What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Left with No Supervision for 5 Days? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Left with No Supervision for 5 Days?

kottke.org

27 pointszdw35 comments

The producers most likely selected kids with personalities more conducive to the outcomes they wanted.

I don't know why the author concluded that the girls did a better job of living together. 20% of the girls left early, while all of the boys stayed.

>I don't know why the author concluded that the girls did a better job of living together

The author has some odd views about gender. For example, he gives credence to the idea that male/female differences in physical strength are entirely due to social factors: https://kottke.org/18/02/the-winter-olympics-male-female-phy...

>humans are sexually dimorphic but the story doesn’t end there. Bodies are also socially constructed.

This seems to be saying that while there are gender differences, social factors also play a role.

He quotes a book that states body aesthetic preference might limit performance at the peaks of women's sports. That's nothing Maria Sharapova hasn't said in a particularly sore interview.

Wait, who is saying “male/female differences in physical strength are entirely due to social factors”?

I'll give you one further - a college professor/trans activist insisting biological sex doesn't exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10fDRERJh4w

How bizarre. It even undermines the argument for transition - if there's no such thing as sex, what are they transitioning from and to?

Not only that, in the first 5 minutes of the boys video the kids were provided with a bunch of water guns, paint tubes, and paint brushes. Add in the fact that the place is furnished like a fun house and not a normal living space. What did they think the kids were going to do there with all that?

Film crews were there with them in person, silently walking around and filming?

Did they also train the kids to ignore the crews and not stare into the cameras lol

This just seems goofy.

It's not feasible to do a real "Lord of the Flies" experiment on purpose; not even the notoriously sociopathic world of reality TV producers could get away with that.

If you have adults watching and ready to spring in at a moment's notice, the kids will limit their behavior to what they think they can get away with.

If you don't, there's a good chance someone will get seriously hurt or killed.

Not surprising that they (or maybe their underwriters) picked the first option.

See also "The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months":

* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

* https://www.google.com/search?q=real+life+lord+of+the+flies

Isn't that what Lord of the Flies was about?

Yeah, except LotF didn't have a couple dozen camera crew hanging out with the kids all day.

There should have been a control group of college age adults.

...Split by political affiliation.

In a way the adults are already replicating the test group behavior on a global level.

> The atmosphere is becoming hysterical and aggressive. Almost everything has been destroyed.

Season two of 'The Island with Bear Grylls' might be closest you can get to that. Though age diverse, men and women were put on separate islands and developed very different dynamics. But it is a tv show so there's only so much value to gain from it as an experiment. I haven't seen later seasons but the synopsizes sounds like producers were much more intent on crafting them as ratings friendly entertainment than what happened in season two.

A similar experiment should be conducted on humanity.

It is very interesting, though not surprising I suppose, of how people conceptualize what "adulthood" is composed of. It seems to me that it is typically considered to be ~synonymous with competence and intelligence, but this is fundamentally only a relative perspective, and it also seems to be typically considered to be a ~measurement, when the truth of the matter is that it more often[1] resembles a hallucination.

I've thought for a long time that the ending of Lord of the Flies is a beautiful analogy for the way humanity conducts itself, both globally and domestically:

https://youtu.be/3MHExbJGIQs

[1] Average cognition, not best cognition

Isn’t boredom supposed to be a driver of negative behavior?

I wonder what would happen if they were left alone but given a goal.

For example, in sports if kids are allowed to “free play”, no coaches, no parents, etc., they can often enjoy their time together.

Hard to make much of this because of the safety considerations required to make it at least minimally ethical. Not sure if there is a way to design such an experiment that is both safe for the children and valid.

"Some would watch these videos and say, “well, boys are like that and girls are like this, it’s just nature”. Others might say that girls and boys are socialized differently"

People really need to stop with this "socialized differently" - the evidence is overwhelming that boys and girls are in fact different. In order to make them act similar you have to fight their nature constantly (which society certainly keeps trying to do - unsuccessfully), in order for them to be different no special effort is needed.

I really want to see the same experiment, but with children from different cultures. For instance how would Japanese children behave in the same situation?

Well, for very young Japanese children alone, there's a show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough! https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279

Interesting! I think Japanese education system puts a lot of emphasis on sense of responsibility and team work from a very young age, so it seems to be a matter of nurture than nature. For example, children at schools are responsible for cleaning their school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv4oNvxCY5k

FYI, the first link is broken because the exclamation mark is not considered part of it by the HN software. The broken link points to a different piece of media. The correct link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough%21

They should have bugged the house, but avoided the presence of a crew.

It would have been most interesting to add a group half boys half girls. I hear mixed groups display better natural behavior.

Pirates and all boys. Girls alone lead to Pussy Riot. Only a mixed group can evolve to civilisation! ;-)

I think it would be neat to see this staged kind of like one of those desert island reality shows, only letting the kids, say, run mostly safely around a monitored forest with shelters setup.

I would have liked to see a mixed gender group. It usually attenuates the extremes of behavior.

William Golding wrote about this…

kill the pig

Golding just made stuff up. In real life, it looks like this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

Golding was satirising other books where young western males get lost amongst "the natives" and end up rebuilding civilization and showing up the natives because they are so much better equipped by superior genetics.

That... makes sense. I had not heard of that interpretation before, but it makes sense, when you think about it.

Thanks :) that was uplifting :)

Im surprised there was no mixed group

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