Conflictive control

CSGnet Archive CSG1996
1

[From Bill Powers (961003.0715 MDT)]

Avery Andrews 961003 --

I'm still not to happy with Kent's treatment of `conflictive control',
for various reasons.

Kent isn't _advocating_ conflictive control, he's merely describing it as a
phenomenon of real social behavior. Consider the adversary system in trials,
or competition in business (for money) or academia (for prestige) or sports
(for ascendency) or politics (for advantage). Even when people try to
cooperate, their goals and their perceptions are always somewhat different,
and there is always pushing and pulling against each other in spite of the
fact that they are supposed to be aligning their efforts and aims.

2) If Cindy and Avery are conflictively controlling, say, the position
of a table, they are doomed to stand there forever tugging at it.

They may not stand there forever tugging at a table, but I'll wager that
they are standing there tugging in opposite directions at other controlled
variables, and have done so for some time, and will continue to do so for
some time. There's an effective reference level that is different from both
of the actual reference levels, and the result, while not exactly what
either one alone would prefer, is not totally unacceptable to either one.
And the variable does get controlled: if an outsider said "Cindy is
perfectly right, and her way should prevail," Cindy would relax and Avery
would gear up for action, and the variable would stay where it is: minimum
total error, although not minimum error in each person. What is it? Socks
dropped where Avery took them off? Hairspray on the bathroom mirror? Who
gets the car on Thursdays? Whose friends come to dinner? How much they talk
together versus working at something separately? Lots of problems like these
never get settled; they just come to some equilibrium condition. But it's
not exactly passive equilibrium, because any deviation will cause one side
to relax and the other to try harder, and the effective control can be
pretty tight.

Your suggestions about physical linkages among perceptions, and of
strategies for minimizing conflict, are OK with me. But it's hard to work
out such things in a whole society, with hundreds or thousands or millions
of people at the same time. I think what happens is that you seek out people
with whom you have the least conflict and the most success at resolving
conflicts, and limit your interactions mainly to that small group. The
groups avoid conflict with other groups mainly by not having much contact
with them. When they do come into conflict, look to the Middle East for an
example of the result.

The biggest insight I got out of Kent's paper was that there is really
nobody in charge of a society, nobody to complain to about it. Each person
has reasons for behaving in certain ways, and when you add up all those
reasons and all those behaviors, you get the resultant, which is the current
form of the society. The only way to change a society is to promulgate ideas
that change a large number of reference signals or ways of perceiving in a
specific way; then the resultant will shift and the society as a whole will
start defending a different set of virtual reference levels.

Best,

Bill P.

2

[From Bruce Gregory (961003.1045 EDT)]

(Bill Powers 961003.0715 MDT)

> Avery Andrews 961003 --

>2) If Cindy and Avery are conflictively controlling, say, the position
>of a table, they are doomed to stand there forever tugging at it.

They may not stand there forever tugging at a table, but I'll wager that
they are standing there tugging in opposite directions at other controlled
variables, and have done so for some time, and will continue to do so for
some time. There's an effective reference level that is different from both
of the actual reference levels, and the result, while not exactly what
either one alone would prefer, is not totally unacceptable to either one.
And the variable does get controlled: if an outsider said "Cindy is
perfectly right, and her way should prevail," Cindy would relax and Avery
would gear up for action, and the variable would stay where it is: minimum
total error, although not minimum error in each person. What is it? Socks
dropped where Avery took them off? Hairspray on the bathroom mirror? Who
gets the car on Thursdays? Whose friends come to dinner? How much they talk
together versus working at something separately? Lots of problems like these
never get settled; they just come to some equilibrium condition. But it's
not exactly passive equilibrium, because any deviation will cause one side
to relax and the other to try harder, and the effective control can be
pretty tight.

If you manage to "go up a level" and to control for having a
satisfying and rewarding relationship, many of the lower level
potential sources of conflict vanish. It took me a long time to
realize this, but it _was_ worth the effort.

Bruce

3

BP said:

The biggest insight I got out of Kent's paper was that there is really
nobody in charge of a society, nobody to complain to about it. Each person
has reasons for behaving in certain ways, and when you add up all those
reasons and all those behaviors, you get the resultant, which is the current
form of the society. The only way to change a society is to promulgate ideas
that change a large number of reference signals or ways of perceiving in a
specific way; then the resultant will shift and the society as a whole will
start defending a different set of virtual reference levels.

I'll buy that. Getting a handle on the dynamics of those virtual actors is
a tough one.

Changing society is sort of like trying to convince academic psychologists
that people have purposes and that one can talk about those purposes in a
perfectly non-mystical way.

