I'm following the coercion discussion but, for the most part, I'm staying
out of it because it seems way too heated and for reasons I don't quite grasp.
Anyway, I very much liked your post to Rick Marken, from which I snipped
the following...
On your side, Bill raises the specter of people prevented from gathering on
streetcorners by the threat of coercion. I submit that this is effective
control using the threat of coercion as means.
I have a little trouble with the phrase "the threat of coercion."
Coercion, as I understand it, is the application of force or the
threat/potential for using force. Thus, "the threat of coercion"
translates to the threat of the threat of the use of force. Substituting
"force" for "coercion" would make the sentence go down a bit better (or so
it seems to me).
And, I especially relished your comment that..
We haven't talked much about how a control system can perceive its own
behavioral outputs as an observable environment variable qi' and to control
perceptions of them in a control loop separate from the one that uses them
to control some other qi.
When I first joined the list I presented a rough diagram of how I thought
PCT worked to Rick and Bill. It included a dotted line from the actions of
the person to the person's perceptual inputs, indicating that we monitor
our own actions as well as their effects on the variables we seek to
control (said effects being defined as changes in the controlled variables
that we attribute to our actions). Rick disallowed it, saying it wasn't a
factor or unnecessary or some such thing. I don't recall that Bill ever
responded to that piece of the model. Anyway, I'm glad to see it being
introduced because we do observe ourselves as well as what goes on around
us (not to mention the interactions between the two).
Nice post...
Regards,
Fred Nickols
The Distance Consulting Company
nickols@worldnet.att.net
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
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