Tomasz Grzyb and others write,
Previous studies employing Milgram’s paradigm have reported no gender differences between “learners” and “teachers” in the administration and receipt of punishment. However, the potential influence of the experimenter’s gender on obedience remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted two studies. Study 1 was a laboratory experiment (N = 80) using the obedience lite paradigm. The results revealed no significant effect of the experimenter’s gender on compliance rates: 88% of participants complied with a female experimenter, compared to 90% with a male experimenter.
Pointer from Steve Stewart-Williams. The next version of my Political Psychology course will include the classic experiments on conformity (Asch), authority (Milgram), role (Zimbardo), and tribalism (Robbers Cave). The original experiments are all considered controversial today, both in terms of ethics and methodological rigor. But the results seem to have held up in more recent studies.
The hardest problem for any social technology is getting users: We’ve talked about this before for dating apps. And if it’s that hard to lure people in with the promise of sex, it’s probably even harder to lure them in with the promise of logical accuracy.
Assuming I get to teach at UATX again next January, I would like to assign an AI coding project in my classes. One idea is a project to give scores to opinion writing. Some of you may remember my Fantasy Intellectual Teams project. It included a scoring method, which I did by hand. Now you could use AI to automate the scoring.
People complain about the low quality of argument on the Internet. They complain about the misleading narratives and inaccurate claims. I am confident that AI could do a lot to clean up Internet discourse. But when it comes down to it, do users really want to see better discourse? Scott is skeptical, and so am I.
Zayd concludes—correctly, and with not a little understatement—that his parents were “flawed.” He acknowledges the need to fight injustice, but in a manner that avoids the “perils and pitfalls” of his parents’ “violent revolutionary project.” Finally, the author of this perceptive, fascinating, and rather sad book emerges as someone who most wanted his mother and father to set aside their fantasies of violent revolution and treat him with the unconditional affection of loving parents.
Capshaw is reviewing the memoir of the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two notorious figures in the Weather Underground of the early 1970s. Capshaw’s review suggests that the book captures the warped psychology of these radicals.
The book’s title, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, I recognize as deriving from the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s We Can Be Together, a radical anthem that appeared on their 1969 album, Volunteers. The record was transgressive in terms of four-letter words and anti-Americanism. It was also quite popular, achieving Gold record status by selling over 500,000 copies. I was one of the purchasers, in my wannabe radical days as a junior in high school. In hindsight, the band comes across to me as cynical poseurs, making big bucks out of calls for anti-capitalist revolution. Claude writes,
Jefferson Airplane in 1969 were probably most sincere as chroniclers of the revolutionary mood rather than as its committed agents. Kantner genuinely absorbed the politics of his milieu — the Panthers, the Diggers, the anti-war movement — and translated it into music with real urgency. But the band lived in Marin County mansions, recorded on RCA, and scattered in different directions almost immediately after Volunteers was released. The album captures a real emotional truth about that moment of countercultural darkness and rage. Whether it reflects a coherent political commitment is another matter — and the band's own words suggest they knew the difference.
I enjoyed the album itself, although it was very uneven. Jorma Kaukonen’s guitar and Grace Slick’s soaring harmonies made “Wooden Ships” one of my all-time favorites, much more interesting than the Crosby, Stills, Nash version. The guitar riff for the title song and for “We Can Be Together” was stirring. And Slick’s biting, nasty “Eskimo Blue Day” is haunting. But the rest of the album ranges from tracks that are forgettable to ones that they should be ashamed of having put on vinyl.
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"In hindsight, the band comes across to me as cynical poseurs, making big bucks out of calls for anti-capitalist revolution."
One can certainly question whether writing lyrics you disagree with is honorable, pure art, or meets some other high standard. Questioning whether it is wrong to sing a song with lyrics one doesn't agree with seems ok too, even if overly restrictive. It never even occurred to me that a listener would think the composer or singer has to live their life as described in lyrics.
When he was something near a fifty year old, a friend looked at the lyrics of the Beatles song and found they weren't nearly as profound as he thought as a teen. Maybe they were posers of a sort too.
"... cynical poseurs, making big bucks out of calls for anti-capitalist revolution."
That was Rage Against the Machine for my generation. For a band pining for revolution, they sure sold a lot of Vietnamese-made T-shirts.