Mad Scientists: Call for Proposals

I'll twist the topic a bit and offer something that I wouldn't _actually_ want to do because of the ethical implications, but instead offer something that I think would provide quite a bit of insight into the human psyche if we were to ignore the ethical implications:

I would create an environment where babies/children are brought up by machines that provide them with the basic needs and do what needs to be done to grant basic education to the babies/children, but all without empathy, or showing interest in them besides these activities. No "feedback" on whether what they're doing is good, no ability to have conversations or to have someone to exchange ideas with, just passive feeding of information and a lot of time with themselves. I think it would be very interesting to see what these children grow up to be, especially if we feed them different types of information (like, if we teach a person all they need to know about art and provide them with art supplies) and how they would react when they come into contact with other humans for the first time.

As a bonus, this would also grant knowledge on the "Nature vs. Nurture"-debate.
 
Some major attempts to address, study, correct the backfire effect, human psychological responses to digging in against data that rejects their prebuilt hypothesis.

Some grand study on whether the entire prison system can be abolished and built from the ground up to reflect more human treatment, independence, and do so while reducing crime and recidivism, maybe using small scale test studies with low population prisons with communities with a robust safety net.

Using all 1 billion on a multiyear UBI in several totally different geographic and cultural locations.

Undertaking the mother of all studies into antidepressant, antipsychotic, and other similar medications efficacy and future development.

Forgiving a large chunk of student debt and following said students over the years and their future earnings, life satisfaction, health, etc.
 
Cheetah said:
Inseminate a bunch of chimpanzees with human sperm, isolate the chimpanzee pack and see if the new hybrids grow up to create some kind of culture.
Click to expand...

I need to disappoint you there, the humanzee has already been tried in the USSR, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee#Reports_of_attempted_hybridization (although reports are doubtfull).

Ryika said:
I would create an environment where babies/children are brought up by machines that provide them with the basic needs and do what needs to be done to grant basic education to the babies/children, but all without empathy, or showing interest in them besides these activities. No "feedback" on whether what they're doing is good, no ability to have conversations or to have someone to exchange ideas with, just passive feeding of information and a lot of time with themselves. I think it would be very interesting to see what these children grow up to be, especially if we feed them different types of information (like, if we teach a person all they need to know about art and provide them with art supplies) and how they would react when they come into contact with other humans for the first time.

As a bonus, this would also grant knowledge on the "Nature vs. Nurture"-debate.
Click to expand...

I think you might be interested in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments . Basically same setup, but the kids never learned any language, with the idea to find out what is the "natural" language.
Your idea is interesting in a different way though :).


Personally...what to say... at our hospital we have a department which intentially (after informed consent) infects human volunteers with all kind of diseases (curable ones). So...I have a bit of a hard time coming up with something what we're not allowed to do :D.
We'll have a colonization trial with a non-pathogenic version of our lab's pet bacterium coming up. We'll just see if we can colonize the people, "cure" them, and maybe find a causative difference between the ability to colonize. We might bomb the participants in a second round also with some rather brutal antibiotics, in case the first round does not work out (although I'm finding that a tad bit unethical already). We're definitely not allowed to use the pathogenic version in a follow up experiment (mortallity can be up to 30%), but that'd be somewhat interesting to see.
 
caketastydelish said:
How to make a person using the human genome project (all the human genomes) and Cherry pick the very best ones to make the “best” person possible.
Click to expand...
Too late. Melania's already claimed that line of research in her Be Best initiative.
 
Nice try, but that’s not what the be best initiative is about.
 
Cheetah said:
Yeah, I know of this one. But as it says, it was never actually successful, so my suggestion still stands. ;)
Click to expand...

Yeah, true.
Would not give it the highest chances of success though. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, other apes have 24. While this doesn't necessarily mean that a hybrid would not be feasible, it means at least that the offspring would not be fertile (like mules).


Another experiment:
Gather a bigger bunch of children from different "races" (define yourself). Raise them all in the same surrounding, with the same education, same everything, etc.
Then make the ultimate IQ test, to figure out if "whatever-race" is superior to the others.


Something more in my field: The ecological theory is that if a niche in a habitat is taken by an organism, another one cannot occupy it.
It also says that every trait has a benefit and a cost, and that costly traits, which in some cases would be useful, but not in that particular setting, make an organism less fit.
This could maybe be used to combat antibiotic resistant organisms.
e.g. infect people with a fully drug resistant organism (e.g. strains of TB or gonorrhea), do not treat them, then infect them additionally with susceptible strains, to see if the susceptible strains erradicate the fully resistant ones. Then treat the people with useful antibiotics. Infection could also come e.g. via a sexual partner, in case of gonorrhea.
Very unethical, but ecologically seen interesting.
 
Last edited:
Ryika said:
I'll twist the topic a bit and offer something that I wouldn't _actually_ want to do because of the ethical implications, but instead offer something that I think would provide quite a bit of insight into the human psyche if we were to ignore the ethical implications:

I would create an environment where babies/children are brought up by machines that provide them with the basic needs and do what needs to be done to grant basic education to the babies/children, but all without empathy, or showing interest in them besides these activities. No "feedback" on whether what they're doing is good, no ability to have conversations or to have someone to exchange ideas with, just passive feeding of information and a lot of time with themselves. I think it would be very interesting to see what these children grow up to be, especially if we feed them different types of information (like, if we teach a person all they need to know about art and provide them with art supplies) and how they would react when they come into contact with other humans for the first time.

