Too Hard For Science

Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren’t an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed - the articles are all way too short, and some of the interviewees fail to actually propose impossible experiments, and just describe hard problems. That said, there are some real gems:

Black Hole Life Preserver:

Is there an invention a prospective [black hole] diver can use to resist spaghettification? Gott and his colleague Deborah Freedman Woods calculated that a giant ring might do. If this “life preserver” encircles your waist as you fall, its gravity counteracts the black hole’s, pulling your sides apart while pulling your head and feet together… [S]uch a buoy would have a mass of more than 12,800 trillion tonnes, about two-millionths the mass of Earth, roughly equal to an asteroid 100 miles wide. “That’s somewhat beyond the current NASA budget,” Gott says. …”Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine before 100 AD, and people back then looked at this and said, ‘Good job, that’s fun, isn’t that nice,’ and nobody looked at it and said ‘Wait, this can change the world.’ We waited about 1,700 years for the Industrial Revolution,” Gott notes. “You can never tell --- concepts for inventions that might seem like toys now might have unrealized promise.”

The sense of meaning in dreams:

By investigating why dreams feel profound, one might learn how events get imbued with this sense of meaning --- perhaps the same one felt during revelations. Stickgold notes that during REM sleep, when dreaming typically occurs, the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin is shut off in the brain. The only other time that happens is because of LSD, “when people seem to have these totally uninteresting experiences they describe as profoundly meaningful called ‘acid insights.’” … The solution? Experiments with drugs that suppress or boost serotonin levels could explore any connections between the neurotransmitter and the feeling of meaning. “You could give people such compounds or a placebo and get them to rate how deep or meaningful specific movie clips seems to them,” Stickgold suggests.

(Also: Raising animals to human intelligence and Printing people and Testing if 10,000 hours makes you an expert.)

Of course, reading this series made me think about what experiments I would run if I had no practical or ethical limits. I came up with this:

For over a decade now I’ve been obsessed with genocide. What fascinates me more than anything else is the moral complexity of the phenomenon, the number of people capable of goodness and kindness who somehow turn instead to fear, anger, and violence. A serial killer or a mass murder is just as “evil” as a person taking part in a genocide, likely more so. But I guess I’m not interested in evil so much as our collective failure to be good. It’s not the psychopaths that disturb me but the bystanders, the folks who say it isn’t that bad as the community slides into hell and never again! as it struggles to find its way out. You know, the people who could very well be me.

So my questions are, What makes a society attempt genocide? and What environmental and personality variables distinguish people who foment genocide, people who go along for the ride, and people who try to stop it?

Probably the “ideal” way to answer these questions would involve a really convincing virtual reality where you could simulate a society turning genocidal around an individual subject, tweaking aspects of the their experience and comparing the actions of different subjects who experience the same thing. Even better would be if we developed the technology to suppress people’s memories, so that you could run different simulations on the same individual. With such resources, it would be trivial to measure/fiddle with physiological reactivity to experiences as they happened, to see how a surge of adrenaline or testosterone, an anxiety attack, or a mild sedative influences moral decision-making.

Of course, the technological limitations here are secondary to the moral ones. Even if we could do all of this, we shouldn’t. We’d be no better than that which we seek to stop - which, when you’re trying to stop genocide, really says something.

(Although if we did have memory suppressants in our virtual world, I would volunteer to be a subject.)

Anyway, that’s the dream that can never be. What impossible experiment would you do, if you could?