A monkey can be trapped by a food reward inside a hollowed shell—they can reach in easily enough, but once they close their fist, they can't take their hand out. The monkey may be screaming with distress, and still be unable to override the instinct to keep hold of the food.
Is there any evidence that this is more than a folk tale? It illustrates the point so well I never thought, until this afternoon, to confirm it as a fact. My efforts to do so have failed so far. The story itself is a kind of monkey trap... it gets held on to even when it isn't real.
Today's post, Ethical Inhibitions was originally published on 19 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Protected From Myself, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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