ยทยทยท

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That's what color I am.
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4

I'm still not to happy with Kent's treatment of `conflictive control',
for various reasons.

Kent isn't _advocating_ conflictive control, he's merely describing it as a
phenomenon of real social behavior. Consider the adversary system in trials,
...

And so I thought he was. I'm just very sceptical about its prevalence, as
a mode of control. Consider football games, for example (your favorite
code, whatever that may be). If the players weren't mostly controlling
for the same things (not getting caught breaking the rules, the ball staying
within bounds, etc.) the game would be unplayable. The main locus of
conflict is the location of the ball w.r.t. the goals, and the graph
of this variable does not looked much like an instance of control.

Conflict is clearly a feature of human societies, and figuring how it
is managed and contained is important, and PCT hopefully has a lot to
offer here, but I don't see conflictive control, as I understood (or
maybe mis-understood) Kent as describing it to be a major factor.
I'd suggest `strategic thinking' as a much more important factor.
Occupying armies are often able to maintain a semblance of order in the
territories they occupy because the locals don't want even worse
things to happen to them (if you shoot the soldier on the streetcorner,
15 houses in the village get blown up, or 50 hostages get executed).
The occupying armies might at some level want to exterminate the
inhabitants, or just drive them out in some random direction, but they
don't, because they are afraid of loosing the support of some powerful
backer, or making a new enemy that they don't need.

So lo-level conflicts are avoided while people maneuver around looking for
some way to deliver a penalty-free king hit. The story of Odysseus and
the Cyclops provides nice examples. Od. initially wanted to just stab
the Cyclops in the liver, but didn't because then they'd be trapped in
the cave, so he comes up with the wine & stake plan, feigns amiability and
then does his thing.

Socks
dropped where Avery took them off? Hairspray on the bathroom mirror? Who
gets the car on Thursdays? Whose friends come to dinner? How much they talk
together versus working at something separately? Lots of problems like these
never get settled; they just come to some equilibrium condition. But it's
not exactly passive equilibrium, because any deviation will cause one side
to relax and the other to try harder, and the effective control can be
pretty tight.

This looks to me like attractor basins, which are supposed to be somewhat
different from genune control. But I certainly don't want to be dogmatic
about this.

Your suggestions about physical linkages among perceptions, and of
strategies for minimizing conflict, are OK with me. But it's hard to work
out such things in a whole society, with hundreds or thousands or millions
of people at the same time.

Yes, for practical work there have got to be simplifications; my understanding
is a lot of the mathematical work in physics is figuring out simplifications
that won't degrade the accuracy of the answers to an unacceptable degree.
But I still think it's important to understand the underlying nature of
whatever it is that's being simplified. One useful simplification is that
it seems to be true that there is a lot of perceptual circuitry that
converts low-level perceptions with complex and shifting patterns of
linkage into high-level perceptions that are a lot more stable, such
as the location of a ball in perceived `room-space', which is invariant
as you walk around the room. It also seems to be the case that the
linkages between such high level perceptions in different people
(Cindy's idea about where the ball is vs. mine) are very simple; if I
remember my multivariable calculus correctly, each persons perception of
where the ball is will be a point in a three-dimensional manifold (the
actual representation might involve any number of coordinates, but linkages
will reduce the dfs to three), so that my perceptions of where the
ball is (in room-space) will mappable in a well-behaved manner onto Cindy's,
and vice versa, so we can talk about these two perceptions as being
`the same'.

I think what happens is that you seek out people
with whom you have the least conflict and the most success at resolving
conflicts, and limit your interactions mainly to that small group. The
groups avoid conflict with other groups mainly by not having much contact
with them. When they do come into conflict, look to the Middle East for an
example of the result.

Sure, but no matter how small and homogeneous the society, there is going
to be some degree of conflict, and even big, multi-ethnic societies
such as the US or Australia can maintain harmony on a very wide range
of references (such as those associated with moving big hunks of metal
around towns and highways). And even members of the same family moving
around in the same house are going to have all sorts of low-level conflicts,
if they don't have specific mechanisms for sorting them out. So my
hunch is that sorting out the conflict resolution mechanisms is the
big priority; I'd guess that most of the time this process works so well
that people don't even notice that it's happening, or even notice the
incipient conflict, such as the discrepancies in initial reference level
for table position in the table-moving example.

For Cindy and I, one of the magic moments of childhood is when the toddler
learns the meaning of the word `later'; then the conflict between the
child's desire for ice-cream or whatever and the parent's desire to finish
the current cup of coffee or whatever can be resolved (the belief that the
ice-cream will be forthcoming lets the child abandon the reference
for tasting the stuff RIGHT NOW!!!).

