I am very fortunate to be a student of psychology in 2024 because of works like this.
The stories themselves are, without a doubt, wildly entertaining and endlessly fascinating...but, something I don't see a lot of people talking about, is the researchers who first started the experiment, knowing it would be an investment beyond even their own lifetime, but would produce an 'endless' treasure trove worth of data that could be used to study and understand human behavior.
You know, it's not as simple as "talk to people every 7 years and record what they say."
Of course, yes, you absolutely have to give credit to Michael Apted to even conceive of this in the first place, the man is brilliant...but also (and I think he'd agree), there are a lot of moving parts here, and a lot of planning and precision has to go into this to make sure tracking these people throughout their lives wasn't 'just' for entertainment.
So, I'm here to applaud the decades of researchers and research assistants who had the foresight and awareness to even make this possible as a valid experiment in psychology, bracing for an inevitable change of communication mediums and media types while being as minimally invasive as possible. Respect.
Most scientific genius is literally just one person thinking, "let's write down something obvious."
This show is the living definition of that. Pretty cool.
The stories themselves are, without a doubt, wildly entertaining and endlessly fascinating...but, something I don't see a lot of people talking about, is the researchers who first started the experiment, knowing it would be an investment beyond even their own lifetime, but would produce an 'endless' treasure trove worth of data that could be used to study and understand human behavior.
You know, it's not as simple as "talk to people every 7 years and record what they say."
Of course, yes, you absolutely have to give credit to Michael Apted to even conceive of this in the first place, the man is brilliant...but also (and I think he'd agree), there are a lot of moving parts here, and a lot of planning and precision has to go into this to make sure tracking these people throughout their lives wasn't 'just' for entertainment.
So, I'm here to applaud the decades of researchers and research assistants who had the foresight and awareness to even make this possible as a valid experiment in psychology, bracing for an inevitable change of communication mediums and media types while being as minimally invasive as possible. Respect.
Most scientific genius is literally just one person thinking, "let's write down something obvious."
This show is the living definition of that. Pretty cool.