[From Bill Powers (950816.0700 MDT)]
David Goldstein (950816) --
Welcome back to the net, David. How about preceding your posts with your
name and date/time (as above) so we don't have to scroll to the end to
see who's talking?
I'm sure I won't be the only one to ask what connections you see between
the procedures you describe and PCT.
The above described system is working better than any we have had
before but it is not a miracle cure. ... Why does it work better?
It allows a teacher to remove a disturbing student from the
classroom. This gives the teacher a fighting chance of continuing
some kind of academic program for the other students.
It provides the disturbing student with a change of scenery.
Sometimes he/she just wants to sit and be left alone for a few
minutes. Sometimes he/she wants to talk about something which is
upsetting. Sometimes, he/she wants more individualized attention
when engaged in educational activities. Finally, it provides a
limit for the aggressive student. " You will not be allowed to
hurt others or destroy property. You will be restrained from doing
this. "
None of these explanations seems to have anything to do with the fact
that the students and teachers are control systems controlling their own
perceptions. You seem to agree with the S-R view when you say in one
place that a student may want to talk about "something which is
upsetting," and in another that it provides the student with a "change
of scenery." You appear to be accepting the concepts of trait psychology
when you speak of "the aggressive student." Are these ideas really
consistent with PCT?
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Hans Blom, (950815) --
While I appreciate your thoughts about rules and their necessity, I
think we need to emphasize flexibility rather than uniformity. 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. 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. Societies are not
the simple monolithic structures that anthropologists, politicians, and
others imagine. Those who study societies and cultures in a formal way
are trying to come up with generalizations that seem to fit what most of
the participants believe and do, but these generalizations leave a lot
of room for variations, so much room that one can question the
usefulness of trying to characterize any particular group of people in a
way that applies even to a majority of them.
A thought, that arises quite naturally in the context of model-
based control: We can control better if the world is more law-like,
more rule-based, more predictable. A chaotic, random world allows
little control. It seems to me, therefore, that in a social context
we WANT rules: they allow for better control for all participants.
They allow for better models of what is out there -- if the rules
are followed.
This idea has its merits; obviously, in order to control we require an
environment in which a given action has at least a consistent sign of
effect on the variables we want to regulate (though that requirement
isn't absolute). But you are describing, largely, the world that is
required to make _model based_ control, in particular, workable. 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.
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. You don't have to
know exactly which tables in a restaurant will be vacant to be confident
of going in, seating yourself, and ordering lunch from whichever waiter
happens to be serving that table. And you don't have to calculate the
kinematics and dynamics of spaghetti in order to load your fork with
spaghetti and stick it in your mouth. With model-based control as the
exclusive means of behavior, you do have to know all those things in
advance, but in real life, you don't.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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. Even
in science, if everyone agreed about everything, the result would be
disastrous: nobody would ever try anything new. Cooperation and mutual
deference can too easily pass over the border into conformity and
rigidity.
It's good to help children learn what rules are and how to manage life
in terms of rules. But if we equip them only to deal with a world in
which everyone obeys all the rules, bad things will happen when the
children, grown up, encounter people who live under different rules, or
who deviate from the expected behavior in any way. That's when we see
prejudice and xenophobia and oppression of minorities.
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Hank Folson (950815) --
You seem to believe that Rick Marken and I are being too technical and
picky in talking about people involved in applications of PCT. I can't
agree with this. My own goals when I talk about applications have always
been to help others and myself understand just what difference PCT can
make in the way we view and deal with human behavior. I am still waiting
to see an application in which PCT is actually used as the main
organizing principle, with ALL older ideas that are contrary to PCT put
aside at least until the PCT-based approach can be given a fair trial.
If, for practical reasons, an application of PCT has to defer to local
customs, I expect the person involved at least to recognize that there
are factors working against success, and to understand that PCT can't be
mixed with contrary approaches with impunity. I want to see PCT ideas
getting a meaningful test. If I see something going on that looks to me
like a violation of principles, I'm going to speak up. And why shouldn't
I?
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Best to all,
Bill P.