Marguerite Bennett's Blog, page 44
August 8, 2017
roscoerackham:
shinykari:
lady-feral:
hollowedskin:
cannon-fannon:
boneyardchamp:
Your...
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
westbrookwestbooks:
swanjolras:
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars...
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
So, I have to say something.
This is my favorite post on this website.
I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.
Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.
I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.
August 7, 2017
candice-bear:
inthegardenunderstars:
kiltsfan:
sixpenceee:
Thi...
This gravestone from 1875 reads:
“Kate McCormick, Seduced and pregnant by her father’s friend, Unwed she died from abortion, her only choice, Abandoned in life and death by family, With but a single rose from her mother, Buried only through the kindness of an unknown benefactor, Died February 1875, age 21, Victim of an unforgiving society, Have mercy on us.”
We are headed for this again in the US!
shitlinguistssay:
setheverman:
did-you-kno:
Fika is the...
Fika is the Swedish tradition of having
coffee, cake, and a chat. It’s such an
integral part of the culture that many
businesses have fika twice a day, and
sometimes it’s mandatory.
Source Source 2According to IKEA’s corporate website: “Some of the best ideas and decisions happen at fika.“
so after reblogging this to find out if other countries had this as well, i found out the following:
germany: yeah we have something similar called “Kaffee und Kuchen” :)
america: i work 16 hours per day at minimum wage and get a 7 minute unpaid lunch break, and instead of “fika” i have “suffering” and “death”
I’m glad someone explained this, because in Duolingo fika wouldn’t translate and I was so confused and I couldn’t find a good translation of it
also @setheverman you’re absolutely right.
bisexualpiratequeen:
bisexualpiratequeen:
Once
a boy looked very sadly at me after a little bit of...
Once
a boy looked very sadly at me after a little bit of conversation.
‘you’re so smart’ he said, ‘I feel like I couldn’t keep up’. And then he
did that sad boy face where you’re supposed to agree to tone yourself
down. So I said ‘probably’ and fucked his mate.
some top advice from a slut, here, 90% of the time when some boy looks sad and tells you you’re too ‘x’ to keep up with it’s a ploy to get you to cut bits off yourself so you can come down to his mediocre level; instead, agree with him and fuck his mate
culturenlifestyle:
All Dressed Up: Artist Photographs His...
All Dressed Up: Artist Photographs His Huskies Amidst Beautiful Flowers
After a long day at work when you come home and get greeted by your pet, all happy and excited just to see you, that moment just melts your heart, your furry friend wiping off any trace of tiredness that you might have had.
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