Objective Reality: an illusion

[Belligerent Savant]

.

[On Edit: changed my mind and removed the term "Fake News" from the OP title.]

The "Fake News" phrase is quickly becoming almost as loathsome as "Conspiracy Theory" (and both are intended for similar thought-stopping functions); I'm leaving the phrase in the OP title, however, in the parlance of our times.

So, it seems there's no way we'll ever be able to prove anything we've been passionately debating here all these years.

Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6130 ... e-reality/

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

March 12, 2019

[norton ash]

When you change the way you look at things the things you look at change. You know I know you know I know you know.

[Wombaticus Rex]

My current favorite counterfactual to our precious fucking human rationality

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf ... cogs.12303

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

...

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others’
arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,”
we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a
series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other
people’s arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials,
they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else’s. Among those participants
who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else’s argument,
more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own.
Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid
answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people’s arguments than of their
own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when
the arguments are someone else’s rather than their own.

Then again, I would fall for such a flimsy, non-replicable study.

[elfismiles]

FLASHBACK...

Re: The Mandela Effect (Disappearing Braces in Moonraker)

Don't worry ... Rabbit Hole Reality Police are en route to your location. They're here to help.

ETA: Donald Hoffman - evolution of perception doesn't score accuracy as necessarily favorable to survivability...

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? | TED Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

It's frustrating knowing our senses may have evolved to lie to us...

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://reactor-core.org/reality-hallucination.html

But this is just the iceberg's tip. Social experience literally shapes cerebral morphology. It guides the wiring of the brain through the most intensely formative years of human life, determining, among other things, which of the thinking organ's sections will be enlarged, and which will shrink.

An infant's brain is sculpted by the culture into which the child is born. Six-month olds can distinguish or produce every sound in virtually every human language. But within a mere four months, nearly two thirds of this capacity has been sliced away. The slashing of ability is accompanied by ruthless alterations in cerebral tissue. Brain cells are measured against the requirements of the physical and interpersonal environment. The 50% of neurons found useful thrive. The 50% which remain unexercised are literally forced to die. Thus the floor plan underlying the mind is crafted on-site to fit an existing framework of community.

When barely out of the womb, babies are already riveted on a major source of social cues. Newborns to four-month-olds would rather look at faces than at almost anything else. Rensselaer Polytechnic's Linnda Caporael points out what she calls "micro-coordination", in which a baby imitates its mother's facial expression, and the mother, in turn, imitates the baby's. Since psychologist Paul Ekman, as we'll see later in more detail, has demonstrated that the faces we make recast our moods, the baby is learning how to yoke its emotions to those of a social team. Emotions, as we've already seen, craft our vision of reality. There are other signs that babies synchronize their feelings to those of others around them at an astonishingly early age. Empathy — one of those things which bind us together intimately — comes to us early. Children less than a year old who see another child hurt show all the signs of undergoing the same pain.

Cramming themselves further into a common perceptual mold, animal and human infants entrain themselves to see what others see. A four-month old human will swivel to look at an object his parent is staring at. A baby chimp will do the same. By their first birthday, infants have extended their input-gathering to their peers. When they notice that another child's eyes have fixated on an object, they swivel around to focus on that thing themselves. If they don't see what's so interesting, they look back to check the direction of the other child's gaze and make sure they've got it right. When one of the babies points to an item that has caught her fancy, other children look to see just what it is.

One year olds show other ways in which they soak up social pressure. Put a cup and something unfamiliar in front of them and their natural tendency will be to check out the novel object. But repeat the word "cup" and the infant will dutifully rivet its gaze on the drinking vessel. Children go along with the herd even in their tastes in food. when researchers put two-to-five-year olds at a table for several days with other kids who loved the edibles they loathed, the children with the dislike did a 180 degree turn and became zestful eaters of the item they'd formerly disdained. The preference was still going strong weeks after the peer pressure had stopped.

