Vividness. You are using the example of Zimbabwe's disasterous and ill-considered land redistribution scheme to cast an ill light on the concept of any form of redistribution. This is equivalent to someone saying in an abortion debate, "Pro-life advocates belief in the sanctitiy of human life," and you replying, "Eric Rudolph murdered doctors," in an attempt to discredit pro-life advocates as a populace.
Zimbabwe's wealth redistribution program is a disaster. However, that doesn't mean that programs like Medicare, public education, emergency services, etc. are equally harmful to a country as a whole. You argument is almost Godwin-esque in the level to which you find the single worst example you can think of to try to discredit an opposing side and doesn't significantly add anything to this discussion.
Economic mobility is supposed to work both ways: stupid rich people are supposed to become poor when they are incompetent.
This is really the problem with both the income gap and the issue of executive pay that brought it up. Our version of capitalism is sliding further and further away from the ideal goal of meritocracy.
The problem is that most people who want to remove "the surge of regulations that prevent the poor from becoming rich" are really talking about the elimination of social services (and the taxes to pay for them) that help distribute risk for the poor. Our society, in the form of bail-outs for companies that can't fund their pension plans while paying multi-million dollar CEO benefits, is only moving towards covering the risks of the wealthy and ignoring the risks of the middle class and poor.
The whole idea of the free markets being fair is that people with great ideas will generate wealth, and people with poor ideas will get driven out of the market and out of wealth. This happens very rarely, though. Once you're in the big leagues, you can drive a company into the dirt and walk away with more money that an entire small town of people may earn in their lives.
Past a certain point, wealth is one-way without deliberate and reckless dedication to spending your way out of it. There's a whole world of difference in terms of risks between people who work for money (the salaried class) and people whose money works for them (the investor class).
Note: I don't believe anyone in America is truly "poor", except by choice.
But whose choice was it?
For example, we know that the quality of primary education ties very strongly to your chances of getting into a good college (or even going to college at all) which ties very strongly to your future career prospects. What about nutrition and healthcare, which have a noted impact on adult IQ? What about how the presence of a strong and united family or the lack thereof affects people? What about the presence of discrimination against people with "ghetto-sounding" names?
Now, who gets to make the choices that shape your life as a child? Is it you, or is it your parents?
Anyone can say that a person made all the choices that led them to where they are today, but it takes a certain short-sightedness to think choices all happen in a vacuum or that all people have equal access to opportunity. Intergenerational income mobility has been on the decline in America because of the prevalence of people who have that philosophy: you sink or swim on your own; there are no hands to hold you up or to keep you down. The fact is that if you're born to poor parents, you're more likely in America than in any other industrialized nation to end up just as poor as them, and if you're born to rich parents, your more likely here to end up rich as well.
I think a lot of people just don't understand how expensive it is to be poor. Try buying things with bad credit, working jobs with no healthcare until you end up in the emergency room, working such long hours at pitiful wages to make ends meet that you can't raise your kids, renting in overpriced slums because you can't afford to pre-pay 1-2 month's rent, etc.
Public works to help cover medical, food, and education expenses does go a long way to giving children the opportunities that their parents don't currently have. A higher minium wage would let parents make ends meet without having to abandon their children, and less financial stress makes for happier relationships and better health. Educating people in school about debt management and about the impact of their choices would also help out a lot.
There are things we can do to improve the opportunity of people to make those good choices that keep one out of poverty. You're right that wealth is no zero-sum game, but there's something fundamentally wrong with our society that makes us think that the biggest pile is a greater sign of efficiency than the highest tide.
No matter how inflated our egos, after a few tears and a small feast for the worms, the planet will continue as if we never even happened. Why complicate matters with a dead man's switch?
Bah! You and your pathetic, egocentric obsession with the ephemeral nature of organic life.
Reminds me of the USA's projection of 'not the USA'?
Reminds me of everbody's projection of "not one of us." Every culture has a superiority bias; some just have louder voices or act more strongly on them.
