Margaret Mead's LSD Memo | Hacker News Reader

Margaret Mead's LSD Memo

slate.com

41 pointsbenbreen7 comments

The west's ability to embrace cultural change is one of its greatest strengths. The article discusses that in 1940s and 1950s America being homosexual/bisexual was opening oneself up to blackmail. It was a secret that needed to be protected. The provides an opening for corruption. Today, it's hard to imagine a scientist losing reputation for being openly bisexual. If only we could measure how much blackmail we have prevented by modifying our cultural norms.

Maybe the acid helped us with the adaptation.

> What if one of our most respected 20th-century scientists had ...

Hasn't Margaret Mead been totally discredited? I mean that while ignoring the ridiculous culture war aspects and unfalsifiable assertions; treating all that discussion with the contempt it deserves. Her research isn't science and she got hoaxed in Samoa by kids making fun of the outsider. It can't be used as evidence for anything much nor does it being discredited count for much as opposing evidence. Interesting story and cautionary tale for informing research design and practice. Sheds no light at all one way or the other on nature vs nurture debates.

Obviously very, very challenging for anyone who had done subsequent work for which it was foundational. Also for those getting extremely confused thinking this finally proves the opposite hypothesis.

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research was challenged by academics too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...

i.e.

In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture

It all sounds great until you consider what her research described is behavior unknown in Samoa. I guess it's possible that it has all completely changed since and Samoans have all colluded to lie and forget about it but it kind of seems pretty unlikely to me. Not you?

Unfounded? I've seen footage of an elderly Samoan lady [1] describing how she and her friends "just lied and lied" to Mead for fun. So if we're going that way it's beyond unfounded but actually fabricated. Note I say /nothing/ at all about Freeman here.

>> Obviously very, very challenging for anyone who had done subsequent work for which it was foundational.

It's really, really hard for us as humans to acknowledge we've fooled ourselves or indeed the lesser thing that our heroes made massive errors.

edit: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQUl9E3GpVI

at around 1:50 but note the other Samoan voices here who have strong views on the matter.

How do you know that the elderly Samoan lady is not lying about having lied to Mead for fun, decades after the events in question? Let me give what ought to be an equally plausible scenario, given the evidence we have: What if the Samoans in that village all told the truth to Mead about sex, gender, coming of age, and so on, because she was the first outsider to visit and ask? Then when other outsiders came to that village much later, the outsiders said they knew of the village because of Mead, and were incredibly interested in one and only one question: was it true? The outsiders really want to know if the villagers lied to Mead and just told her what they thought she wanted to hear. The outsiders stick a camera in their faces, begging for an answer. The villagers then lie to the new outsiders and tell them what they want to hear: that they lied to Mead and made it all up for fun, and outsiders shouldn't believe anything she says.

The point is that there is no way to verify Mead's empirical claims either way. It isn't false, it is unfalsifiable.

Here's what I said.

>> I guess it's possible that it has all completely changed since and Samoans have all colluded to lie and forget about it but it kind of seems pretty unlikely to me. Not you?

So it is possible, sure. Seems implausible to me that Samoa is engaging in a national conspiracy for reasons unclear. Between any number of Samoans (sample size many more than 3) telling us about their culture it seems reasonable to believe the Samoans themselves using their own words about their own experiences rather than reports of what was said by 3 people to a third party that we'd have to acknowledge, seem far from certain in the light of subsequent statements.

>...no way to verify Mead's empirical claims either way. It isn't false, it is unfalsifiable

Yep unfalsifisble is not science. It is discredited. The information from the source interviews surely does look false too. I just can't give credence to a national, inter-generational conspiracy in Samoa, combined with a very radical and persistent cultural change all to discredit an american anthropologist. How would you even pull that off? Finding out would be more fascinating than the original research if it happened but I strongly doubt it did.

> Yep unfalsifisble is not science

Ethnography is not really science. It is about constructing a perspective from what you experience, but there's no guarantee you are not influencing what you see.

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