At six, children are obsessed with being accepted by the group and become incredibly sensitive to violations of group norms. They've been gripped by yet another conformity enforcer which structures their perceptions to coincide with those around them.

Even rhythm draws humans together in the subtlest of ways. William Condon of Pennsylvania's Western State Psychiatric Institute analyzed films of adult conversations and noticed a peculiar process at work. Unconsciously, the conversationalists began to coordinate their finger movements, eye blinks and nods. Electroencephalography showed something even more astonishing — their brain waves were moving together. Newborn babies already show this synchrony — in fact, an American infant still fresh from the womb will just as happily match its body movements to the speech of someone speaking Chinese as to someone speaking English. As time proceeds, these unnoticed synchronies draw larger and larger groups together. A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator." Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn't make sense to view humans as "isolated entities." And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: "an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together" into what he called a "shared organizational form."

[bks]

My current favorite counterfactual to our precious fucking human rationality

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf ... cogs.12303

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

...

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others’
arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,”
we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a
series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other
people’s arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials,
they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else’s. Among those participants
who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else’s argument,
more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own.
Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid
answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people’s arguments than of their
own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when
the arguments are someone else’s rather than their own.

Then again, I would fall for such a flimsy, non-replicable study.

So people were unable somehow to remember the answer they had originally given? I understand that they gave a number of answers and that only one of the answers they supplied was then manipulated, but I'd like to see some actual evidence that people were fooled by the presentation of another person's reasoning as their own. I guess I could read the whole study to see if that objection is addressed . . .

[MacCruiskeen]

"Objective reality? An illusion!" That's what I told the cop after running three of those so-called "red lights". Then he arrested me, possibly.

[stickdog99]

My current favorite counterfactual to our precious fucking human rationality

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf ... cogs.12303

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

...

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others’
arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,”
we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a
series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other
people’s arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials,
they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else’s. Among those participants
who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else’s argument,
more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own.
Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid
answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people’s arguments than of their
own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when
the arguments are someone else’s rather than their own.

Then again, I would fall for such a flimsy, non-replicable study.

Thanks for providing another data point for my Selective Laziness of Experimental Design experiment.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

It's been a while since I read Howard Bloom's material. Lots to digest in that piece, but here's another excerpt:

Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world's premier memory researchers, is among the few who know how powerfully the group shapes what we think we know. In the late 1970s, Loftus performed a series of key experiments. In a typical example, she showed college students a moving picture of a traffic accident, then asked after the film, "How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road." Several days later when witnesses to the film were quizzed about what they'd seen, 17% were sure they'd spied a barn, though there weren't any buildings in the film at all. In a related experiment subjects were shown a collision between a bicycle and an auto driven by a brunette, then afterwards heard questions about the "blond" at the steering wheel. Not only did they remember the non-existent blond vividly, but when they were shown the sequence a second time, they had a hard time believing that it was the same incident they now recalled so graphically. One subject said, "It's really strange because I still have the blond girl's face in my mind and it doesn't correspond to her [pointing to the woman on the videotape]...It was really weird." In visual memory, Loftus concluded that hints leaked to us by fellow humans are more important than the scene whose details actually reach our eyes.

[BSavant comment: shades of Mandela Effect/Moonraker braces, eh?]


Though it got little public attention until the debates about "recovered" memories of sexual abuse in the early and mid 1990s, this avenue of research had begun at least two generations ago. It was 1956 when Solomon Asch published a classic series of experiments in which he and his colleagues showed cards with lines of different lengths to clusters of their students. Two lines were exactly the same size and two were clearly not — the mavericks stuck out like basketball players at a convention for the vertically handicapped. During a typical experimental run, the researchers asked nine volunteers to claim that two badly mismatched lines were actually the same, and that the actual twin was a total misfit. Now came the nefarious part. The researchers ushered a naive student into the room with the collaborators and gave him the impression that the crowd already there knew just as little as he did about what was going on. Then a white-coated psychologist passed the cards around. One by one he asked the pre-drilled shills to announce out loud which lines were alike. Each dutifully declared that two terribly unlike lines were perfect twins. By the time the scientist prodded the unsuspecting newcomer to pronounce judgement, he usually went along with the bogus acclamation of the crowd. Asch ran the experiment over and over again. When he quizzed his victims of peer pressure, it turned out that many had done far more than simply go along to get along. They had actually shaped their perceptions to agree, not with the reality in front of them, but with the consensus of the multitude.