Yeah, I'm talking of the Milgrim tests, specifically the first test using 40 volunteers. However, Milgram ran 20 different experiments. As far as I know, no one in the first test run stopped earlier than 300 volts, but I'm not sure when serious protests started.
This guy may have been from later test runs, especially if the researchers believed he would go all the way, since they had higher expectations of subjects in the beginning.
(Though, I'm not surprised someone with a "prankster" attitude gave up at the first sign of serious distress by the "learner." It's the guys who had a steely, controlled attitude that worry me.)
False sense of pride or not, the comment was not as irrelevant as you think. There are many different viewpoints on the definition of ethics, and the person was stating where their viewpoint was coming from.
It wasn't stating that he was a Christian that drew my ire. It was the hypocritical and unchristian chest-thumping that he considered himself "more ethical than average" that did.
However, for this most recent expirement, the "teachers" are fully aware that the subject and the environment is fully virtual and nothing they are doing is actually causing harm.
I agree. The subjects were not deceived about what they were doing nor the real world consequences of their acts. The original poster's comment was about the original experiment. I have no problems with the updated version.
I actually find it fascinating because it confirms that the conscience of the subjects is working at them, causing them to feel stress at feeling that what they're doing is wrong in spite of actually doing it. Guilt or discomfort is present but insufficient to stop action.
Maybe he was just trying to explain his moral background with a couple words rather than explaining his entire moral code. Next time, hold the slam.
There are multiple problems with what he said, from a Christian point of view. First, of all, to claim moral superiority to others requires that one judge others (and risk being judged oneself for it). Second, it implies that one is better than others without recognizing that we are all sinners and that it is better to reflect on the board in one's own eye than the speck in another's. Thirdly, that sort of arrogant pride in one's own piety is one of the traits of the Pharisees that Jesus preached against.
Lastly, wading into any forum, discussion, or whatever and proudly declaring that you see yourself as a more fundamentally decent and morally aware person than the populace on average is just arrogance and deserves to be rebuffed. It this sort of "holier than thou" attitude that turns so many people away from hearing the words of Jesus. It's anti-evangelism -- the sort of behavior that drives people away from the church and hardens hearts against other Christians by reinforcing false conceptions of what the Bible teaches Christians to behave like.
The irony of someone declaring themselves more ethical than average and not being able to see that the distress Milgram's experiment caused was the unethical part just irks me. I mean, talk about puffing yourself up just to show how hollow your claims are.
Because terms are qualified to create new terms - often opposed in meaning to the original word. The unqualified word "evolution" usually refers to a mix of natural selection and macro evolution - with perhaps some origin of life thrown in.
Usually, but not always. That's why Spore's use of the term is still correct.
Theists object to theistic evolution on (somewhat shaky) moral grounds - a god that creates via a process as apparently harsh and cruel as evolution seems somehow abhorrent (although you could say it is "worth it all in the end")
Actually, most theists (at least Christian non-believers in evolution) object to theistic evolution on two grounds:
It contradicts the story of creation in Genesis.
If you accept that theistic evolution was a possible origin of man, then there's no room to prove that said evolution was theistic and not the result of natural processes not driven by God.
So, no, these test subjects weren't "tempted". They were bullied, controlled, persuaded into harming others.
The temptation is the desire to do what's wrong -- nothing more, nothing less. In this case, the temptation was to do what was easy instead of what was right to avoid the disapproval of an authority figure. Carrots or sticks, promise of pleasure or threat of pain -- temptation is temptation.
Regardless, it's rather obvious that having people "bullied, controlled, persuaded into harming others" should be unethical to anyone with the most modest grasp of ethics.
Aside: There's no justice in motoring. Responsible drivers just have to get used to the idea that they can help avoid jams and accidents, and they themselves will get less benefit from their own responsible actions than will the idiots who cause the trouble in the first place. The idiots won't even realise they've done anything wrong...
This can essentially be applied to practically every problem in the world -- egocentric jerks who do something to give themselves a moment of convenience without knowledge or care of the ripple effects their actions have on the world around them and the slow dawning realization of others that they can get ahead of the pack too if only they act like jerks too.
