11 ms·

Intelligent disobedience

212 points by hhs 6y ago

ubuntuubuntu 6y ago
Dogs are beautiful creatures
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
The article briefly mentions teaching this principle to children, and references this article, which I found interesting: https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-teaching-children-intelligent-disobedience/ https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-tea... "Blink, Think, Choice, Voice" is a pretty poor mnemonic though. They compare it to "Stop, Drop, and Roll", but those instructions make sense even before you read anything else about it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's weird and forced. "Blink, Think, Choose, Voice" would be much more consistent, but I'm guessing someone really wanted it to rhyme.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    "Blink, Think, Choose, Refuse" "Blink, Think, Make a Stink" or, the classic, "Question Authority"
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      "Refuse" implies an outcome. I also think "blink" in the first place is a bad term. I understand what they're going for, but it's not an intuitive instruction.
7leafer 6y ago
It's all good when it's about dogs and their owners. But it's not so when it's about the people and the, uhm, men, who were meant to serve the people. The latter are increasingly trying to portray the people as a whole as disabled, and pretend to be knowing better. But to tell the truth, a hefty chunk of people is indeed disabled by the media brainwash...
- luckylion 6y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but you have two points. Almost everybody believes a sizable part of the population to be brainwashed, they disagree on what part it is however. And I do very much believe that it is a discussion worth having for society at large. Do we believe that we are generally aware of the dangers of things we do? Is outlawing oversized sodas the right thing to do? Would it be okay to allow them only if you can use a code word that signals that you do, in fact, understand the risk? Do we not like that approach at all, or do we just not want to deal with deciding who understands the risk and is able to walk down the stairs and who isn't?
  - 7leafer 6y ago
    Let those who don't understand the risk learn the hard way. Free will is not only about doing right, it's also about making mistakes. Now it's obvious that the trend is biasing towards enforcement of the right-doing regardless of consequences and impact on individual freedoms. Almost all writing of Stanislav Lem, for example, is dedicated to this one theme. And extrapolations he made are only becoming more and more relevant as the time goes. Having said that, the freedom to fail should only apply to individuals. Corporate or government entities should never be treated as humans and be allowed to fail the hard way. First, because the magnitude of consequences are incomparable, and second, because the strings of corporate responsibilities are entangled in such a way so as to lead nowhere. They can always lose a head and grow another one. As to crossing of one's individual freedom into another's, that's what the service men are for. But it was alright while they operated under presumption of innocence. Now they are clearly trying to render people guilty until proven otherwise. That was one of the points in my first reply.
yadavmahesh 6y ago
Can have applications in AI / AGI alignment.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Intelligent Disobedience has also found its place in Children's Rights Education offering instruments that help to keep children safe from the rare, but traumatic instances when authority figures abuse their power. I really don't think this is rare. People do crappy things all the time, especially when they imagine they know what is best for someone else. This is the default assumption of most adults in how they relate to any children in their lives.
- Nursie 6y ago
  Isn't that literally the job of a parent? Knowing better than the child what is best for them? Obviously that should include letting the young person stretch, learn and exercise their own judgement, but within bounds set by the parent and with the parent there to help with any consequences.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I was a full-time parent (homemaker) for a lot of years. I always operated as much as possible on the assumption that my kids had a great deal of local knowledge about their life that I would never know and when they were little they were incapable of articulating it but still knew it. An event that helped cement my commitment to respecting their boundaries as much as possible is where I made my son eat lunch because he wasn't eating and he tended to be skinny and I worried that I would end up charged with neglect for not feeding him enough. About thirty minutes later, he threw up all over my jacket which I actively encouraged to keep it off the cloth truck seat. After that, I doubled down on trying to make sure there was food available that he liked and that I felt was sufficiently healthy, but I left it up to him to decide to eat. He likely has two conditions that can each lead to requiring hospitalization to treat aversion to eating by mouth. He's never developed any such issues. So, unbeknownst to me, I had some serious challenges to deal with. Respecting his boundaries paid off. Kids like mine frequently end up seriously abused because the parents just keep increasing their attempts to control the kid and force the kid to do as they are told rather than coming at the issue from another angle as I chose to do. I am on my third parenting blog, still trying to figure out how to talk at folks about such things in a way that is helpful and doesn't sound too accusatory. The intent is to offer options, not criticism per se, for people dealing with challenging children.
