Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!

Experimental History

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Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!<br>OR: crock pots and lightning bolts

Adam Mastroianni<br>May 12, 2026

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photo cred: my dad<br>1.

Say what you will about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its 1936 constitution was a banger.<br>It guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and protest. It extended equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race or gender. It shortened the working day to seven hours, affirmed “the right to rest and leisure”, and offered free education and free health care to all, including a “wide network of health resorts for the working people.” You gotta admit this is a lot better than certain other constitutions that, say, count slaves as three-fifths of a person.<br>In the two years after the constitution was adopted, however, Stalin purged something like a million people. Eighteen million Soviet citizens would be forced into gulag camps and colonies over the next three decades. This was all clearly in violation of Articles 103, 111, and 127, and many others besides. How could one of the greatest tragedies in human history happen when it was very explicitly not allowed?<br>The uncomfortable answer is that a critical mass of people found prisons and purges palatable. We say that “Stalin” did all these things as if held the gun himself1, but obviously you can’t run a gulag without guards, secretaries, accountants, engineers, architects, doctors, drivers, quartermasters, mid-level managers, kangaroo court judges, and all manner of flunkies, patsies, and stool pigeons. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of regular people were willing to commit their own personal portion of an atrocity.<br>The lesson here is obvious: rules don’t matter unless people act like they matter. Writing down laws does not endow them with physical force or psychic potency. We all know this. We all believe this.<br>So why don’t we act like it?<br>2.

Ever since the replication crisis began over a decade ago, most folks have agreed that the problem is the laxness of our rules, and that the solution is to tighten them. We should mandate replication, preregistration, public data, bigger studies and tinier p-values. The more we can reduce researcher degrees of freedom, the thinking goes, the better our science will be.<br>Vindicating this theory, a big group of researchers published a paper in 2023 showing that it’s possible to achieve high rates of replicability as long as you follow a set of “rigor-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency.”<br>One year later, the paper was retracted because it...failed to follow those rigor-enhancing practices. The journal editors claim the authors were not transparent about their methods, did not abide by their own preregistration, and cherry-picked their results.2<br>Clearly, we’re not missing the right regulations. We’re missing the right motivations. If you want to discover true things about the world, you’ll be interested in the guidelines that help you do that, and you’ll be thankful to the people who develop them. That’s how the replication crisis could have played out: someone demonstrates that our sample sizes are too small, and we all go, “oh wow we should make our sample sizes bigger because want to know what’s real and what’s not”.<br>But if you’re not actually seeking the truth, no amount of “rigor-enhancing practices” will ever cause you to find it. That’s why our revolution in scientific regulation has mostly failed. We require researchers who conduct clinical trials to post the results on a public website, but only 45% of them do. We tell people to specify their primary outcomes beforehand, but if their studies don’t work as planned, they just sneak in different analyses—one study on anesthesiology experiments found that 92%(!) of them did this. We make researchers end their papers by saying “data available on request” and then only 17% of them actually make their data available on request.3<br>You can’t turn a cheat into a scientist by making a rule against cheating. The most important “rigor-enhancing practice” is caring about getting things right, and without that, nothing else matters.

3.

Every couple will eventually have some version of the “Let’s Make a Rule” fight, where they try to solve some interpersonal issue through legislation. “You think I don’t take enough interest in your life, so let’s make a rule: I have to ask you three things about your day before I start telling you about mine.” The theory behind the Let’s Make a Rule fight is that we could live in harmony with one another if we could just compile all of our expectations into one big Google Doc.<br>The Let’s Make a Rule fight never leads to a satisfying conclusion because nobody actually wants their partner to follow the rules. They want their...