Meanwhile the macroscopic effects of such actions and the losses that we collectively share are hidden so that only the people who try to act thoughtfully are made aware of what they're sacrificing to do so.
Milgram ran at least 20 experiments along this theme. The end result of variations in the base experiment revealed the emotional distance between the "teacher" and the "learner" had a very strong effect on the likeliness to continue. The more dehumanized the learner was, the more readily the teacher went further and further. Conversely, the more empathy the teacher was encouraged to have (say by seeing or directly hearing the learner through an open door instead of a speaker), the less likely they continued.
By demonizing the subject as a criminal, you would definitely observe a higher incidence of going too far. Demonizing your enemies is a central tactic in all societies committing to war for a reason -- it makes it easier to kill the other guy when you don't see him as being the same as you.
I want something I can buy in a shop for cash, load up with a pre-paid amount and use online, throwing away when I'm done with it.
This may be what you want. Look for their non-personalized cards and never reload them as you have to give personal info to do so. I heard about this on a privacy-oriented site, but I've never tried them myself, so I don't know how hard it is to avoid giving personal info.
Seems that most of humans in the test were in fact UNETHICAL.
Interesting. You fall into the same trap as many of the psychologists who decried the experiments when they were published -- that the subjects must all be inherently flawed and that normal, good, decent people would never find themselves failing in the same manner. You ignore that in 1963, most of the test subjects were probably church-going Christians themselves. Even the researchers performing the experiment were convinced beforehand that no more than 1.2% of subjects would go all the way to deadly voltage.
In fact, 65% did. None stopped before 300 volts, and the shocks started at 45 volts and increased 15 volts each time. That means that a minimum of 16 shocks were delivered by every single subject. The experiment was stopped when the subjects either refused to continue or objected more than 4 times. The experimenters expected that most subjects would stop at 150 volts (8 shocks) and that no more than 4% would make it to 300 volts.
Let me repeat that again. Every single subject shocked people up to 16 times, well into the "dangerous" range on the dial. None of the subjects knew what they were getting into at the time. They were being led to believe that they were helping perform a test on memory of the "electocuted" actor.
Milgram got similar results in the 19 other experiments exploring variations on the theme. He found that increased emotional distance from the subject increased the willingness to go all the way while seeing and hearing the victim scream and writhe and having the authority figure be more remote decreased it. However, all replications of the original experiment got deadly shock results in the 61-66% range.
Now, what are the odds that 65% of Americans in 1963 were all rotten murderers and 100% were vicious torturers? Pretty bad if you believe that the populace isn't inherently ready to perform these kinds of acts without realizing it. The odds of getting so many latent torturers is pretty bad unless the percentage of latent torturers in the population is really, really high.
Quite frankly, you've never been tested like they have. You've probably never been put in a similar situation, and you have the advantage of knowing ahead of time to watch out for this sort of thing. Many of the subject expressed gratitude for having been in the experiment because it made them face what lies within them. At least one wrote back that when he was drafted for the Vietnam War, he was far more aware of what being put under someone else's authority would mean for him and how he was ready now to put the foot down if ordered to do something horrible.
Who knows, maybe you're actually more ethical than most, but I want you to remember your words every SINGLE time the temptation arises to cut corners to meet a boss' impossible deadlines, every time the temptation comes to make an excuse to the customer to avoid getting reported, every time the temptation comes to tell a white lie to avoid any form of disapproval from anyone for ANY reason.
Because the potential for evil lies within you too. It lies within us all.
Since there's no real victim, the subjects are less going against their conscience.
Matthew 5:27-30. Sins committed in the mind and intentions to commit sins are as good as having committed the sins themselves. As a Christian, you should oppose pressuring these people into choosing to assault and murder others in intent even if they do not do so in reality. The mortal burden on their souls is exactly the same. This should trouble you even if you fail to sympathize with the burden this places on their minds and hearts.
I disagree about the manipulativeness of the experiment being a problem. Yes, it's manipulative.
As a Christian, lying is forbidden -- even for the betterment of others. Sometimes, in psychology, it is accepted that ignorance of the subject is necessary for an experiment, but outright deception and lying is considered something to be avoided now because of this experiment. However, that should be irrelevant to whether this experiment is seen as unethical from a Christian point of view. Merely the presence of lies should be sufficient.