kbirk 6y ago
When I was a child I watched a blind man repeatedly kick his service dog while screaming obscenities because it would not let him cross the street outside of a cross walk. I think about that poor animal often.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  Yeah, I saw a CCTV video on Australian news where a train stopped short of the platform and the blind owner dragged his poor dog off the edge. That sucks for everyone.
x1000 6y ago
Reminds me of Asimov's Second Law of Robotics[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
HugoDaniel 6y ago
"This behavior is a part of the dog's training and is central to a service animal's success on the job." Now get back to work.
ineedasername 6y ago
I have been fortunate to work under a few managers who value this trait.
- praptak 6y ago
  Those who don't often get its evil twin - malicious compliance.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I'm in a unique position where I work for one division, but I'm occasionally loaned to another area for a special project. Sometimes it's fine, but when my attempts at persuasion have failed, malicious compliance was what they got: with fully documented explanations regarding the limitations of what was delivered. "This is not an adequate tool for the intended purpose" was my comment on one such project. They used it for a single "business cycle" before they came around to my way of thinking.
  - jaimex2 6y ago
    Great reddit sub to read btw :)
    - praptak 6y ago
      It has the flavor of sticking it to the man and it has great comedy potential (like 70% Dilbert is about it). That said, you can only be passive-agressive for so long before you get jaded and unhappy.
      - pbourke 6y ago
        > you can only be passive-agressive for so long before you get jaded and unhappy I think you’re putting the cart before the horse here
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    Also known as "give'em rope". I did that to a few former "bosses". After a few months they were let go, hi hi.
glenstein 6y ago
This is a fascinating concept, and I always appreciate wiki reads like these whenever they come through HN. One thing I wonder, though, what's going on in this part: >The animal understands that this contradicts the learned behavior to respond to the owner's instructions: instead it makes an alternative decision because the human is not in a position to decide safely.[5] The dog in this case has the capacity to understand that it is performing such an action for the welfare of the person.[6] I think that's a very bold and categorical claim to make. Not necessarily because it's wrong, but animal cognition is a charged subject where it's easy to become motivated to make claims, and I think it's fair to say it's a sphere where untrue claims abound. It wasn't clear to me that the source for [6] is sufficiently authoritative. It seems to be derived from interviews with dog owners. Here's a quote from [6] on the cited page: >"The competent guide dog can recognize dangerous situations and, even when commanded to engage in a articular action, can decide to disobdy in order to protect the owner's welfare.. All of the interviewees spoke of their dogs as regularly involved in behaviors that were not understandable if one were only to see dogs merely as automatons responding to instinct or behavioral conditioning." Anyway, I bring this up because that sentence stuck out to me as something that felt highly motivated, and in general it's a feature I think you see sometimes in wiki articles - bold claims, almost vulgar in their simplicity, that just go ahead and declare a truth and don't try to couch the language in terms of earned institutional understanding that fully merit the claim. Again, not saying it's wrong, it just stuck out.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I think that's just a need to introduce conciseness to the situation. It's less about comprehension and more about "despite an express general request, the device (in this case, a dog) responds differently in this specific situation, unless receiving a countermanding specific command". i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this case, the dog) having certain behaviour. For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The program understands that the user did not actually confirm since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and proceeded to overrule the human".
joe_the_user 6y ago