To polish off the mass delusion, many of those whose perception had NOT been skewed became collaborators in the praise of the emperor's new clothes. Some did it out of self-doubt. They were convinced that the facts their eyes reported were wrong, the herd was right, and that an optical illusion had tricked them into seeing things. Still others realized with total clarity which lines were duplicates, but lacked the nerve to utter an unpopular opinion. Conformity enforcers had rearranged everything from visual processing to open speech, and had revealed a mechanism which can wrap and seal a crowd into a false belief.

Prescient, in light of theatrics/events taking place in this modern era.

[stickdog99]

.

It's been a while since I read Howard Bloom's material. Lots to digest in that piece, but here's another excerpt:

Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world's premier memory researchers, is among the few who know how powerfully the group shapes what we think we know. In the late 1970s, Loftus performed a series of key experiments. In a typical example, she showed college students a moving picture of a traffic accident, then asked after the film, "How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road." Several days later when witnesses to the film were quizzed about what they'd seen, 17% were sure they'd spied a barn, though there weren't any buildings in the film at all. In a related experiment subjects were shown a collision between a bicycle and an auto driven by a brunette, then afterwards heard questions about the "blond" at the steering wheel. Not only did they remember the non-existent blond vividly, but when they were shown the sequence a second time, they had a hard time believing that it was the same incident they now recalled so graphically. One subject said, "It's really strange because I still have the blond girl's face in my mind and it doesn't correspond to her [pointing to the woman on the videotape]...It was really weird." In visual memory, Loftus concluded that hints leaked to us by fellow humans are more important than the scene whose details actually reach our eyes.

[BSavant comment: shades of Mandela Effect/Moonraker braces, eh?]


Though it got little public attention until the debates about "recovered" memories of sexual abuse in the early and mid 1990s, this avenue of research had begun at least two generations ago. It was 1956 when Solomon Asch published a classic series of experiments in which he and his colleagues showed cards with lines of different lengths to clusters of their students. Two lines were exactly the same size and two were clearly not — the mavericks stuck out like basketball players at a convention for the vertically handicapped. During a typical experimental run, the researchers asked nine volunteers to claim that two badly mismatched lines were actually the same, and that the actual twin was a total misfit. Now came the nefarious part. The researchers ushered a naive student into the room with the collaborators and gave him the impression that the crowd already there knew just as little as he did about what was going on. Then a white-coated psychologist passed the cards around. One by one he asked the pre-drilled shills to announce out loud which lines were alike. Each dutifully declared that two terribly unlike lines were perfect twins. By the time the scientist prodded the unsuspecting newcomer to pronounce judgement, he usually went along with the bogus acclamation of the crowd. Asch ran the experiment over and over again. When he quizzed his victims of peer pressure, it turned out that many had done far more than simply go along to get along. They had actually shaped their perceptions to agree, not with the reality in front of them, but with the consensus of the multitude.


To polish off the mass delusion, many of those whose perception had NOT been skewed became collaborators in the praise of the emperor's new clothes. Some did it out of self-doubt. They were convinced that the facts their eyes reported were wrong, the herd was right, and that an optical illusion had tricked them into seeing things. Still others realized with total clarity which lines were duplicates, but lacked the nerve to utter an unpopular opinion. Conformity enforcers had rearranged everything from visual processing to open speech, and had revealed a mechanism which can wrap and seal a crowd into a false belief.

Prescient, in light of theatrics/events taking place in this modern era.