This sounds like a training aid for torturers. Attorney General Gonzales ("Mr. Torture Memo") would love this.
What do you think all the pressure from above on "getting results" and all the memos supporting more "aggressive interrogation methods" served to accomplish?
Quite frankly, anyone who's seem the Milgram Obedience and the Standford Prison experiments shouldn't have been surprised in the slightest when rumors of torture coming out of Guantanimo started and when the reports about Abu Ghraib and Bagram started coming out. It's human nature. It's the natural, expected outcome of this kind of environment, and the unconscionable lack of oversight oriented towards preventing this sort of thing and, worse, the active encouragement of aggressive methods makes the administration directly culpable for torture of captives.
At worst, it's malice; at best, it's utter incompetence or callousness.
I consider myself as having more ethics than the average. I am a Christian (yeah, hold your slams, that's not the point). I try to live consistent with what Christianity teaches.
Funny. So were most of the original test subjects in Milgram's 1963 experiments. This stands an an irrelevant comment except to basically brag about how you feel morally superior to most people -- and then you have the sheer, unmitigated gall to ask that people "hold [their] slams." That's Pride. We are all sinners; remember that, and you'll do far better as a Christian than to parade around like a Pharisee waving your religiousity around like it's a badge, proclaming that you have "more ethics than average."
I don't see what's morally or ethically wrong with the experiment, even with a real human subject. I mean, the "victim" isn't actually being shocked, whether the "victim" is human or virtual.
The victims are the test subjects -- the people being pressured into harming other people in spite of their normal moral inclination to avoid such a thing. They are being put under stress and are being led to sincerely attempt to cause mortal harm to another to avoid the displeasure of an authority figure. They are caught between their conscience and the pressure to conform. In the end they are harmed in two ways: (a) they are put under immense stress, (b) they are led to commit a deeply wrong act that they would've never considered.
If tempting people to hurt others and causing distress and emotional turmoil (and in one subject seizures) aren't unethical in your worldview, then I think you need to hit the Good Book a little harder and work some more on those superior ethics of yours.
The subjects might feel guilty for "hurting" someone else, but that's about it.
Spoken like a man who is incapable of the empathy to understand how believing for a moment that you've killed a man through electroshock might make someone else feel. The Milgram experiment made many of the participants believe for a short time that they were guilty of murder due to peer pressure. That's not something that leaves you to be forgotten for the rest of your life.
Neither is having the self-delusion in one's inherent morality stripped away by being pressured into committing an atrocity merely by being told "the experiment must continue" by a man in a lab coat. Finding out that you're essentially a sheep who will harm others just to avoid the disapproval of an authority figure would be a scarring experience for those involved. The damage done to the subjects' worldviews is a large part of what makes it unethical.
Plus, even if the effects weren't long lasting, causing undue stress on a subject and heavy use of deception are generally considered unethical in psychology experiments. I mean, one of the subjects did get so stressed out that they had a seizure.
Slashdot Mirror
How about "We are screwed"?
Is is just me, or does that strike anyone else as the kind of funny name that you'd see in a Niven book?
Neither do creation scientists -- for much the same reason, if you ask me.
Hah! That's pretty funny, actually. I was really just more making a snide comment on the author's statement that he liked MOND and then DSR & DSR II with no real explanation of why, but I didn't phrase it right to carry off the joke and the sarcasm.
Maybe if I'd said, "...because I just really want a space drive to be possible. Zoom!"
Ah, well. I always knew in my heart of heart's that some of the predictions of Heim theory were probably too good to be true, but darn it if they weren't fun!
A Groundhog Day type game would be pretty cool. But I guess it would be pretty easy to figure out how to finish if you've seen the movie.
Yes, but think of the replay value!
After all, it's probably the only reason that a good percentage of Slashdotters would even care about the poor lady's death. Not too many people are aware that you can die from excessive drinking of water. This would just be an "Oddly Enough" story "unworthy" of Slashdot's attention if there wasn't a geeky angle to it.
