But a supermajority of the population ought to be capable of learning to do what Hermione and Holocaust resisters did.
I think this is a key point. The Milgram experiments illustrate more about average person’s obedience than their inclination towards evil. If the experimenters had pressured the subjects to do something heroic and personally risky they would have gotten similar results with a supermajority choosing to do the heroic thing. Most humans can pursue a wide-range of goals under pressure and.only a minority have the willpower to stick to a narrow range of goals.
I really liked this line. A couple of years I was with friends and we were playing Spades together along with the dad of one of the friends. We were all computer science majors and the dad was farmer. In all of our games he was either first or second. We also played mafia and he was clearly very good at reading people and appearing innocent.
I’ve played some games since then with my friends dad and he’s always been very skilled. I’ve always wondered why he was so good at these games we played since it’s not something he did often, only the 1 or 2 times a year we’d visit. However, I’ve reflected on some of the conversations I’ve had with him and I’ve realized that he’s a very detailed thinker and his job requires him to be constantly making decisions under uncertainty. For example, he has in his head about an hour long talk about what is the ideal corn row width which takes into account the trade-off between output volume and fungal spread and many other things that I can’t remember. He’ll also casually mention that one of his fields flooded with a nonchalance and a quip that he’ll make do. He always sharing how much rain has fallen in the last x days and how much is predicted to fall in the next x days and I’ve realized that the weather not only affects his crop but also dictates what kind of work he’s gonna do and when he’ll do it. He’s a detailed planner but his plans are always flexible. In games like Spades or Poker where you need make decisions under uncertainty his training as a farmer is far more valuable than my training as a programmer. At a programming job or in competitive programming I’m always looking for an exact answer and either I know it or I don’t. There’s no real uncertainty outside of saying things like “I’m 70% sure this will work” which is something I generally try to avoid. The biggest advantage my friend’s dad has gained as a farmer in these uncertainty laden games is his intuitive sense of probabilities and the planning that should follow which is IMO best gained from accumulating real-life experience with a dedicated effort to improving this intuition and planning.