If you were running this world as an experiment, what...

[Kyriakos]

what would you be primarily testing for?

On my part, i suppose i'd be examining either for appearance of rare behavior (eg people who go insane and do a routine, including rare actions such as focusing on obscure things), or have some mental pattern complexity assessment to make (eg thoughts or progressions considerably above x complexity, with x being a standard or typical for the species).

It doesn't matter if you have tentacles, pseudopods or tens of eyes, but better keep the thread relatively clean from the mundane sexual 'Grays' probing

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Firced mass resettlement of humans. I'd send all Indonesians to Western Europe, disperse 200 million Europeans in Africa, and Asia, make the populations of Japan and Brazil switch places, send half the chinese to India and half the Indians to China, switch some of the rest with North Americans, place the entire population of Ethopia and the Kongo on the North American East coast etc.
Then I'd watch how the societies develop.

Alternatively, I might try to make artificial states among ideological lines. All fundamentalists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu etc together) get one subcontinent together, all Nazis -German Nais together with American Nazis, Russian Nazis and Mongolian Nazis etc. get one country, same for all manner of (center) leeftists, rightists, liberals etc.

 

[Ryika]

Conscience. I don't think humans have any, but they seem to think they have it, so maybe that makes them conscious, even though they're really not conscious by any logical definition.

Aside from that, I would probably test all the funky little types of theoretical governments that you people have come up with, just to see which one crumbles the quickest, in some kind of race to the bottom. You humans really don't understand how to create well-working societies.

 

[Broken_Erika]

The dolphins are running this world as an experiment. Soon they'll decide to end it and drive us all into the ocean!
I think the experiment started as a study of intelligent primates and devolved into a class study of stupidity..
Regardless! The Dolphin Wars are Coming!

 

[Gori the Grey]

See whether the universe would ever generate a Greek-speaking translator of Poe and Kafka.

 

[Hrothbern]

Interesting question...
Could be anything...

After Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he wrote the Dosadi Experiment
In some ways an echo of extreme circumstances leading to the Sardaukar on one planet and the Freemen on Dune.
Which on her turn reflects the common practice of colonial empires to single out one race/tribe in the colonial area as stormtroopers to control the rest of the area.

For the plot of that Dosadi experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dosadi_Experiment

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I dunno, but I could name a few impurities I'd have filtered from the sample by now.

 

[Kyriakos]

I dunno, but I could name a few impurities I'd have filtered from the sample by now.

And instead let Barabas free, right?
I mean, Barabas likely would be a pitbull kind of guy.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Not a terribly fun answer, but since I've studied physics for so many years, and mostly dealt with basic questions, I've gotten pretty amazed by how complex and intricate biology is, so I'd be content seeing how intriciate life can get on like a molecular level or whatever
even trees are pretty amazing