pbtree

This is a fascinating AMA, thanks for doing it! I'm looking at the wikipedia article at the moment, and trying to sort out some facts.

The article corroborates what you've said about the "John Wayne" guard treating it as an acting exercise, and that Zimbardo was the warden, which by itself seems damning to me as far as any scientific validity goes. The criticism section also confirms a lot of your general points about the (in)validity of the experiment.

However, according to wikipedia that there were some very disturbing incidents during the experiment. For example (emphasis mine),

...prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the guards' instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered...and subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers without being supervised by the research staff. Finding that handling nine cellmates with only three guards per shift was challenging, one of the guards suggested that they use psychological tactics to control them.

Can you comment on the accuracy of the above statement, especially the fire extinguisher bit?

Edit: tact and markdown, not my strong suites!

He means "strong men" in the sense of a dude with authoritarian tendencies, many of whom are actually quite fragile.

If he gets bored with casinos, wait until he meets the federal government!

Hey /u/SamTheSnowman, I'm not (based on others comment's bellow) convinced that /u/Neuroncologist is entirely legit.

However, I've worked in the health care software industry for a few years, and I can definitely say that his advice regarding getting a digital hard copy of all of your MRIs and whatever data you can for you pathology slides, especially any that will save you a biopsy, is totally spot on. Try to get all of your medical records in some easy to process format -- the worst case is essentially hand typed hard copies of said records, but that beats a format that your hospital back home will be unable to deal with.

Hospitals, especially in different countries, but even between institutions here in the states, have awful standards for sharing data in bulk, but if you can break it down into things like MRI and pathology slides, you basically end up with some JPEGS that anyone can work with.

Demand your data in such a format, and you'll have a much better chance at surviving whatever is going on here (again, not a dr, but I know a good case for imaging and good record keeping when I see one!)

For sure you should scan the packets, who knows what important data they might contain.

But you should also demand that your current healthcare providers turn over all of their data. Wherever you continue your treatment, they'll have folks like me who can deal whatever poor obsfucation format they give it to in.

We know how to get something relevant out of absolute garbage, and we probably already have a program to do so, with whatever garbage you can bring in.

If your place of continuing care claims that they're unable to do so, hit me up, I actually kind of enjoy cracking a nice stupid PHI data format, and I probably know the format that wherever you're continuing treatment is going to happen, whether that's in the US or Europe, uses.