Derren Brown: Pushed to the Edge

[Fidel_Castronaut]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...-Edge.html

I'm a big fan of Derren Brown, an illusionist who used science and psychology to explore and explain the weirder aspects of the natural world, including how we as humans think and, importantly, how we are suspetible to indoctrination and being led to do things. I'd thoroughly recommend watching his shows, especially the ones where he exposes frauds and charlatans such as psychics (his experiment with cold reading is great).

His most recent show explored the phenomenon of suggestion and social compliance, the idea that people will suspend their convictions, beliefs and morals in order to 'fit in' with the situation around them, leaving them more suspetible to completing tasks that they otherwise wouldn't complete.

This show uses the premise of a charity fundraiser culminating in the subject being given the choice whether to ultimately murder someone to protect both themselves and others from having some other crimes they have committed during the show from being revealed.

Not sure people outside of the UK can access it but quite fascinating (dailymail link is just chock full of criticism which misses the point of the show but has all the info if you can't watch it).

[Napoléon]

God the comments on there are fucking cringe.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Oh yeah. DM and their readership never fails to disappoint.

[robvalue]

He is cool, but I lost a lot of respect for him with the lottery charade. That was a massive insult to the intelligence.

I've recorded this but I didn't know whether to watch it. I feel he goes too far sometimes and it's either morally questionable or a fix. What exactly would he do if the people complained about all this instead of going along with the program once they're done being duped? They can hardly have given consent beforehand.

[Aoi Magi]

What lottery charade?

[Napoléon]

What lottery charade?

The one where he told us he'd tell us the lottery numbers before the lottery. But ended up telling us the lottery numbers, after the lottery. And in the process wasted a good hour of our lives.

[Faith No More]

So, I watched the whole thing(it's on youtube), and I have to say that that was brilliant. He sure skated the line of what is ethical, but it was a great social experiment. The design and the execution of the whole thing was incredible. What I was most surprised at was the reaction of the people afterwards. They seemed thankful for the whole thing, and he had them full convinced that they had murdered someone.

I recommend anyone with any sort of interest in social experiments and how human beings are influenced to watch it.

[Tiberius]

I didn't feel like the lottery episode was a "charade". Sure, he said he'd predict the lottery, but this is Derren Brown, someone who is the first person to come out and say he doesn't have any magic or "psychic" powers. Of course he wasn't going to actually predict the lottery, I don't know why anyone really expected him to do that. It was always going to be a trick.

The trick was actually pretty good too, but the main reason it fell flat (if I recall correctly) was the special effects used to change the numbers on his "prediction" balls. In the age of YouTube and people dissecting footage, it would have to be perfect live editing, which it wasn't.

I think the real entertainment honestly came from the "explanation" show, which was hilarious.

[robvalue]

Well, unless Derren was being all tongue in cheek to those of us who know better, he was presenting the "wisdom of crowds" in an entirely irrelevant setting. He was either being stupid himself, or calling most of the audience stupid for expecting them to believe a single word of it.

I read his book a while ago, and a comment he made there leads me to think that his grasp of mathematics is poor, so I lean a bit more towards him not really understanding the concepts.

Compared to his other work, this was a resounding failure in all departments. But that's just my opinion.

[Napoléon]

Of course he wasn't going to actually predict the lottery

Doesn't make it any less annoying and a waste of time that he'd tell us he'd predict them beforehand. And then make a show over an hour long going through all the bullshit maths involved with predicting it.

It didn't fall flat because the CGI was shit, it fell flat because he took us all for cunts.