Sad, I know.
I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II.
Personally, I've been a fan of Heim theory, not necessarily because I think it's definitely true even though it makes nice predictions about particle mass, but because I just really want a space drive to be possible.
To the extent that poverty is intergenerational it is mostly because parents teach bad attitude.
So, again, the question is, "Should those children be allowed to suffer from the poor choices of their parents when we could provide them with opportunities to avoid making the same mistakes?"
If parents aren't competent enough to be worth more than minimum wage, a higher minimum wage will get them fired. That'll really help make ends meet, won't it?
Right now, practically no one works minimum wage that has the skills to work a better job. If you're willing to pay within about $1/hour of minimum wage, you're practically willing to hire anyone. If minimum wage was eliminated, you could probably pay people $2/hour and still have people willing to work 14+ hrs/day, 7 days/week just to scrape by, even if they couldn't afford shelter. Does that make it a "fair" wage for the labor given?
My answer is, "No." A wage should be enough to enable a person to make ends meet and to care for their family. "Charging what the [labor] market will bear" is neither fair and just nor the most efficient way to run a society outside of the narrow and single-minded metric of the immediate cost of goods and services. Failure to account for externalities is a central problem of any argument against raising the minimum wage.
There once was a country called Zimbabwe.
This is the fallacy of Misleading Vividness. You are using the example of Zimbabwe's disasterous and ill-considered land redistribution scheme to cast an ill light on the concept of any form of redistribution. This is equivalent to someone saying in an abortion debate, "Pro-life advocates belief in the sanctitiy of human life," and you replying, "Eric Rudolph murdered doctors," in an attempt to discredit pro-life advocates as a populace.
Zimbabwe's wealth redistribution program is a disaster. However, that doesn't mean that programs like Medicare, public education, emergency services, etc. are equally harmful to a country as a whole. You argument is almost Godwin-esque in the level to which you find the single worst example you can think of to try to discredit an opposing side and doesn't significantly add anything to this discussion.
Economic mobility is supposed to work both ways: stupid rich people are supposed to become poor when they are incompetent.
This is really the problem with both the income gap and the issue of executive pay that brought it up. Our version of capitalism is sliding further and further away from the ideal goal of meritocracy.
The problem is that most people who want to remove "the surge of regulations that prevent the poor from becoming rich" are really talking about the elimination of social services (and the taxes to pay for them) that help distribute risk for the poor. Our society, in the form of bail-outs for companies that can't fund their pension plans while paying multi-million dollar CEO benefits, is only moving towards covering the risks of the wealthy and ignoring the risks of the middle class and poor.
The whole idea of the free markets being fair is that people with great ideas will generate wealth, and people with poor ideas will get driven out of the market and out of wealth. This happens very rarely, though. Once you're in the big leagues, you can drive a company into the dirt and walk away with more money that an entire small town of people may earn in their lives.
Past a certain point, wealth is one-way without deliberate and reckless dedication to spending your way out of it. There's a whole world of difference in terms of risks between people who work for money (the salaried class) and people whose money works for them (the investor class).
Note: I don't believe anyone in America is truly "poor", except by choice.
But whose choice was it?
For example, we know that the quality of primary education ties very strongly to your chances of getting into a good college (or even going to college at all) which ties very strongly to your future career prospects. What about nutrition and healthcare, which have a noted impact on adult IQ? What about how the presence of a strong and united family or the lack thereof affects people? What about the presence of discrimination against people with "ghetto-sounding" names?
Now, who gets to make the choices that shape your life as a child? Is it you, or is it your parents?
Anyone can say that a person made all the choices that led them to where they are today, but it takes a certain short-sightedness to think choices all happen in a vacuum or that all people have equal access to opportunity. Intergenerational income mobility has been on the decline in America because of the prevalence of people who have that philosophy: you sink or swim on your own; there are no hands to hold you up or to keep you down. The fact is that if you're born to poor parents, you're more likely in America than in any other industrialized nation to end up just as poor as them, and if you're born to rich parents, your more likely here to end up rich as well.