I think this article describes a quality of communications that many discussions of artificial intelligence seem to miss. Intelligent disobedience is effectively a formalization of the way informal language-interactions often work. When you ask a person to do something, the response is can easily be a request for clarification, a comment on possible negative results, some suggestions about alternative approaches and so-forth. Often, you get a decision after a few rounds of this. Basically, a good portion of language interactions involve a bargaining and clarification process. Now, consider the average "AI goes wrong" argument. The classic scenario is someone asks a general AI to "build a lot of paperclips" and, like Disney's Sorcerers Apprentice, the AI converts the entire earth into a paperclip factory. Here, the interactions between AI and human fail to be anything like human-to-human informal interactions. And this hypothetical scenario seems implausible just given that the scenario also posits vast understanding in the AI, an understanding which would seem to encompass language understanding such that AI could do that back-and-forth bargaining approach (the human might ask for such behavior to be avoided but theoretically we're talking the human that invented the AI and also has this sort of meta-understanding).
- glenstein 6y ago
  I think back-and-forth bargaining is an important and valuable concept. And while I think you are right, I suspect that the capability to bargain in response to commands would be fraught with its own category of concerns and potentials for undesired outcomes. I also think the paperclip concept could be rehabilitated and treated with a charitable/steelman interpretation, where it's regarded as a toy example of unanticipated adverse outcomes.
- simonh 6y ago
  I think your missing the point of the paper clip maximiser example. All it’s for is to show how complex reasoning and intelligence are, and that strong AI has to be about a lot more than just solving problems. Arguing that a strong AI would have to be smart enough not to make a mistake like that is really the purpose of the example.
- solveit 6y ago
  The paperclip AI knows exactly what you want, it just doesn't care. Any naive way of trying to make the AI care will fail because we don't know how to design good measures that can't be hacked.
jasonid 6y ago
Some people seem invested in the idea that animals are not intelligent, do not have feelings, are not persons etc, despite so much evidence to the contrary. Why is that?
- scarlac 6y ago
  Assuming you're genuinely asking. I believe it's because feelings and intelligence would mean that animals suffer pain like we do, which would imply that we are cruel for eating or using them as we do. The best analogy I can come up with that many Americans would relate to would be slavery, when slave owners would insist on dehumanizing them. They were both financially and emotionally invested in the idea that slaves could be used and abused.
ydnaclementine 6y ago
Really good documentary on Disney+ about the training dogs go through, and how they reinforce this type of behavior is really interesting
trhway 6y ago
small anecdote, saw couple years ago - a woman with a dog leaves the dog park and pulls the dog to follow her toward the parking, the dog pulls into opposite direction and is pretty insistent, after some moments of mutual pulling the woman finally "Oh! you're right! I parked there today!" and follows the dog to the other parking.
dqpb 6y ago
A different framing of this would be multi-heuristic decision making.
_iqha 6y ago
Service animals do the best for the person they're trying to help! I feel like this is obvious, and, therefore, if you agree with me, pls don't upvote. I feel like recently there's been an emphasis on individual responsibility which is at the very least not sustainable in the long term. I'd wrap my point up but I feel the original poster hasn't really put in the effort :-)
lsb 6y ago
Reminds me of the Milgram experiment https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0 https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0 , where people were followed up with, to ask if there was anything the man they were electrocuting could have said to get them to stop electrocuting him, no matter what the investigator told them to do (36:30 is an example of one)
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  > In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".[23][24] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."[25]
pixelmonkey 6y ago
A short documentary called “Pick of the Litter” focuses on the training of service dogs for the vision impaired, and it first introduced me to this concept of Intelligent Disobedience. No longer on Netflix, but you can find it on Amazon Prime here: https://amzn.to/3gttRxt https://amzn.to/3gttRxt If you are a dog lover, this movie will tug at your heart strings. If you are not into dogs, it’s still a wonderful character study in perseverance & human-animal symbiosis. For programmers, you’ll start to realize that even reaching dog-like AI would be quite an accomplishment and open up a lot of possibilities for humanity. On a lighter note, whenever I hear the term Intelligent Disobedience now, I always also think of one of my favorite organizational psychology terms, Malicious Compliance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
getpost 6y ago
Tangentially, I'm reminded of something a high school teacher mentioned to me. The context was military service, but of course this applies in any organization. 'The way to get rid of an undesireable superior is to do only what you are ordered to do.' The supervisor's task will fail in some way, and new leadership will be needed. I've kept this in mind, not as a way to undermine leadership, but as a lesson in what good leaders need to know — that getting things done requires everyone to be be empowered and act in some degree at their own inititive.

