Science, Kai...Pure Science, and be Damned to He Who Says "Enough".

[Eater of Clowns]

No thanks. I'm not clicking that. 

Harlowe's monkey torture experiments were much worse.


They were baby monkeys.  They died of loneliness.

[Freeky]

Nor am I going to go looking for that. 

[Rumckle]

You could find one of those pathetic "real superheroes" that wander the internet. They would make entertaining, if very sad, nemeses.

Some of them are cool, like angle grinder man:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/3112670.stm

[Eater of Clowns]

Nor am I going to go looking for that. 

No need to look, here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow

[The Wizard]

Some of them are cool, like angle grinder man:

For a second there, I thought that this guy might have had some angle grinder themed gadgets. But even that sad hope is destroyed. Why has no one ever bothered to actually do this shit seriously?

[Rumckle]

What I found interesting was this:

It is also today considered unethical to evoke responses of fear in a laboratory setting, unless a participant has given informed consent to being intentionally frightened as part of an experiment.

So we can't evoke responses of fear in laboratories, but for reality TV shows it's ok?

[The Wizard]

Well yeah. Reality TV makes more money, at least in the short term. And who cares about five years from now, anyway?

[Eater of Clowns]

I'm pretty sure they need to give informed consent on the reality show as well.  I don't know about "hidden camera" type things though.

Also note unethical - since when is reality television concerned with ethics?

[The Wizard]

If they ever did give a shit about ethics, they stopped caring the moment they realized that people liked watching assholes.

[Rumckle]

The hidden camera ones were the shows I was talking about.

[Freeky]

I'm pretty sure they need to give informed consent on the reality show as well.  I don't know about "hidden camera" type things though.

They get them to sign the waiver afterwards.

[Rumckle]

But that is only to show it on TV, it doesn't change the fact that it happened.

[Freeky]

Hm. I guess they don't ask them and just do it?

[Iason Ouabache]

If they ever did give a shit about ethics, they stopped caring the moment they realized that people liked watching assholes.

I'm standing by my prediction that a reality show will finally kill someone this year. I thought that I had it when the captain from "Deadliest Catch" died a couple of days ago but it was an unrelated stroke.

[Kai]

Dkr H-

After reading JR Platt's classic paper on Strong Inference, I'm not sure that I can even /be/ a mad scientist, since I'm not sure if the stuff I'm doing is even really science. I've been told that science doesn't have to be experimental, that research based upon observation and comparison can be perfectly good "science", but now reading this I'm not so sure.

Or maybe just my science (with a little s) is just piddly stuff compared to Science, which uses strong inference and conducts experiments and discovers all the answers to the Big Important Questions^tm. I'm just the accessory, Doktor. I'm no scientist, I'm just mad.

~Kai