I think a lot of people just don't understand how expensive it is to be poor. Try buying things with bad credit, working jobs with no healthcare until you end up in the emergency room, working such long hours at pitiful wages to make ends meet that you can't raise your kids, renting in overpriced slums because you can't afford to pre-pay 1-2 month's rent, etc.
Public works to help cover medical, food, and education expenses does go a long way to giving children the opportunities that their parents don't currently have. A higher minium wage would let parents make ends meet without having to abandon their children, and less financial stress makes for happier relationships and better health. Educating people in school about debt management and about the impact of their choices would also help out a lot.
There are things we can do to improve the opportunity of people to make those good choices that keep one out of poverty. You're right that wealth is no zero-sum game, but there's something fundamentally wrong with our society that makes us think that the biggest pile is a greater sign of efficiency than the highest tide.
No matter how inflated our egos, after a few tears and a small feast for the worms, the planet will continue as if we never even happened. Why complicate matters with a dead man's switch?
Bah! You and your pathetic, egocentric obsession with the ephemeral nature of organic life.
Reminds me of the USA's projection of 'not the USA'?
Reminds me of everbody's projection of "not one of us."
Every culture has a superiority bias; some just have louder voices or act more strongly on them.
Yeah, I'm talking of the Milgrim tests, specifically the first test using 40 volunteers. However, Milgram ran 20 different experiments. As far as I know, no one in the first test run stopped earlier than 300 volts, but I'm not sure when serious protests started.
This guy may have been from later test runs, especially if the researchers believed he would go all the way, since they had higher expectations of subjects in the beginning.
(Though, I'm not surprised someone with a "prankster" attitude gave up at the first sign of serious distress by the "learner." It's the guys who had a steely, controlled attitude that worry me.)
False sense of pride or not, the comment was not as irrelevant as you think. There are many different viewpoints on the definition of ethics, and the person was stating where their viewpoint was coming from.
It wasn't stating that he was a Christian that drew my ire. It was the hypocritical and unchristian chest-thumping that he considered himself "more ethical than average" that did.
However, for this most recent expirement, the "teachers" are fully aware that the subject and the environment is fully virtual and nothing they are doing is actually causing harm.
I agree. The subjects were not deceived about what they were doing nor the real world consequences of their acts. The original poster's comment was about the original experiment. I have no problems with the updated version.
I actually find it fascinating because it confirms that the conscience of the subjects is working at them, causing them to feel stress at feeling that what they're doing is wrong in spite of actually doing it. Guilt or discomfort is present but insufficient to stop action.
Maybe he was just trying to explain his moral background with a couple words rather than explaining his entire moral code. Next time, hold the slam.
There are multiple problems with what he said, from a Christian point of view. First, of all, to claim moral superiority to others requires that one judge others (and risk being judged oneself for it). Second, it implies that one is better than others without recognizing that we are all sinners and that it is better to reflect on the board in one's own eye than the speck in another's. Thirdly, that sort of arrogant pride in one's own piety is one of the traits of the Pharisees that Jesus preached against.
Lastly, wading into any forum, discussion, or whatever and proudly declaring that you see yourself as a more fundamentally decent and morally aware person than the populace on average is just arrogance and deserves to be rebuffed. It this sort of "holier than thou" attitude that turns so many people away from hearing the words of Jesus. It's anti-evangelism -- the sort of behavior that drives people away from the church and hardens hearts against other Christians by reinforcing false conceptions of what the Bible teaches Christians to behave like.
The irony of someone declaring themselves more ethical than average and not being able to see that the distress Milgram's experiment caused was the unethical part just irks me. I mean, talk about puffing yourself up just to show how hollow your claims are.
Usually, but not always. That's why Spore's use of the term is still correct.
Theists object to theistic evolution on (somewhat shaky) moral grounds - a god that creates via a process as apparently harsh and cruel as evolution seems somehow abhorrent (although you could say it is "worth it all in the end")
Actually, most theists (at least Christian non-believers in evolution) object to theistic evolution on two grounds:
So, no, these test subjects weren't "tempted". They were bullied, controlled, persuaded into harming others.