212 points by hhs 6y ago

Dogs are beautiful creatures

The article briefly mentions teaching this principle to children, and references this article, which I found interesting: https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-teaching-children-intelligent-disobedience/ https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-tea... "Blink, Think, Choice, Voice" is a pretty poor mnemonic though. They compare it to "Stop, Drop, and Roll", but those instructions make sense even before you read anything else about it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 6y ago
It's weird and forced. "Blink, Think, Choose, Voice" would be much more consistent, but I'm guessing someone really wanted it to rhyme.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  "Blink, Think, Choose, Refuse" "Blink, Think, Make a Stink" or, the classic, "Question Authority"
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    "Refuse" implies an outcome. I also think "blink" in the first place is a bad term. I understand what they're going for, but it's not an intuitive instruction.

7leafer 6y ago

It's all good when it's about dogs and their owners. But it's not so when it's about the people and the, uhm, men, who were meant to serve the people. The latter are increasingly trying to portray the people as a whole as disabled, and pretend to be knowing better. But to tell the truth, a hefty chunk of people is indeed disabled by the media brainwash...

luckylion 6y ago
You're getting downvoted, but you have two points. Almost everybody believes a sizable part of the population to be brainwashed, they disagree on what part it is however. And I do very much believe that it is a discussion worth having for society at large. Do we believe that we are generally aware of the dangers of things we do? Is outlawing oversized sodas the right thing to do? Would it be okay to allow them only if you can use a code word that signals that you do, in fact, understand the risk? Do we not like that approach at all, or do we just not want to deal with deciding who understands the risk and is able to walk down the stairs and who isn't?
- 7leafer 6y ago
  Let those who don't understand the risk learn the hard way. Free will is not only about doing right, it's also about making mistakes. Now it's obvious that the trend is biasing towards enforcement of the right-doing regardless of consequences and impact on individual freedoms. Almost all writing of Stanislav Lem, for example, is dedicated to this one theme. And extrapolations he made are only becoming more and more relevant as the time goes. Having said that, the freedom to fail should only apply to individuals. Corporate or government entities should never be treated as humans and be allowed to fail the hard way. First, because the magnitude of consequences are incomparable, and second, because the strings of corporate responsibilities are entangled in such a way so as to lead nowhere. They can always lose a head and grow another one. As to crossing of one's individual freedom into another's, that's what the service men are for. But it was alright while they operated under presumption of innocence. Now they are clearly trying to render people guilty until proven otherwise. That was one of the points in my first reply.

yadavmahesh 6y ago

Can have applications in AI / AGI alignment.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Intelligent Disobedience has also found its place in Children's Rights Education offering instruments that help to keep children safe from the rare, but traumatic instances when authority figures abuse their power. I really don't think this is rare. People do crappy things all the time, especially when they imagine they know what is best for someone else. This is the default assumption of most adults in how they relate to any children in their lives.

Nursie 6y ago
Isn't that literally the job of a parent? Knowing better than the child what is best for them? Obviously that should include letting the young person stretch, learn and exercise their own judgement, but within bounds set by the parent and with the parent there to help with any consequences.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I was a full-time parent (homemaker) for a lot of years. I always operated as much as possible on the assumption that my kids had a great deal of local knowledge about their life that I would never know and when they were little they were incapable of articulating it but still knew it. An event that helped cement my commitment to respecting their boundaries as much as possible is where I made my son eat lunch because he wasn't eating and he tended to be skinny and I worried that I would end up charged with neglect for not feeding him enough. About thirty minutes later, he threw up all over my jacket which I actively encouraged to keep it off the cloth truck seat. After that, I doubled down on trying to make sure there was food available that he liked and that I felt was sufficiently healthy, but I left it up to him to decide to eat. He likely has two conditions that can each lead to requiring hospitalization to treat aversion to eating by mouth. He's never developed any such issues. So, unbeknownst to me, I had some serious challenges to deal with. Respecting his boundaries paid off. Kids like mine frequently end up seriously abused because the parents just keep increasing their attempts to control the kid and force the kid to do as they are told rather than coming at the issue from another angle as I chose to do. I am on my third parenting blog, still trying to figure out how to talk at folks about such things in a way that is helpful and doesn't sound too accusatory. The intent is to offer options, not criticism per se, for people dealing with challenging children.

