are there experiments you can only perform once ever? if so, how would you plan for and conduct them?
@lucifargundam what i thought of is broad social experiments. like you can't really redo the first reality TV shows because people are too savvy about how those things play out. sure, not everyone saw "The Real World" or whatever but there's an awareness. could you redo the Stanford prison experiment? or the Milgram obedience experiment? how faithfully?
of course, people forget. so maybe not exactly "only once"
@2ck at this point I'd be concerned about social manipulation like what #google and #facebook have historically been caught doing.
If you want to prepare for such a thing, consider the upcoming presidential election. You have some time to put a ton of thought into it- and what you would like to try and do (or be ready for) during that timeframe.
Again, social manipulation is bad. But easy to do as repeatedly parroted by many #fediverse users on a few other non-#qoto servers.
@2ck A bit of a dark direction to take this in, but...
Many people have done experiments that they could never repeat: for example, such experiments are an important source of knowledge about which plants are safe to eat and which are not.
@eqyo heh. yeah, I'm thinking more like "which could we not repeat as a human species"
@2ck
Usually, such circumstances occur when there's either limited resources or on a random occurrence that was dependent on a unique, obscure pattern of preluding events.
The best way to plan ahead for them is brainstorm hypothetical endgames and prepare backwards from those. Keep preparing with tools and knowledge until you have a stockpile ready for quickaccess should you have the patience and calm mind to remember to take advantage of the situation instead of immediately resolving it instinctually.
An example would probably be easier found within a zeroday attack or through production line infiltration(can't remember the canoned name for the latter).