I am not sure what Loftus' research is supposed to prove. Far more people tortured other people at Milgram's directive than misremembered events at hers.

[Elvis]

Thanks for the perfect opportunity to post from Theodore Roszak's 1969 "The Making of a Counter Culture"—a book among my first recommendations to anyone interested in culture, technology, government, politics, psychology etc.

Roszak coined the term "counterculture" (later consolidated into one word). This is from the chapter, "The Myth of Objective Concsiousness" [page 215 of this PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/b/b4/Roszak ... ulture.pdf ]:

If there is one especially striking feature of the new radicalism we have been surveying, it is the cleavage that exists between it and the radicalism of previous generations where the subjects of science and technology are concerned. To the older collectivist ideologies, which were as given to the value of industrial expansion as the capitalist class enemy, the connection between totalitarian control and science was not apparent. Science was almost invariably seen as an undisputed social good, because it had become so intimately related in the popular mind (though not often in ways clearly understood) to the technological progress that promised security and affluence. It was not foreseen even by gifted social critics that the impersonal, large-scale social processes to which technological progress gives rise in economics, in politics, in education, in every aspect of life generate their own characteristic problems. When the general public finds itself enmeshed in a gargantuan industrial apparatus which it admires to the point of idolization and yet cannot comprehend, it must of necessity defer to those who are experts or to those who own the experts; only they appear to know how the great cornucopia can be kept brimming over with the good things of life.

Centralized bigness breeds the regime of expertise, whether the big system is based on privatized or socialized economies. Even within the democratic socialist tradition with its stubborn emphasis on workers' control, it is far from apparent how the democratically governed units of an industrial economy will automatically produce a general system which is not dominated by coordinating experts. It is both ironic and ominous to hear the French Gaullists and the Wilson Labourites in Great Britain—governments that are heavily committed to an elitist managerialism now talking seriously about increased workers' "participation" in industry. It would surely be a mistake to believe that the technocracy cannot find ways to placate and integrate the shop floor without compromising the continuation of super-scale social processes. "Participation" could easily become the god-word of our official politics within the next decade; but its reference will be to the sort of "responsible" collaboration that keeps the technocracy growing. We do well to remember that one of the great secrets of successful concentration camp administration under the Nazis was to enlist the "participation' of the inmates.

It is for this reason that the counter culture, which draws upon a profoundly personalist sense of community rather than upon technical and industrial values, comes closer to being a radical critique of the technocracy than any of the traditional ideologies. If one starts with a sense of the person that ventures to psychoanalytical depths, one may rapidly arrive at a viewpoint that rejects many of the hitherto undisputed values of industrialism itself. One soon begins talking about "standards of living" that transcend high productivity, efficiency, full employment, and the work-and-consumption ethic. Quality and not quantity becomes the touchstone of social value.

The critique is pushed even further when the counter culture begins to explore the modes of non-intellective consciousness. Along this line, questions arise which strike more deeply at technocratic assumptions. For if the technocracy is dependent on public deference to the experts, it must stand or fall by the reality of expertise. But what is expertise? What are the criteria which certify someone as an expert?

If we are foolishly willing to agree that experts are those whose role is legitimized by the fact that the technocratic system needs them in order to avoid falling apart at the seams, then of course the technocratic status quo generates its own internal justification: the technocracy is legitimized because it enjoys the approval of experts; the experts are legitimized because there could be no technocracy without them. This is the sort of circular argument student rebels meet when they challenge the necessity of administrative supremacy in the universities. They are invariably faced with the rhetorical question: but who will allocate room space, supervise registration, validate course requirements, coordinate the academic departments, police the parking lots and dormitories, discipline students, etc., if not the administration? Will the multiversity not collapse in chaos if the administrators are sent packing? The students are learning the answer: yes, the multiversity will collapse; but education will go on. Why? Because the administrators have nothing to do with the reality of education; their expertise is related to the illusory busywork that arises from administrative complexity itself. The multiversity creates the administrators and they, in turn, expand the multiversity so that it needs to make place for more administrators. One gets out of this squirrel cage only by digging deep into the root meaning of education itself.