kbirk 6y ago

When I was a child I watched a blind man repeatedly kick his service dog while screaming obscenities because it would not let him cross the street outside of a cross walk. I think about that poor animal often.

brokenmachine 6y ago
Yeah, I saw a CCTV video on Australian news where a train stopped short of the platform and the blind owner dragged his poor dog off the edge. That sucks for everyone.

x1000 6y ago

Reminds me of Asimov's Second Law of Robotics[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

HugoDaniel 6y ago

"This behavior is a part of the dog's training and is central to a service animal's success on the job." Now get back to work.

ineedasername 6y ago

I have been fortunate to work under a few managers who value this trait.

praptak 6y ago
Those who don't often get its evil twin - malicious compliance.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm in a unique position where I work for one division, but I'm occasionally loaned to another area for a special project. Sometimes it's fine, but when my attempts at persuasion have failed, malicious compliance was what they got: with fully documented explanations regarding the limitations of what was delivered. "This is not an adequate tool for the intended purpose" was my comment on one such project. They used it for a single "business cycle" before they came around to my way of thinking.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  Great reddit sub to read btw :)
  - praptak 6y ago
    It has the flavor of sticking it to the man and it has great comedy potential (like 70% Dilbert is about it). That said, you can only be passive-agressive for so long before you get jaded and unhappy.
    - pbourke 6y ago
      > you can only be passive-agressive for so long before you get jaded and unhappy I think you’re putting the cart before the horse here
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Also known as "give'em rope". I did that to a few former "bosses". After a few months they were let go, hi hi.

glenstein 6y ago

This is a fascinating concept, and I always appreciate wiki reads like these whenever they come through HN. One thing I wonder, though, what's going on in this part: >The animal understands that this contradicts the learned behavior to respond to the owner's instructions: instead it makes an alternative decision because the human is not in a position to decide safely.[5] The dog in this case has the capacity to understand that it is performing such an action for the welfare of the person.[6] I think that's a very bold and categorical claim to make. Not necessarily because it's wrong, but animal cognition is a charged subject where it's easy to become motivated to make claims, and I think it's fair to say it's a sphere where untrue claims abound. It wasn't clear to me that the source for [6] is sufficiently authoritative. It seems to be derived from interviews with dog owners. Here's a quote from [6] on the cited page: >"The competent guide dog can recognize dangerous situations and, even when commanded to engage in a articular action, can decide to disobdy in order to protect the owner's welfare.. All of the interviewees spoke of their dogs as regularly involved in behaviors that were not understandable if one were only to see dogs merely as automatons responding to instinct or behavioral conditioning." Anyway, I bring this up because that sentence stuck out to me as something that felt highly motivated, and in general it's a feature I think you see sometimes in wiki articles - bold claims, almost vulgar in their simplicity, that just go ahead and declare a truth and don't try to couch the language in terms of earned institutional understanding that fully merit the claim. Again, not saying it's wrong, it just stuck out.

renewiltord 6y ago
I think that's just a need to introduce conciseness to the situation. It's less about comprehension and more about "despite an express general request, the device (in this case, a dog) responds differently in this specific situation, unless receiving a countermanding specific command". i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this case, the dog) having certain behaviour. For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The program understands that the user did not actually confirm since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and proceeded to overrule the human".

joe_the_user 6y ago

I think this article describes a quality of communications that many discussions of artificial intelligence seem to miss. Intelligent disobedience is effectively a formalization of the way informal language-interactions often work. When you ask a person to do something, the response is can easily be a request for clarification, a comment on possible negative results, some suggestions about alternative approaches and so-forth. Often, you get a decision after a few rounds of this. Basically, a good portion of language interactions involve a bargaining and clarification process. Now, consider the average "AI goes wrong" argument. The classic scenario is someone asks a general AI to "build a lot of paperclips" and, like Disney's Sorcerers Apprentice, the AI converts the entire earth into a paperclip factory. Here, the interactions between AI and human fail to be anything like human-to-human informal interactions. And this hypothetical scenario seems implausible just given that the scenario also posits vast understanding in the AI, an understanding which would seem to encompass language understanding such that AI could do that back-and-forth bargaining approach (the human might ask for such behavior to be avoided but theoretically we're talking the human that invented the AI and also has this sort of meta-understanding).

