Both misguided and false. Never mind the fact that such experiment would have PETA members storming the lab to save the monkeys, the problem is that something like that would never happen and it wouldn’t mean what they imply it’d mean.

First off, if you’re ever seen a monkey climb a ladder you’d know the little devil will be up and down the latter before the first drop of cold water touched the other guys. Also, if the water is hitting the one climbing the latter, that’d be enough to make it stop climbing it and no one would have to beat it. But if the water isn’t hitting it, then the others would just climb after the first one to get the bananas and be protected from the cold water. It’s simply not possible to do what the “experiment” claims it did.

And regarding the “moral” of the story, it is incredibly naive. It seems to say that indirect knowledge is deeply flawed and should be ignored. The problem is that 99.99999% of your knowledge is indirect. And while it’s true that you shouldn’t just accept something simply because everyone else thinks it’s true, it’s also true that it’s stupid to discard any piece of knowledge simply because you don’t know all the reasons behind its existence all the way to the quantum level.