The temptation is the desire to do what's wrong -- nothing more, nothing less. In this case, the temptation was to do what was easy instead of what was right to avoid the disapproval of an authority figure. Carrots or sticks, promise of pleasure or threat of pain -- temptation is temptation.
Regardless, it's rather obvious that having people "bullied, controlled, persuaded into harming others" should be unethical to anyone with the most modest grasp of ethics.
Aside:
There's no justice in motoring. Responsible drivers just have to get used to the idea that they can help avoid jams and accidents, and they themselves will get less benefit from their own responsible actions than will the idiots who cause the trouble in the first place. The idiots won't even realise they've done anything wrong...
This can essentially be applied to practically every problem in the world -- egocentric jerks who do something to give themselves a moment of convenience without knowledge or care of the ripple effects their actions have on the world around them and the slow dawning realization of others that they can get ahead of the pack too if only they act like jerks too.
Meanwhile the macroscopic effects of such actions and the losses that we collectively share are hidden so that only the people who try to act thoughtfully are made aware of what they're sacrificing to do so.
Milgram ran at least 20 experiments along this theme. The end result of variations in the base experiment revealed the emotional distance between the "teacher" and the "learner" had a very strong effect on the likeliness to continue. The more dehumanized the learner was, the more readily the teacher went further and further. Conversely, the more empathy the teacher was encouraged to have (say by seeing or directly hearing the learner through an open door instead of a speaker), the less likely they continued.
By demonizing the subject as a criminal, you would definitely observe a higher incidence of going too far. Demonizing your enemies is a central tactic in all societies committing to war for a reason -- it makes it easier to kill the other guy when you don't see him as being the same as you.
I want something I can buy in a shop for cash, load up with a pre-paid amount and use online, throwing away when I'm done with it.
This may be what you want. Look for their non-personalized cards and never reload them as you have to give personal info to do so. I heard about this on a privacy-oriented site, but I've never tried them myself, so I don't know how hard it is to avoid giving personal info.
Seems that most of humans in the test were in fact UNETHICAL.
Interesting. You fall into the same trap as many of the psychologists who decried the experiments when they were published -- that the subjects must all be inherently flawed and that normal, good, decent people would never find themselves failing in the same manner. You ignore that in 1963, most of the test subjects were probably church-going Christians themselves. Even the researchers performing the experiment were convinced beforehand that no more than 1.2% of subjects would go all the way to deadly voltage.
In fact, 65% did. None stopped before 300 volts, and the shocks started at 45 volts and increased 15 volts each time. That means that a minimum of 16 shocks were delivered by every single subject. The experiment was stopped when the subjects either refused to continue or objected more than 4 times. The experimenters expected that most subjects would stop at 150 volts (8 shocks) and that no more than 4% would make it to 300 volts.
Let me repeat that again. Every single subject shocked people up to 16 times, well into the "dangerous" range on the dial. None of the subjects knew what they were getting into at the time. They were being led to believe that they were helping perform a test on memory of the "electocuted" actor.
Milgram got similar results in the 19 other experiments exploring variations on the theme. He found that increased emotional distance from the subject increased the willingness to go all the way while seeing and hearing the victim scream and writhe and having the authority figure be more remote decreased it. However, all replications of the original experiment got deadly shock results in the 61-66% range.
Now, what are the odds that 65% of Americans in 1963 were all rotten murderers and 100% were vicious torturers? Pretty bad if you believe that the populace isn't inherently ready to perform these kinds of acts without realizing it. The odds of getting so many latent torturers is pretty bad unless the percentage of latent torturers in the population is really, really high.
Quite frankly, you've never been tested like they have. You've probably never been put in a similar situation, and you have the advantage of knowing ahead of time to watch out for this sort of thing. Many of the subject expressed gratitude for having been in the experiment because it made them face what lies within them. At least one wrote back that when he was drafted for the Vietnam War, he was far more aware of what being put under someone else's authority would mean for him and how he was ready now to put the foot down if ordered to do something horrible.