The same radicalizing logic unfolds if, in confronting the technocracy, we begin looking for a conception of expertise which amounts to something more than the intimidating truism that tells us experts are those in the absence of whom the technocracy would collapse.

An expert, we say, is one to whom we turn because he is in control of reliable knowledge about that which concerns us. In the case of the technocracy, the experts are those who govern us because they know (reliably) about all things relevant to our survival and happiness: human needs, social engineering, economic planning, international relations, invention, education, etc. Very well, but what is "reliable knowledge"? How do we know it when we see it? The answer is: reliable knowledge is knowledge that is scientifically sound, since science is that to which modem man refers for the definitive explication of reality. And what in turn is it that characterizes scientific knowledge? The answer is: objectivity. Scientific knowledge is not just feeling or speculation or subjective ruminating. It is a verifiable description of reality that exists independent of any purely personal considerations. It is true . . . real . . . dependable. . . . It works. And that at last is how we define an expert: he is one who really knows what is what, because he cultivates an objective consciousness.

Thus, if we probe the technocracy in search of the peculiar power it holds over us, we arrive at the myth of objective consciousness. There is but one way of gaining access to reality—so the myth holds—and this is to cultivate a state of consciousness cleansed of all subjective distortion, all personal involvement. What flows from this state of consciousness qualifies as knowledge, and nothing else does. This is the bedrock on which the natural sciences have built; and under their spell all fields of knowledge strive to become scientific. The study of man in his social, political, economic, psychological, historical aspects—all this, too, must become objective: rigorously, painstakingly objective. At every level of human experience, would-be scientists come forward to endorse the myth of objective consciousness, thus certifying themselves as experts. And because they know and we do not, we yield to their guidance.1

(The ellipses are Roszak's prose style, not redactions.)

. . . skipping to page 227:

In short, as science elaborates itself into the dominant cultural influence of our age, it is the psychology and not the epistemology of science that urgently requires our critical attention; for it is primarily at this level that the most consequential deficiencies and imbalances of the technocracy are revealed.4

* * * *

We can, I think, identify three major characteristics of the psychic style which follows from an intensive cultivation of objective consciousness. I have called them: (1) the alienative dichotomy; (:2) the invidious hierarchy; (3) the mechanistic imperative.5

1. Objective consciousness begins by dividing reality into two spheres, which would seem best described as "In-Here" and "Out-There." By In-Here is meant that place within the person to which consciousness withdraws when one wants to know without becoming involved in or committed to that which is being known. . . .

Whatever the scientific method may or may not be, people think they are behaving scientifically whenever they create an In-Here within themselves which undertakes to know without an investment of the person in the act of knowing. The necessary effect of distancing, of estranging In-Here from Out-There may be achieved in any number of ways: by the intervention of various mechanical gadgets between observer and observed; by the elaboration of chilly jargons and technical terms that replace sensuous speech; by the invention of strange methodologies which reach out to the subject matter like a pair of mechanical hands; by the subordination of the particular and immediate experience to a statistical generalization; by appeal to a professional standard which excuses the observer from responsibility to anything other than a lofty abstraction--such as "the pursuit of truth," pure research," etc. All these protective strategies are especially compatible with natures that are beset by timidity and fearfulness; but also with those that are characterized by plain insensitivity and whose habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder.

The spectating In-Here has been called by many names: ego, intelligence, self, subject, reason. . . .What I prefer to emphasize is the act of contraction that takes place within the person, the sense of taking a step back, away from, and out of. Not only back and away from the natural world, but from the inarticulate feelings, physical urges, and wayward images that surge up from within the person. . . .

