The Joan Baez Murder Experiment
The trick for keeping anything a secret is to make its discoverers so embarrassed they never report what they’ve found. This is how Atlantis has disguised itself for untold centuries.
In the land of large endowments lurks the never-mentioned field of Donor Experience Psychology. DEP departments do not exist on any university website or budget. Their faculty tend to be washed out SERE instructors, who conduct psychological experiments designed for the pleasure of special donors, with no pretense of scientific or even pseudo-scientific purpose.
The following experiment is described in a series of memos leaked to the Borges Review from the secret archives of the University of P . They were leaked by a junior DEP researcher who reasoned that the experiment’s description in this venue, erroneously understood by many readers to be a publisher of short fictions, will dissuade research by journalists and historians.1
The Joan Baez Murder Experiment tests the length of time it takes for shoppers and staff in an upscale grocery store to begin murdering one another when they are sealed in the store without warning and forced to listen to Joan Baez’s self-titled debut LP on loop. The first two attempts at the Experiment were inconclusive. Researchers unsealed the store after a week because no murders occurred and none seemed imminent.
The third attempt introduced a new element. The Joan Baez volume increased every hour at such a rate that by the end of the second day decibel levels would begin to cause hearing damage. But the surviving research subjects emerged with hearing intact because first murder occurred after 28 hours. The second, third, and fourth murders followed quickly, before researchers were able to unseal the store and turn off the music. The 28 hour mark has been reproduced in the dozen subsequent runs of the experiment, a rare exception to the so-called Replication Crisis in Psychology.2
The trick for keeping anything a secret is to make its discoverers so embarrassed they never report what they’ve found. This is how Atlantis has disguised itself for untold centuries. Difficulty and danger encourage the most skilled and daring adventurers, the very men who you want least interested in whatever you’re hiding. The best seafarers and divers have met the Atlanteans, but they returned from these journeys so embarrassed and ashamed they never admit to their discoveries in public. There is a bar in the Madeira Islands—NAMED WITHHELD—where members of this unlucky brotherhood sometimes gather, not to speak about their Experience but to drink in the presence of others who share in common this rare humiliation.
The more theoretically minded of the DEP researcher community doubt “replication” as a measure of scientific validity. Their work on the subject is interesting but hidden in the secret archives of various east coast universities. See Wittgenstein: “As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning newspaper to assure himself that what it said was true.” (Philosophical Investigations, §265)