Just Finished Reading: “The Lucifer Effect” #books

I’ve been reading Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, a book which contains a details description of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and an explanation of the dangers which exist in a system where there are roles which create an expectation of certain behaviours there is a likelihood that these behaviours will be expressed. It leads me to believe that there are Nash Equilibria here, looking at the SPE it is clear that it coordination game in which the Guard and the Prisoner should adopt the same or corresponding strategies to achieve the highest pay-off.

I was amused to not see a reference to Game Theory in Zimbardo’s book, as the Prisoners Dilemma is the most “fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.”^[1] The Prisoners Dilemma is a game with cooperation being a strictly dominated strategy – dominated by abuse in the SPE game – this doesn’t entirely translate to the SPE. The Guard does better than the Prisoner in most strategies both, although cooperation strictly dominates all other strategies.

The influence of role on the game is clear from the experiment, and many other examples, this means that role-based actions will influence strategy, this could be called a role-based strategy. The role-based strategy does not necessarily correspond with an optimal strategy, the fable of the the scorpion and the frog is an instance of choosing a strictly dominated role-based strategy.

Good read, food for thought.

Voices in my Head

I finally found out, from the article Crowd-Controlling: MEDUSA Ray Gun Puts Voices Inside Your Head, it’s all true. (Microwave ray gun controls crowds with noise) They can put voices in your head with “… a damned scary ray gun that uses the ‘microwave audio effect‘ to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people’s heads.“

“The microwave auditory effect, also known as the microwave hearing effect or the Frey effect, consists of audible clicks induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies that are generated directly inside the human head without the need of any receiving electronic device.”¹

This could be what happened to Lucille Ball:

“All of a sudden, my mouth started jumping. It wasn’t music this time, it was Morse code. It started softly, and then de-de-de-de-de-de. As soon as it started fading, I stopped the car and then started backing up until it was coming in full strength. DE-DE-DE-DE-DE-DE DE-DE-DE-DE!”²

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