glenstein 6y ago
I think back-and-forth bargaining is an important and valuable concept. And while I think you are right, I suspect that the capability to bargain in response to commands would be fraught with its own category of concerns and potentials for undesired outcomes. I also think the paperclip concept could be rehabilitated and treated with a charitable/steelman interpretation, where it's regarded as a toy example of unanticipated adverse outcomes.
simonh 6y ago
I think your missing the point of the paper clip maximiser example. All it’s for is to show how complex reasoning and intelligence are, and that strong AI has to be about a lot more than just solving problems. Arguing that a strong AI would have to be smart enough not to make a mistake like that is really the purpose of the example.
solveit 6y ago
The paperclip AI knows exactly what you want, it just doesn't care. Any naive way of trying to make the AI care will fail because we don't know how to design good measures that can't be hacked.

jasonid 6y ago

Some people seem invested in the idea that animals are not intelligent, do not have feelings, are not persons etc, despite so much evidence to the contrary. Why is that?

scarlac 6y ago
Assuming you're genuinely asking. I believe it's because feelings and intelligence would mean that animals suffer pain like we do, which would imply that we are cruel for eating or using them as we do. The best analogy I can come up with that many Americans would relate to would be slavery, when slave owners would insist on dehumanizing them. They were both financially and emotionally invested in the idea that slaves could be used and abused.

ydnaclementine 6y ago

Really good documentary on Disney+ about the training dogs go through, and how they reinforce this type of behavior is really interesting

trhway 6y ago

small anecdote, saw couple years ago - a woman with a dog leaves the dog park and pulls the dog to follow her toward the parking, the dog pulls into opposite direction and is pretty insistent, after some moments of mutual pulling the woman finally "Oh! you're right! I parked there today!" and follows the dog to the other parking.

dqpb 6y ago

A different framing of this would be multi-heuristic decision making.

_iqha 6y ago

Service animals do the best for the person they're trying to help! I feel like this is obvious, and, therefore, if you agree with me, pls don't upvote. I feel like recently there's been an emphasis on individual responsibility which is at the very least not sustainable in the long term. I'd wrap my point up but I feel the original poster hasn't really put in the effort :-)

lsb 6y ago

Reminds me of the Milgram experiment https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0 https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0 , where people were followed up with, to ask if there was anything the man they were electrocuting could have said to get them to stop electrocuting him, no matter what the investigator told them to do (36:30 is an example of one)

oh_sigh 6y ago
> In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".[23][24] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."[25]

pixelmonkey 6y ago

A short documentary called “Pick of the Litter” focuses on the training of service dogs for the vision impaired, and it first introduced me to this concept of Intelligent Disobedience. No longer on Netflix, but you can find it on Amazon Prime here: https://amzn.to/3gttRxt https://amzn.to/3gttRxt If you are a dog lover, this movie will tug at your heart strings. If you are not into dogs, it’s still a wonderful character study in perseverance & human-animal symbiosis. For programmers, you’ll start to realize that even reaching dog-like AI would be quite an accomplishment and open up a lot of possibilities for humanity. On a lighter note, whenever I hear the term Intelligent Disobedience now, I always also think of one of my favorite organizational psychology terms, Malicious Compliance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

getpost 6y ago

Tangentially, I'm reminded of something a high school teacher mentioned to me. The context was military service, but of course this applies in any organization. 'The way to get rid of an undesireable superior is to do only what you are ordered to do.' The supervisor's task will fail in some way, and new leadership will be needed. I've kept this in mind, not as a way to undermine leadership, but as a lesson in what good leaders need to know — that getting things done requires everyone to be be empowered and act in some degree at their own inititive.