The ideal of objective consciousness is that there should be as little as possible In-Here and, conversely, as much as possible Out-There. For only what is Out-There can be studied and known. Objectivity leads to such a great emptying-out operation: the progressive alienation of more and more of In-Here's personal contents in the effort ot achieve the densest possible unit of observational concentration surrounded by the largest possible area of study. The very word "concentration" yields the interesting image of an identity contracted into a small hard ball; hence a dense, diminished identity, something which is less than one otherwise might be. . . . Curiously, this great good called knowledge, the very guarantee of our survival, is taken to be something that is forthcoming only to this lesser, shriveled-up identity.

The scientific observer who comes to feel that Out-There has begun to implicate him personally--say, in the manner of a lover spellbinding one's sympathies so that one cannot tell clearly where one's self leaves off and the other begins--has begun to lose his objectivity. Therefore, he must fight back this irrational involvement of his personal feeling. . . . But if body, feelings, emotions, moral sentiment, sensuous enchantment are all to be located Out-There, then who is this In-Here that is so stalwartly struggling against the siren song? . . .

As soon as two human beings relate in detachment as observer to observed, as soon as the observer claims to be aware of nothing more than the behavioral surface of the observed, an invidious hierarchy is established which reduces the observed to a lower status. . . . For consider the gross impertinence of the act of detached observation. Psychologist confronting his laboratory subject, anthropologist confronting tribal group, political scientist confronting voting public . . . in all such cases what the observer may very well be saying to the observed is the same: "I can perceive no more than your behavioral facade. I can grant you no more reality or psychic coherence than this perception allows. I shall observe this behavior of yours and record it. I shall not enter into your life, your task, your condition of existence. Do not turn to me or appeal to me or ask me to become involved with you. I am here only as a temporary observer whose role is to stand back and later to make my own sense of what you seem to be doing or intending. I assume that I can adequately understand what you are doing or intending without entering wholly into your life. I am not particularly interested in what you uniquely are; I am interested only in the general pattern to which you conform. I assume I have the right to use you to perform this process of classification. I assume I have the right to reduce all that you are to an integer in my science." . . .

Already legions of scientists and military men throughout the world, the products of careful training and selection, give themselves to whole lives of ultimate objectivity. They systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death. They do their job as they are ordered to do it . . . objectively. For them the world at large has become a laboratory--in the same sense that when they enter upon their professional capacity, they leave their personal feelings behind. Perhaps they even take pride in their capacity to do so, for indeed it requires an act of iron will to ignore the claims that person makes upon person. . .

the whole chalupa: https://monoskop.org/images/b/b4/Roszak ... ulture.pdf

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Good stuff, Elvis. Will need to dedicate time towards reading all of it.


stickdog99

I am not sure what Loftus' research is supposed to prove. Far more people tortured other people at Milgram's directive than misremembered events at hers.

Indeed, good point, though I don't believe the results for either are mutually exclusive. Control (or the lack thereof) and the illusion of objectivity are the recurring themes.

[stickdog99]

.

Good stuff, Elvis. Will need to dedicate time towards reading all of it.


stickdog99

I am not sure what Loftus' research is supposed to prove. Far more people tortured other people at Milgram's directive than misremembered events at hers.

Indeed, good point, though I don't believe the results for either are mutually exclusive. Control (or the lack thereof) and the illusion of objectivity are the recurring themes.

Agreed. I am not discounting her research, but perhaps what such research shows is merely that a certain percentage of people will always try to say or do whatever they interpret they are expected to say or do?

Did I get that one right, everyone?

[Elvis]

Sounds right to me.


The mention of Loftus and 'objective reality' reminds of hearing Loftus on the radio struggling to explain why a respected, intelligent lawyer like Hillary Clinton could so badly mis-remember her landing "under sniper fire" (not) in Bosnia—how she got it so wrong. Especially considering that some reasonable facsimile of the objective reality was recorded by CBS news cameras for everyone to see.

It never once occurred to Loftus that maybe Clinton was just plain LYING.

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^^^^^^^

Ha. Sounds like Loftus was suffering from that shared illusion that authority figures are primarily forthright in their intentions/statements.