As a bonus, this would also grant knowledge on the "Nature vs. Nurture"-debate.
Click to expand...
This was tried. The babies died very quickly.
 
Hygro said:
This was tried. The babies died very quickly.
Click to expand...

We need from birth on, if not already earlier, human social interactions to develop.
I think the idea to research Nature vs Nurture is as such interesting.
Trying to find that base line of Nature likely delivers good info, and I am curious how much our current culture is adding: positive effects as well as negative effects, depending how you look at them.

In order to research that baseline, we could simulate small tribes with cultures and means of existence as they were 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, 200k years ago.
Let them run for a couple of generations, and monitor. The results should give us an estimate of the minimal set of social interactions our evolution expects.

One, two centuries ago we had an abundancy of such tribes to monitor. But we improved their lives... or needed resources.
Many old reports on them too colored by bias of the observers to be really useful imo.

It would not surprise me when these Nature social cultures are quite rich in social interactions.
Perhaps we are more like a dessert.
 
Make a person with partial human chromosomes and partial spider chromosomes so we can make spider man real.

I would also be impressed with a bird man.
 
caketastydelish said:
Make a person with partial human chromosomes and partial spider chromosomes so we can make spider man real.

I would also be impressed with a bird man.
Click to expand...
Theres a good chance that the experiment could lead to something along these lines......
Spoiler :
LyVt.gif

Or this "Spider-Man"
Spoiler :
tumblr_ogi73kgETi1r7zeb0o1_1280.gif
 
Building an android robot that looks like the Donald, talks like the Donald and moves
like the Donald, to allow the real poor over stressed Donald to relax on his golf courses.

Hint, similar to what a German engineer was prototyping with King George Bush II.

But perhaps Michael Pence has already done that, in which case the only reason I
can establish for the current behaviour is to get the Donald impeached, so that Mike
Pence can step out of his remote control frame and be the POTUs in his own right.
 
Time to bust out cloning and DNA modification in addition to designer babies. More funding in general AI research would be nice too but that's not sufficiently unethical.

The ultimate discovery objective: attaining the ability to modify what people want outright. Let's put nerve staples to shame. Joyous world to picture indeed!
 
Lexicus said:
Give me fifty human test subjects and carte blanche and I will prove beyond any possibility of doubt that "human nature" is near-infinitely malleable and that environmental influences are decisive in shaping life outcomes.
Click to expand...
:lol: I wonder if observation would open your eyes or if youd find a way to attempt to invalidate the experience when common cultural patterns emerged that couldn't be explained by environment.
 
They're already making AI to play video games so that's kind of out.

https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/

I want a long term study with tons of subjects across multiple races/ethnic groups to study the differences in beverage choices. All have the exact same healthy diet aside from what they drink, ie full of fruits and veggies, lean protein like fish, chicken, beans, nuts, some eggs, red meat once or twice a week, fibrous carbs like brown rice and oatmeal, one or two days a week are vegetarian. Five groups.

Control group- drinks only water, recommended amount for weight like 2-3 liters a day.
All other groups drink half water and sub the other half of their liquids with one drink type. So that'd be around 3-4 standard cans (12 ounce servings) of whatever drink if we're basing this on 2-3 liters of liquids per day.

Group 1- Drinks orange juice, pulp free kind not from concentrate
Group 2- Drinks the coca cola from mexico that's made with real cane sugar
Group 3- Drinks standard american coca cola with high fructose corn syrup
Group 4- Drinks diet coke with aspartame
Group 5- Drinks water and supplements with caffeine pills to reach the equivalent of 3 cans of coke a day (around 100mg)
Group 6- Drinks orange juice and supplements with same caffeine pills

I just want to see average results on weight, feelings of hunger (since they're all fed the same diet), blood glucose levels etc just to see what happens.
 
civvver said:
They're already making AI to play video games so that's kind of out.

https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/

I want a long term study with tons of subjects across multiple races/ethnic groups to study the differences in beverage choices. All have the exact same healthy diet aside from what they drink, ie full of fruits and veggies, lean protein like fish, chicken, beans, nuts, some eggs, red meat once or twice a week, fibrous carbs like brown rice and oatmeal, one or two days a week are vegetarian. Five groups.

Control group- drinks only water, recommended amount for weight like 2-3 liters a day.
All other groups drink half water and sub the other half of their liquids with one drink type. So that'd be around 3-4 standard cans (12 ounce servings) of whatever drink if we're basing this on 2-3 liters of liquids per day.

Group 1- Drinks orange juice, pulp free kind not from concentrate
Group 2- Drinks the coca cola from mexico that's made with real cane sugar
Group 3- Drinks standard american coca cola with high fructose corn syrup
Group 4- Drinks diet coke with aspartame
Group 5- Drinks water and supplements with caffeine pills to reach the equivalent of 3 cans of coke a day (around 100mg)
Group 6- Drinks orange juice and supplements with same caffeine pills

I just want to see average results on weight, feelings of hunger (since they're all fed the same diet), blood glucose levels etc just to see what happens.
Click to expand...


I would recommend to carbonate the orange juice and plain water to the same degree as coca cola.
Or double the full test with carbonated and non-carbonated (cola)

Too many effects appear to happen from drinking plain or sparkled water.
 
Carbonated orange juice? Are you trying to have a group that has a high fatality rate? Horrendous.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom