[kergonath]

> “Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. For example, we don’t know about the raving lunatics that don’t make headlines.

[lelanthran]

> but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic.

And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was only TK that went down this particular path.

TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.

If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

[kergonath]

> And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.

Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.

> There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".

It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…

> If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.

> Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.