1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity (2015) | Hacker News Reader

1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity (2015)

smithsonianmag.com

69 pointscscurmudgeon49 comments

Not very long ago there was a story posted about some boys from a Catholic boarding school in New Zealand(?) who got lost on an island and how it did not turn into Lord of the Flies. I'll try to find the link, but generally I'll advice to take both science and highly praised fiction (as well supposed debunking of science) with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Edit - DDG keeps getting better, not monotonically, but still, I found this on my first try: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

Edit 2 - and here is the discussion from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27375076

This is the story you mention, I believe...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2...

6 boys really doesn't constitute a society besides in its minimal definition. I imagine things may have been different with even just 12 of them since group dynamics can change dramatically. Although I do think we overestimate how easily any group of people can devolve into LOTF when not subjected to governance.

This experiment doesn't tell us much of anything about the future of humanity.

* There aren't enough parallels between human social patterns and mice. Human intelligence seems to be largely about managing social relationships and we might reasonably expect that to have big implications at scale.

* Resource scarcity is still the major problem at the level humans operate at. The global median lifestyle is sustained on less than $10k/annum, and a human can comfortably consume an order of magnitude more than that without giving in to hedonism. There is reason to believe resources will give out before we hit that limit.

* The experiment is a bit artificial.

the experiment showcases basics of biology. A biological population is mostly controlled by scarcity of resources. Decreasing scarcity leads to population growth. That leads to increased density. Fast changes don't allow for sufficient smooth adaptation, and instead cause breakdown of existing related patterns (in that particular case fast density increase breaks social behavior patterns which evolved to manage much lesser density). That applicable to any biological system, not just mice and people.

It's not as simple as that with humans. scarcity is just of factor of many.

I don't think there's a scarcity problem these days yet population is still declining(especially in educated/civilized countries). That's been ongoing since the 70's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

1. scarcity isn't only of food, which is basically solved, there is also other resources which are scarce like place to live, etc.

2.children for humans were a way to hedge against scarcity issue in the old age. With that issue decreasing the children are less needed for that.

The point is it still directly connected to scarcity (or lack of it).

Calling it a "utopia" is pretty weird, and it doubly annoys me that no journalists who talks about this line of experiments ever actually mentions that. The analogous situation for humans wouldn't be a utopia... it would be be a wildly overcrowded prison with no entertainment, no exercise equipment, and no outside access ever. Of course people, and animals, go crazy under those sorts of conditions.

Thank you for saying this. All animals need intellectual stimulation, living in a panopticon is not that.

https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia

>Mouse Utopia is almost completely unpublished. Despite working on it and similar experiments with NIMH funding for decades (he “continued to work on his research results until his death on September 7, 1995”), Calhoun appears to have published almost nothing substantive about his research, limited to a handful of short summary articles or passing references.

>It is unclear just how many experiments Calhoun had to run to get the one result which is always talked about; the name “Universe 25” implies at least 24 prior experiments, and Calhoun speaks vaguely of multiple “series” of experiments, referencing earlier experiments with stable populations (unlike Universe 25), some which were apparently controlled to fixed population sizes and some which apparently were not. Nor did all of the overpopulated universes develop the “behavioral sink” phenomenon Calhoun lays so much stress on, which he attributes to an otherwise-unexplained change in the food type.

>No followup literature: only 2 partial replications have ever been done by third parties that I know of; likewise, if unique aspects of Calhoun’s experiment like the “beautiful ones” have been reported since, I have not encountered any references to them. They do not convincingly support the Universe 25 Mouse Utopia narrative.

I've noticed that there were a number of high profile social experiments around that time (50's-70's) that tried to show something inherent elements of humanity that cause us to turn evil. The Stanford prison experiment, Robbers Cave experiment, The Third Wave, etc. When you start to look deep into any of these, they all seem to have mostly been done by charlatans who manipulated results and sensationalized findings in order to get publicity.

The popular-audience book Humankind by Rutger Bregman goes into the history of some of these classic experiments. In particular I was pretty shocked at how badly run the Stanford prison experiment was, and how lackluster and different the results were in the BBC's attempt to replicate. Granted, participants in that second experiment knew it would be televised, but that's not necessarily a recipe for good behavior, and they certainly engaged in conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment

I don't trust any studies in psychology, especially social psychology. https://www.gleech.org/psych

It is good to debunk bad science.

Just be careful not to repeat the same mistakes in reverse, throwing out something that is clearly helpful because the original experiment cannot be trusted.

I'll post a very simple thought experiment to prove it for one of the cases:

> No good evidence that tailoring teaching to students’ preferred learning styles has any effect on objective measures of attainment. There are dozens of these inventories, and really you’d have to look at each. (I won’t.)

Now, do as in math and consider what happens when we approach zero:

- what happens if a student cannot hear?

- what happens if a student cannot see?

or infinity:

- can you think of a learning style that works better or worse for people who are strongly affected by ADHD?

