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Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

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Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#51

Post by Sparkyte »

throwway120385 wrote: post #46
Sparkyte wrote: post #34

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 u…

Without actually talking to the cat, there's not any way of knowing that they don't perceive walls within some abstraction like "building." All we can really say is that the cat behaves as if the wall is some unchangeable object in its environment. You can't know the mind of a cat. Maybe they just like the idea of being inside something impregnable?

Possible but that also means you have no way to convey the difference between the idea of wall and the unchangeable object that is the wall.

The idea of this experiment succeeding depends entirely on those in the experiment knowing the rules of the test.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#53

Post by fnordian_slip »

Corvus wrote: post #52

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

It's not about the same experiment, unless I am mistaken, but it's a great comic nevertheless, thank you for sharing.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#54

Post by nisegami »

Asooka wrote: post #37
adamwong246 wrote: post #3

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?

You can, in fact, buy a dozen pet mice and build a pen like that. In fact that's what breeders do regularly. There are no laws against it.

This reply is an infohazard.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#55

Post by theamk »

tomohelix wrote: post #18
generalizations wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like an incredibly easy experiment for a 'citizen scientist' to replicate - all you need is a backyard, 5+ years of mouse food, A/C, and water. And a burrow-proof structure. Someone should do this.

Even if they did, the result would never be accepted. People will nitpick everything they can, from comparability to methodology, to ignore whatever may come out of such a study. Heck, the original is still controversial to this day and there are many people rejecting the results because of "lack of scientific method". A sweet lie is preferable to the cruel truth, or so they said.

I am not sure what results are there to reject? "Overpopulation exists"? "Overpopulation can be very dangerous"? "If you stress animals enough, they will start behaving strangely"? Those seem pretty trivial, perhaps even obvious.

There are also people doing parallels to human groups, but as other commenter said, it's not clear at all how mice social behavior relates to humans', given how different they are even in non-stressed environment.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#56

Post by autoexec »

hoseja wrote: post #42
robwwilliams wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have not. And now not possible due to justified animal welfare concerns. Hans-Peter Lipp and colleagues have studied domestic mice reared and maintained in a large outdoor pen. I could only find this reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21454292/

>justified How about yall stop factory farming first. But I guess a curious slightly mad scientist is an easier target than an agrocorporation, the guy probably won't feed you to the hogs.

Scientists and universities with ethics put rules in place to prevent unethical behavior. People without ethics work for Tyson Foods and torture chickens for extra money.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#57

Post by generalizations »

theamk wrote: post #55
tomohelix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they did, the result would never be accepted. People will nitpick everything they can, from comparability to methodology, to ignore whatever may come out of such a study. Heck, the original is still controversial to this day and there are many people rejecting the results because of "lack of scientific method". A sweet lie is preferable to the cruel truth, or so they said.

I am not sure what results are there to reject? "Overpopulation exists"? "Overpopulation can be very dangerous"? "If you stress animals enough, they will start behaving strangely"? Those seem pretty trivial, perhaps even obvious. There are also people doing parallels to human groups, but as other commenter said, it's not clear at all how mice social behavior relates to humans', given how different they are even in no…

The interesting parts of the experiment aren't the basic 'overpopulation bad' results. I think the interesting stuff is more like:

- what emergent, unnatural behaviors form? (e.g. the beautiful ones, isolated females)

- are these emergent behaviors tied directly to mouse psychology, or to more fundamental things also true of humans? (e.g. is the beautiful ones emergence due specifically to alpha-mouse ostracism behavior, or is this a more fundamental psychological urge to maintain control over what little is still controllable? - which has direct implications for humans)

- what tweaks to this system of, effectively, complex automata result in a stable equilibrium, dependent only on behaviors that are true of both mouse and man?

Questions like that would be hard to construct in an experimental setting, and it would take an insane amount of documentation and rigor to get those results accepted if it was a backyard experiment. With good reason, too. I'd take it with a huge helping of skepticism too. But do it right, and it'd be crazy valuable.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#58

Post by rekabis »

> 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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#59

Post by Log_out_ »

adamwong246 wrote: post #3

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?

What if the rat behavior was evolutionary adapted to the boom and bust cycles aka they are loopdeformed? What if it is against ratgods directives to not max out rathaven? What if we all are?
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