Comments on: What’s a fire alarm for?

By: Grasspunk

Grasspunk — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 14:14:13 +0000

I’m also wondering what the smoke smelled like. If it is just smoke from a machine smoke then all the kids think they’re in a nightclub.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 08:27:48 +0000

This is not a place where burning buildings is a problem. I’ve never seen a building burn unintentionally, nor has anyone I’ve known more deeply than as an acquaintance. Even still, everyone immediately starts asking, “Do you smell smoke?” at the tiniest hint of smoulder.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing which can’t be tested in a lab because the reaction is in part a function of the lab setting. “I’m in a lab, the professor is in charge of my safety now,” that sort of thing.

By: Felix

Felix — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:06:25 +0000

The interpretation of these kids not acting as being because they don’t want to “appear panicky” is certainly strange.

For instance, wouldn’t not acting be an indication they were figuring others may have been more familiar with the situation than themselves and therefore the actions of others was useful information?

Then, too, my extremely limited experience with psych experiments is that they are a game and one can expect them to include meta-players. So, wait for the meta-players (the guys who are in on the joke, that is) to do their thing? Otherwise, you get less entertainment from your Psych 101 course.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 20:56:29 +0000

Yeah… I’ve never participated in one of those tests, but I can’t see myself being the guy who just sits there and waits for a public consensus to arise out of nowhere about what to do about the rising smoke… My ass is getting out of there as soon as I notice it.

You read these things, and the question that comes first to mind is… Where the hell do they find these people? Seriously… If I were running that test, and people just ignored the smoke, waiting for a socially-acceptable reason to notice it…? After a point, I think I’d lock the doors, and leave them to asphyxiate, as a means of improving the race. Just… WTF? That can’t be real… Can it? “Socially safe”?

On the other hand, this is probably one of those deals where they ran the tests with college students, and just assumed that everyone else would react in a similar anti-survival fashion. Testing with a broad swathe of humanity, including reasonably intelligent tradesmen who are smart enough to recognize a hazard…? You’d likely get very different results than with a herd of half-wit undergraduates.

Some of the crap like this I see coming out of academia just makes me question the entire process by which these people are selected, educated, and promoted as “experts”. You know what we call people who ignore smoke in a room, where I come from? Dead.

By: Grasspunk

Grasspunk — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 19:38:17 +0000

I have a hypothesis that I guess applies to fire alarms. I think that responding in the face of apathy by others is a trainable skill. I (attempt to) teach my kids to do what they think is right even if everyone else is doing something else. One example was school shooter drills where the teachers want the kids to cower and I want my kids to get out of Dodge.

There’s a corollary that these public control systems do the opposite – they let people wait for public signals rather than think for themselves. i.e. there can’t be a fire because the fire alarm has not gone off.

To make it fit with Yudkowsky’s example, if you have a population that lives in highly flammable houses and have no experience of fire alarms do they have a response rate greater than 10%? Maybe USA 100y ago. Maybe New Guinea highlands today. I’d guess yes, they’d be more likely to do something when smoke showed no matter what those other clowns were doing.