- same but for social anxiety?

So, just by thinking about it for a few moments we can debunk the debunking: Clearly there exists whole subsets of the population (blind, deaf) where one or more learning styles are impossible, meaning that the rest of the learning styles must be better for those.

What can we learn from this?

Maybe to be sceptical, even towards the sceptics?

That's why you use multiple approaches if you could. No real reason to limit yourself to only one preferred modality unless you're forced to.

In case there was any reason to doubt: I agree.

There's the old saying "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

Isn’t the problem you’re raising here simply that the studies tend to look at populations rather than individuals or even sub-groups? It’s a neat way to demonstrate the problem. The challenge is that as long as we treat the RCT as the primary means by which we build knowledge, it will remain difficult to study sub-groups because it’s so hard to obtain a sufficient sample.

That's a good approach, thanks for writing it as a reminder. This takes me back to math and physics lessons, where we tested a given function/formula at extremes and one or more interesting points in the middle, just to get a good feel for its behavior.

Continuing your mental framework, the problem with interpreting such research is that the results we get are in the "probe some points to get a feel" category. Consider a single learning style, and let's plot its known effectiveness, as a function of "learning capability", where "learning capability" is a measure that places students with relevant disabilities on the left, and students with relevant gifts on the right. Assume, for the sake of the exercise, that this metric is sound. We get something like:

  EFFECTIVENESS
     ^
     |                               oo
     |           x   x x
     | 
     |oo                       
     +--------------------------------->
              LEARNING CAPACITY

Where 'o' are obvious values derived from the thought experiments like you did ("what happens if a student cannot hear?", etc.), and 'x' are points from research of the method over a population of a given learning capacity. Looking at 'x' points alone would make you think the method doesn't improve anything for anyone. Looking at 'o' points alone would make you conclude it obviously is effective. But the points I depicted above are not enough to tell you whether the function looks like this:

  EFFECTIVENESS
     ^                              ***
     |                           *** 
     |   ************************
     | **
     |**                       
     +--------------------------------->
              LEARNING CAPACITY

Or like this:

  EFFECTIVENESS
     ^                           *******
     |                    *******
     |             *******
     |     ********
     |****                       
     +--------------------------------->
              LEARNING CAPACITY

Or something else entirely. This is something to keep in mind too: does the research data you saw, whether from single or multiple studies, sampled enough of the search space to give you some confidence in the conclusions?

Thanks! Good points!

The world was still scarred by WW2, humans proved the worst if themselves just few years before. It's very reasonable that people were trying to find out why

From the video: "Eventually, the entire mouse population perished". I find that part pretty hard to believe unless there was some additional external factor. A population crash is one thing. But mouse society apparently collapsed to the point where every individual died?

I got fascinated by this experiment and read the paper about it a while back.

To me it is haunting what it implies, on the other hand I also have to believe that humanity are not rats and are more capable smarter and able to reason in ways rats cannot.

Ultimately whenever I enocunter these apocalyptic Malthusian predictions I also try and remind myself that the original Malthus was wrong, so was everyone else that predicted the end of the world and collapse of society, thus this prediction is likely wrong as well.

> I also try and remind myself that the original Malthus was wrong

Was he wrong in the sense his predictions didn't make sense, or was he just mistaken about the timeline because he didn't predict us getting lucky with Haber–Bosch process and finding shitload of oil to burn? Because I feel it's just the latter - which doesn't invalidate the predictions, just delays them.

I suppose a broken clock is right twice a day.

When you look at the types of preventable misery inflicted by philosophical sympathizers, such as the Irish Famine, the banal evil of such a lazy train of thought kinda jumps out.

Malthus had laughably simple mathematical models (strict geometric growth, strict additive food growth IIRC) but the fact that we are staring a worldwide climate crisis and species extinction problem as we race towards 8 billion people and a very uncertain future seems to validate Malthus more than anything.

The 20th century was a century of abundant utilization of resources. Unless space mining takes off, I don't think people in the know consider the 21st century in a similar light.

The exploitation curves of oil fields are basically similar to many other things: mines, agriculture, etc. We have resources that are easy to get to and use, and others that are progressively less economical/productive.

In oil, we're entering the age of tar sands and fracking to keep things afloat until the switchover to EVs happens. EROEI on those things is far worse than the early 1900s where you could stick a pipe into a ground, dig ten feet down and light sweet crude oil would explode out.

Technology keeps bailing us out, but one could view technology the same way: a great deal of simple technology has been pruned from the tech tree. Now we're on 3nm semiconductors, nanostructures, microbiology. Which are all amazing, but those are of increasing complication and increasing cost to bring to market.

So almost all resources are "developed" from more difficult to exploit sources now.

I think his point is that we have unchecked growth and just one planet currently.

“ Technology keeps bailing us out, but one could view technology the same way: a great deal of simple technology has been pruned from the tech tree. Now we're on 3nm semiconductors, nanostructures, microbiology. Which are all amazing, but those are of increasing complication and increasing cost to bring to market.”

And fragility/lack of resilience.

All it implies is putting rodents in a prison makes them unhappy.

Totally useless information, since overpopulation will never happen (mainly because as countries evolve and middle class emerges, birth rates plummet.) Even by 2100 population will barely top 10 Bn and will take a millennia to reach 15. [0]

[0] Pew Research: "By 2100, the world's population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% – a steep decline from the current rate. Between 1950 and today, the world's population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion"

When you fly over the United States most is uninhabited and we have the ability to build up density through height. We are even facing a population crises where we don't have enough people to work the jobs that are open now, much less the number of jobs in the next ten years.

It is not just space, this we have a lot I agree. It is also the ressources and these we have less and we are dependent on others that are also potentially ressource starved.

In last 20 years in the US and other first world countries resource consumption and CO2 emissions flattened or even reversed, whereas economic growth continued almost exponentially. We can now do way more with less resources.

Define economic growth.

It is indeed difficult/impossible to define precisely, but GDP and GDP per capita is a good start

> We are even facing a population crises where we don't have enough people to work the jobs that are open now, much less the number of jobs in the next ten years.

I'm not sure that's really a "population crisis", though, because it can be turned around to "we can't afford to pay people enough to do all of the jobs we want done."

Both of those can be solved in a month with unlimited migration.

But then you get the "standards of living in this city have gone to shit" problem :D

> "we can't afford to pay people enough to do all of the jobs we want done."

Probably more accurate to say "we can afford to pay people enough to do all the jobs we want done -but- it would require a more equitable distribution of wealth and that's not going to happen any time soon"

Conversely, the analogous social factors in humans that caused a population decline in rats in these experiments are already at work on humans in the postindustrial Internet-connected world.

Here’s the Wikipedia article about the experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

And the controversy:

> Controversy exists over the implications of the experiment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman's experiment recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness, and general unpleasantness. He declared to have found no appreciable negative effects in 1975. Researchers argued that "Calhoun's work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."

My biggest problem with this article isn’t the research itself, but the fact that The Smithsonian caint no grammur guud no mo.

Seriously, it reads in places like “hookt on fonix rillee wurkt” for the author.

To me, this sounds more like a problem with lack of genetic diversity. I'd like to see this experiment done again with a larger and more diverse population to start with.

I would also add: on a much higher surface area. Something like 20000sqm to allow the species(mice in this case) to form different groups/tribes

So, did someone cared to replicate the experiments?

And could Calhouns interpretations in his writings and the culturally pessimistic doomsayings the 1970s loved to spawn be confirmed?

If they do it with humans I want to participate.

Beware what you wish for, you hedonist sinner, Man shall not live by bread alone and hell is other people.

So, is there already a comparative literary and/or sociological study of Steinbecks 'Of Mice and Men' and O'Brien's 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH'?

Conscious beings must not be subject to these cruel experiments, or any experiments we wouldn't ourselves submit to.

Real cute this guy had children that yielded him grandchildren if he was so convinced of an overpopulation hypothesis.

On a somewhat related note, I recently got onto a binge reading about Polynesian people and culture.

The story of Polynesian colonization of New Zealand is captivating. It starts with the colonization of a new land with abundant resources. It seems that for the first few centuries the Māori ancestors lived in a relative utopia [3]. Then, as climate changed, population increased, and some resources got depleted competition increased. This is when their culture turned into the genocidal [1] [2] warrior culture that Europeans encountered a few centuries later.

Interestingly, around the time of the culture shift part of the population split off for some reason and formed a non-violent pacifist community that later got annihilated [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_culture#Archaic_per...

What happened to the HackerNews, that bashes 60s Pschology papers as unreproduceable wall isolation material?

No Feynman quotes about how psychology lacks in rigor when testing?

No quibs? No jabs. Afraid to hurt oneself on all the ex-socialoutcast edgyness?

Were are all those google and fb data-miners, who have anonymized access to the largest psychological db on the planet?

Why not for once violate those layers of NDA and give humanity some insight into itself?

Can't right now?

All those social engineering sims occupied with the Palantir accounts?

Can't even run that one, that emulates how indoctrinated employees would behave if they were betraying the enlightenment for idealized privatized interests..

Making the world a beta-place, indeed. The truth is, the mouse-utopias end is doctored. Mouse eats mouse, splits into morlock and eloi, and the habitat waves in horror, as hyper-capitalist predators descent on peaceful mice, trying to retreat, the predators eat themselves, the peaceful mice start to rebound, the experiment never ends, the doctors doctor it so it ends.

There, we are just part of nature and nature is horrifying and finding horrific balances. The pig fearing the tiger in the forest, does not sing.

PS: Sorry to Dang, i shouldn't but a discussion should go somewhere, and these reposts usually don't. They often don't even accumulate interesting anecdata.

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