Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

I wish I could run a few of these experiments. Like, what if you continuously increase the size of the pen? What if you introduce some sort of predator or limit the food? What if you give the rats birth control so you can prevent the "bomb then bust" population curve? What if you continuously remove the alphas? What if you continuously remove the non-alphas?

The biggest danger by human overpopulation is global warming and other forms of permanent enviromental damage (specially to other animal species), which has no equivalent in this experiment, global warming wouldn't be such an issue if there weren't 8 billions of us, is hard to verify but is likely that if there were "only" 1 billion humans global warming would have progressed only an 8th fraction of what it currently has. Of course any chance of addressing such population issue is long gone but hoping from a change of hearth from the people at charge of the top most polluting industries is even less likely as far as I can tell (fossil fuels, agriculture, fashion)

I feel it's hard to find correlations between these studies and human psychology. It'd require a fair amount of extrapolations, sometimes far too generous to the point of it being a stretch. Yes, perhaps science does work that way to an extent. But considering how the readings so vastly change as per the group reading it, mostly reflects more on the person reading than the experiment itself.

I guess a controlled MMORP with certain constraints could also lead to some understanding of group dynamics in a similar vein.

For my uni ecology course back in 1980 I read about a predator prey experiment consisting of hundreds of oranges connected by string bridges and a mite, with a predator. They really struggled to get multi generational scale.

What I read in this is that models for the natural environment with "a couple of simplifications" generally crash fast because real world systems are much more complex.

Maybe what he needed for rodent heaven 25 was a more complex situation to model? Add Cats? Fleas? Diseases? Maybe heaven demands adversity?

Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?

The Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen wrote a good cartoon called Rat Park about this experiment; https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

They had everything they could ever want for - except space.

(2022)

Some discussion then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31905218

My big takeaway is that Calhoun must have been world champion at giving blowjobs, because how else do you get the ethics board to approve twenty five of these cursed experiments?

The problem with this study as that mice do not have the collective intelligence to know the situation they are in and there for the input and output is straight forward. If the information is kept transparent to a person human level sentenance the could have entirely different results.

No animal or human deserves to be compared to as their nature while still part of the same kingdom is distinctively different.

Man understands what walls are, what they do, what they mean. It is conceptual and tangible in thought. Pets, the family cat for example, knows only that it is an obstacle. There is no further meaning or allusion, it is to them in all ways just an obstacle.

> Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks.

That happens with everything. You'll often see people on the internet blaming the collapse of the Roman Empire on... well, anything the writer doesn't like, really. I've seen both 'capitalism' and 'socialism' blamed, which would be a good trick, as neither would meaningfully exist for many centuries afterwards. We're often quite good at seeing something unfamiliar which we don't understand, seeing some echo of familiarity in it, and projecting all sorts of things onto it based on that familiarity.

> Calhoun’s big takeaway involved status. Again, the males who lost the fights for dominance couldn’t leave to start over elsewhere. As he saw it, they were stuck in pathetic, humiliating roles and lacked a meaningful place in society.

Sounds like most younger modern men that reached adulthood in the last 20-30 years: forced by women to uphold all the patriarchal requirements that benefit women - breadwinner, good career, good social status, pay for everything, take all the physical and emotional risks, etc. - yet are increasingly denied the very tools needed to achieve these goals… instead, they are faced with a myriad of barriers that they cannot control and are not permitted to object to, such as preferential education support for women, preferential hiring of women, preferential career advancement for women, disrespected status in society, becoming the default “villain” for anything that nerfs a woman, etc..

Not only does this underlie the societal conditions that many researchers are saying gives rise to 1ncels, but this is also the very reasoning why many men are giving up and “going their own way” -- they are being crushed between a rock and a hard place, and are being simultaneously punished for failing to perform while being forcibly denied the very tools needed to achieve said performance. So they reject it all as an impossible task that is maliciously anti-male and directly harmful to their own physical health and mental health. They turn away from society and women’s demands of men to focus on what truly matters: themselves.

These MGTOW become “the beautiful ones”, rejecting female entanglements and (frequently even) sex in order to properly take care of themselves in a society that actively hates them for the gender that they were born with.

And I don’t blame them one bit.

> Women are supposedly falling into Calhoun’s behavioral sink by learning “maladaptive behaviors,” such as choosing not to have children, which “destroy[s] their own genetic interests.” Other critics agonize over the supposed loss of traditional gender roles, leaving effete males and hyperaggressive females, or they deplore the undermining of religions and their imperatives to “be fruitful and multiply.” In tandem, such changes will lead to the “decline of the West.”

Jesus Christ.

Calhoun's observations were subjective and unscientific. This sadistic "experiment" only demonstrated his biases.