Who knows, maybe you're actually more ethical than most, but I want you to remember your words every SINGLE time the temptation arises to cut corners to meet a boss' impossible deadlines, every time the temptation comes to make an excuse to the customer to avoid getting reported, every time the temptation comes to tell a white lie to avoid any form of disapproval from anyone for ANY reason.
Because the potential for evil lies within you too. It lies within us all.
Since there's no real victim, the subjects are less going against their conscience.
Matthew 5:27-30. Sins committed in the mind and intentions to commit sins are as good as having committed the sins themselves. As a Christian, you should oppose pressuring these people into choosing to assault and murder others in intent even if they do not do so in reality. The mortal burden on their souls is exactly the same. This should trouble you even if you fail to sympathize with the burden this places on their minds and hearts.
I disagree about the manipulativeness of the experiment being a problem. Yes, it's manipulative.
As a Christian, lying is forbidden -- even for the betterment of others. Sometimes, in psychology, it is accepted that ignorance of the subject is necessary for an experiment, but outright deception and lying is considered something to be avoided now because of this experiment. However, that should be irrelevant to whether this experiment is seen as unethical from a Christian point of view. Merely the presence of lies should be sufficient.
This sounds like a training aid for torturers. Attorney General Gonzales ("Mr. Torture Memo") would love this.
What do you think all the pressure from above on "getting results" and all the memos supporting more "aggressive interrogation methods" served to accomplish?
Quite frankly, anyone who's seem the Milgram Obedience and the Standford Prison experiments shouldn't have been surprised in the slightest when rumors of torture coming out of Guantanimo started and when the reports about Abu Ghraib and Bagram started coming out. It's human nature. It's the natural, expected outcome of this kind of environment, and the unconscionable lack of oversight oriented towards preventing this sort of thing and, worse, the active encouragement of aggressive methods makes the administration directly culpable for torture of captives.
At worst, it's malice; at best, it's utter incompetence or callousness.
I consider myself as having more ethics than the average. I am a Christian (yeah, hold your slams, that's not the point). I try to live consistent with what Christianity teaches.
Funny. So were most of the original test subjects in Milgram's 1963 experiments. This stands an an irrelevant comment except to basically brag about how you feel morally superior to most people -- and then you have the sheer, unmitigated gall to ask that people "hold [their] slams." That's Pride. We are all sinners; remember that, and you'll do far better as a Christian than to parade around like a Pharisee waving your religiousity around like it's a badge, proclaming that you have "more ethics than average."
I don't see what's morally or ethically wrong with the experiment, even with a real human subject. I mean, the "victim" isn't actually being shocked, whether the "victim" is human or virtual.
The victims are the test subjects -- the people being pressured into harming other people in spite of their normal moral inclination to avoid such a thing. They are being put under stress and are being led to sincerely attempt to cause mortal harm to another to avoid the displeasure of an authority figure. They are caught between their conscience and the pressure to conform. In the end they are harmed in two ways: (a) they are put under immense stress, (b) they are led to commit a deeply wrong act that they would've never considered.
If tempting people to hurt others and causing distress and emotional turmoil (and in one subject seizures) aren't unethical in your worldview, then I think you need to hit the Good Book a little harder and work some more on those superior ethics of yours.
The subjects might feel guilty for "hurting" someone else, but that's about it.
Spoken like a man who is incapable of the empathy to understand how believing for a moment that you've killed a man through electroshock might make someone else feel. The Milgram experiment made many of the participants believe for a short time that they were guilty of murder due to peer pressure. That's not something that leaves you to be forgotten for the rest of your life.
Neither is having the self-delusion in one's inherent morality stripped away by being pressured into committing an atrocity merely by being told "the experiment must continue" by a man in a lab coat. Finding out that you're essentially a sheep who will harm others just to avoid the disapproval of an authority figure would be a scarring experience for those involved. The damage done to the subjects' worldviews is a large part of what makes it unethical.
Plus, even if the effects weren't long lasting, causing undue stress on a subject and heavy use of deception are generally considered unethical in psychology experiments. I mean, one of the subjects did get so stressed out that they had a seizure.