Root Blog is an interesting blog aggregator that I noticed in my logs. It does what I assume to be automatic extraction of posts in one column, and recent updates in another. Good stuff.
About the “Third Wave” experiment – a writeup of about the first person account of an experiment that a High School teacher inadvertently carried out. Shades of Milgram.
We were studying Nazi Germany and in the middle of a lecture I was interrupted by the question. How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people. How could the townspeople, railroad conductors, teachers, doctors, claim they knew nothing about concentration camps and human carnage. How can people who were neighbors and maybe even friends of the Jewish citizen say they weren’t there when it happened. it was a good question. I didn’t know the answer.
In as such as there were several months still to go in the school year and I was already at World War II, I decided to take a week and explore the question.
[Hmm (the rest of the site seems interesting… [not necessarily in a good way]), is it real?] I’m tending to give it credence. It’s certainly completely plausible on the psychological/sociological level (just flip on the news, if you don’t believe that)… Still, it would be nice to track down some of the students I suppose…
- The original story was written w/ a fictional frame (Mr. Frank vs Mr. Jones), so that can’t really be held against it
- A recent Stanford grad teaching in Palo Alto, I’d hope he could find some friends on short notice
- They were in the middle of studying WW2 Germany, I don’t think it’s out of the question having film reels on hand
Related: The Stanford Prison Experiment