[Hans Blom, 950821]
(Bill Powers (950816.0700 MDT))
While I appreciate your thoughts about rules and their necessity, I
think we need to emphasize flexibility rather than uniformity.
Are flexible rules OK?
In a single society, even a single university or small town, there
are many different and conflicting rules, and people do not actually
obey all the rules they know about.
What is the advantage of keeping the rule? What is the penalty of
breaking a rule? Rules and laws are, in many respects, like trees and
cars and people. They may help but you don't want to run into them.
You may speak at one moment with a person who approves of your
obeying some social rule, and at the next moment with a person who
laughs at you for obeying the same rule.
It is not the rules that are important here, it is the way people
interact with those rules. There are, I agree, extreme differences.
It is therefore not sufficient to have _one_ internal model of how a
fellow human works. Since different people operate according to
different rules, our control will be best if we have a separate model
for each individual that we interact with. Yet, we cannot do that,
and I do not mean that our brain capacity is too limited. I mean that
initially we have insufficient information about a person to be able
to build an adequate model of that person. What would be very helpful
is to have an a priori model of how an as yet unspecified human
behaves, and tune it when you get to know that person better. I
assume that we have such an a priori internal model as an innate
given. It would even help us if we meet a total stranger from a
completely foreign culture under weird circumstances. The uncertaint-
ies inherent in such an a priori model would force us to control very
carefully, however. But that is another discussion.
Societies are not the simple monolithic structures that
anthropologists, politicians, and others imagine.
Of course not. Societies consist of individuals, all different. Yet,
some individual behaviors (stimulus-response patterns or elementary
control systems) are remarkably alike in a given society, culture or
subculture. Therefore a model of a _society_ may be helpful, even if
it applies to not a single individual of that society. Such a model
may be so general, however, that it easily leads to stereotypes.
... you are describing, largely, the world that is required to
make _model based_ control, in particular, workable.
Not necessarily _only_ model-based control. In your PCT models, you
will very likely also need to tune some (PIF or OF) parameters in
order to be able to interact differently with, say, your wife and
your neighbor's wife :-).
I quite agree that for skillful and accurate model-based control to
work, the world must be structured in a very rigid way, and also in
a simple way.
Simple only if the world that the organism lives in is simple, or if
the organism's modelling capacity (association cortex?) is small.
Rigid only if the properties of the world are rigid -- like the
eternal (?) laws of nature. It is not too difficult to keep a model's
parameters at all times tuned to _changing_ laws or rules (just one
parameter in my demo, which I didn't explain).
Not all methods of control, however, require such a noise-free and
consistent world, or a world whose properties are completely known
or knowable. You don't have to be able to predict the wind in order
to drive a car quite skilfully and accurately. You don't have to
know exactly what other people are going to do in order to maintain
your relationships with them or protect your own interests.
Whereas I (somewhat) agree about the wind, I certainly don't agree
about the people. It is my personal experience that warm, personal
relationships require a finely tuned model of the other person. No
one likes to be treated as just anybody. In your restaurant scenario
you may recommend the sirloin to her as the best thing in the place,
but it certainly helps if you remember that she once told you that
she was a vegetarian.
As you say, there are many rules that we adopt for perfectly good
reasons, such as driving on one and only one side of the road. As a
general principle, we can agree that adopting rules even temporarily
is an advantage in social interactions.
I would even go so far as to believe that social interaction is
possible _only if_ we, at least temporarily, adopt common rules, of
which a common language and common definitions of terminology are the
least that are required. Some common goal as well, if only the mutual
desire to interact.
You and I agree about Ed Ford's program, in that it's an advantage
to children to learn to recognize and conform to rules with obvious
and evenly distributed social importance.
It is crucial to learn to recognize rules and laws, man-made or not.
That is the basis of any science, the basis of establishing how to
interact with the world, be it the physical or the social world. To
me, recognizing a rule is like basic science: discovering a relation-
ship, building a model. Making a rule is like applied science: tool-
building.
It may or may not be desirable to _conform_ to a rule. That depends
upon the economics of using it: do I gain more -- in terms of getting
closer to (controlling for) my goals -- by using it or by not using
it? Anyway, it is essential to _know_ the rule, if only in order to
be able to do your economic calculations (consciously or subcon-
sciously).
Obviously, in the benign world that Ed Ford and his teachers offer,
the rules will be equally benign to all students and will ultimately
be gratefully accepted as such, I hope.
I'll even agree that it's good to teach consistency, so that others
can rely on you and know what you're likely to do in a given
circumstance.
I don't know whether consistency in invariably keeping to a rule is
_good_ (compared to what?). Probably not, or not always; that seems
to depend upon the time horizon over which you "play the game", as
the (iterated) prisonner's dilemma shows. I do know that if others
cannot rely on you (cannot model you), interaction -- in the sense of
establishing and reaching common goals -- is impossible. If interact-
ion (social behavior, but also science) is to be taught, it may be
very important to teach what consistency _is_, not necessarily to
_be_ consistent.
But it's at least as important to teach children to make up their
own minds about rules and to obey them as a matter of conscious
choice rather than automatic compliance. Rules are not right just
because someone imposed them.
I made no mention of "right" or "wrong". To me, rules are like tools,
only some of which I like and use. But regardless whether I like a
rule or not, it is very important to at least be able to _recognize_
it.
Let's not forget all the terrible things that have happened in the
world precisely because people have been afraid to stand up and
disagree with what their society seemed to require of them.
Very true. In more theoretical terms: I think of rules as sub-goals
that one adopts to reach a certain goal; we -- a society, a culture
or a subculture -- specifies somehow that we want to reach some goal
through some specified means, in some specified way, and not in
another way. We may or may not disagree with the primary goal; but
most often we will probably agree with it (or that goal would not be
supported by at least a significant segment of the population), yet
we may disagree with the way in which to reach that goal. Like fight
a war in order to establish peace.
Even in science, if everyone agreed about everything, the result
would be disastrous: nobody would ever try anything new.
So conformity is _not_ good if we want to have science. Fine with me!
... if we equip them [children] only to deal with a world in which
everyone obeys all the rules ... we see prejudice and xenophobia
and oppression of minorities.
So the important things seems to be a) how to recognize (man-made)
rules, and b) how to value them (as tools).
Greetings,
Hans