I think that the more confrontational style of the original est training brought people's resistance up, and created a more emotional rather than just a cognitive or didactic interaction with the trainer. I'm sure each style worked better for some people than others. I have the impression that as the format evolved, it got less confrontational, more "est-light". Some of that was no doubt in response to some of the media attention. I heard Werner Erhard speak a few times in person, and I read a number of articles and books about him and the training. The early television reports about the est training focused a lot on the "restrictions" on participants leaving the training room to go to the restrooms, equating that to a technique used in cult indoctrination. Werner Erhard said he was amused by that, because as he said, "I didn't call a break because I didn't have to pee."

I liked the training a great deal, but I might have been more prepared for the "in-your-face" style because I had read several books before doing the training. I also took several of the follow-up courses, I "assisted" at a couple or so trainings including the one my sister took, and I enjoyed being included in the group for a few years after my initial training. I got turned off to the organization and the courses around 1987. I felt that they shot themselves in the foot by making SO much of every session of the post-training seminar programs on bringing in more people. I believe that if they had just focused more on the content, which was powerful and valuable, the people would have brought guests in all on their own. I think there must have been pressure coming from the upper management, and I felt that it was really a shame, because I would definitely have kept going if not for that.

They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising.

Maybe not so much. If the Stanford undergraduate "guards" were part of the counterculture of 1971, their preexisting views of how a "prison guard" was supposed to behave would have been...unfavorable. When Zimbardo told them to role play a "prison guard," the obvious interpretation would be "act like a fascist pig." A non-countercultural blue collar kid from the same era, maybe one proud of his dad's service in World War II, might have interpreted the instructions differently.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has had more of an impact as a legend in popular culture than as an actual work of social science in the decades since it was conducted. Notice the capitals in "Prison Experiment." It's become the name of a punk band for Darwin's sake.

Wikipedia says that the experiment violates modern ethical standards. So, if the results were ever replicable (I have my doubts), they won't be replicated now.

I suspect that Stanford University undergraduates tend to come from very different backgrounds than the average prison guard or prison inmate. Also, the conditions of the experiment were sufficiently different from the real-world criminal justice system that I don't think the experiment says much about "prisons." On the other hand, if the results are valid -- again, I have my doubts -- it says something about Stanford. I'm wondering how much of this experiment was really the result of a lot of bright, high-achieving undergraduates guessing Professor Zimbardo's password -- he wanted dramatic results, and they obliged.

I'm not his biggest fan, having read his report on the experiment he not only acted terribly unethically he also got absorbed in it himself. Its just a really bad thing for a scientist to do, and to do his work these days would almost certainly get him fired. Comparing the prison experiment to Milgrams experiments, which were controlled, safe, and repeatable, is frankly dishonest.

I would describe myself as a computationalist by default, in that I can't come up with an ironclad argument against it. So, here are my stabs:

1) I'm not sure what you mean by an abstract machine (and please excuse me if that's a formal term). Is that a potential or theoretical machine? That's how I'm reading it. If that's the case, I would say that CIRJC means both a and b. It's a computation of an extremely sophisticated algorithm, the way 2 + 2 = 4 is the computation of a "simple" one (that still needs something really big like math to execute).

2) I don't know if there needs to be a particular class of models; do you mean we know in advance what the particular human consciousness model is? I'd probably say we'd need several models operating in parallel, and that set would be the "human consciousness model".

3) To me, that just means that a simple state machine took in an input, executed some steps, and provided an output on a screen. There was some change of register positions via electricity.

4) Computing red: here's where qualia is going to make things messy. In a video game, I don't have any problem imagine someone issuing a command to a Sim to "move the red box" and the Sim would do so. That's all computation (I don't think there's "really" a Sim or a red box for that matter living in my TV set), but the video game executed what I was picturing in my head via internal qualia. So it seems like there would be an approximation of "computing" red.

5) I don't have any problem saying the algorithm would be very important. I can put this in completely human terms. A psychopath can perfectly imitate emotions, and enact the exact same behavioral output as someone else in similar circumstances. The internal algorithm, if you will, is extremely different however.

6) I would say this is an emphatic yes. Neurons, for instance, serve as some sort of gate analog.

7) I think it would mention qualia, in as much as people would ask about it (so there would at least be enough of an explanation to explain it away, so to speak).

8) I don't think computations are conscious in and of themselves. If I'm doing math in notebook, I don't think the equations are conscious. I don't think the circuitry of a calculator or a computer are conscious. That said, I don't think individual cells of my brain are conscious, and if you were to remove portion of a person's brain (surgery for cancer, for example) that those portions remain conscious, or that person is less conscious by the percentage of tissue removed. Consciousness, to me, may be algorithmically based, but is still the awareness of self, history, etc. that makes humans human. Saying CIRJC doesn't remove the complexity of the calculation.

I haven't read that other thread; can I ask what your opinions are? Briefly of course, and while I can't speak for everyone else, I promise to read them as thumbnails and not absolute statements to be used against you. You could point to writers (Searle? Penrose?) if you like.

My understanding that the est of the 70's employed a fairly confrontational format. Do you feel that helped the learning process by making it more personal? I have talked to folks who drew a lot out of the training but weren't fans of the est organization (the group, that is, not the format of the training).

I think you should read up on the conjunction fallacy. Your example does not address the observations made in research by Kahneman and Tversky. The questions posed in the research do not assume causal relationships, they are just two independent probabilities. I won't rewrite the whole wiki article, but the upshot of the conjunction fallacy is that people using representativeness heuristic to asses odds, instead of using the correct procedures they would have used if that heuristic isn't cued. People who would never say "Joe rolled a six and a two" is more likely than "Joe rolled a two" do say "Joe is a New Yorker who rides the subway" is more likely than "Joe is a New Yorker", when presented with information about Joe.

I wonder if this comment inspired Patrissimo's inagural post on his new Rational Poker site.

There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn't fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn't be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don't advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. "Ought not to" has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.

And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.

to me, morality means not disastrously/majorly subverting another's utility function for a trivial increase in my own utility.

edit: wish the downvoters would give me some concrete objections.