The biggest insight I got out of Kent's paper was that there is really
nobody in charge of a society, nobody to complain to about it. Each person
has reasons for behaving in certain ways, and when you add up all those
...

Definitely, my points are matters of detail rather than fundamental principle.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au

5

[Martin Taylor 961008 13:35]

Avery Andrews Fri, 4 Oct 1996 12:08:53

Lots of problems like these
never get settled; they just come to some equilibrium condition. But it's
not exactly passive equilibrium, because any deviation will cause one side
to relax and the other to try harder, and the effective control can be
pretty tight.

This looks to me like attractor basins, which are supposed to be somewhat
different from genune control. But I certainly don't want to be dogmatic
about this.

What one control system does is control. What two do, interacting in the
same world, is not, though what each of them does is indeed control. The
interactions among control system has a dynamic that almost surely involves
attractor basins. There are different ways in which the control systems
can reach stable situations (not if they are linear, but in general there
are). Each such way is an "orbit" leading to the attractor of the relevant
basin.

There's no conflict between saying that individuals control and that the
structure of the interrelations among individuals is a dynamic with attractors.

The attractors are the social conventions (and language) that evolves when
these particular control systems interact. When new control systems are
born into a group that has established certain attractors, the attractors
may change in detail, but only rarely will they change drastically, and
then (usually) only for a relatively small subgroup of strongly interacting
control systems. Translated into everyday langauge: social conventions
drift, but only rarely do revolutions happen, and when they do, they usually
emanate from a prior revolution in a small cohesive subgroup.

Martin

6

[From Bill Powers (961018.0745 MDT)]

Avery Andrews 961018 --

Something that puzzles me is why my musings on `conflictive control'
have given rise to what to me seems to be a rather pointless argument
about attractors, rather than about whether `conflictive control' is
really as prevalent as I understood Kent's paper to be saying it was.

Good point. The basic thing we're doing there is discussing PCT and human
behavior, and here we have some people doing it by wanting the discussion to
be about attractors while others want it to be about conflictive control.
Naturally there's some insistence by the various parties to the discussion
that the discussion stay on one track or the other, but somehow, despite
this tugging in different directions, the conversation goes on.

Sounds like conflictive control to me. Or do you think that the best thing
to do would be for those who want to talk about each subject to start their
own discussion groups, so we wouldn't have this conflict? Reaction here [ ].

Conflictive control is how people manage to stay together to carry on some
project despite their differences about how it ought to be carried out and
exactly what its goals are. That's not _all_ it is, but that's one
application of the idea. Any outsider who tried to convince us that the PCT
project really should be abandoned would meet with massive resistance just
as if a single big control system with a single goal were acting, yet that
doesn't prevent the people within it from having conflicts with others who
are doing "the same thing." Sometimes it's amusing, isn't it, how an
outsider will complain about the "party line" and the "religious faith" that
is being proclaimed by the "high priests" inside the PCT "cult," while some
of the insiders consider others to be stubborn opponents. I'm reminded of
what happens on the Democratic and Republican sides of the Congressional
Houses in Washington when a newcomer says "Ok, folks, time to talk about
campaign finance reform." Or at a University Budget Committee meeting when
some pipsqueak stands up and proposes that some serious money be allotted to
PCT research.

I've always wondered about a bird phenomenon. A large flock of birds will be
peacefully pecking away in a harvested grain field, when somewhere a single
bird, then two, then four, then forty, then all 2000 of them will become
airborn, fly in a huge group around in a big circle, and then settle back
down into the field. It looks as if some huge organism had suddenly decided
to peel itself off the ground, go for a short flight, and then land again to
go on feeding. Obviously each bird is an independent collection of
hierarchically related control systems, yet we get this concerted action as
if under the control of a single higher-level entity.

One possible story is that there is conflictive control going on. All the
birds have a goal of searching through the grain field to find bits of grain
and eat them, but all of them also have the goal of maintaining proximity to
other birds without actually bumping into them. If one bird, temporarily
replete or finding no more grain nearby or startled by some imaginary
predator, starts to take off , another bird nearby, trying to keep eating
AND stay close to the center of gravity of the other neighboring birds,
finds itself halfway between the two goals, airborne, which of course leads
surrounding birds to try to maintain both goals, and before you know it all
the birds are airborne and flying away (you have to be moving to fly). Of
course that takes ALL the birds away from the grain field, and EACH of them
that is still hungry tries to turn back without losing proximity to the
other birds. The bird who started it all still wants to stay with the others
and follows its neighbors back to the ground.

And how about the mavericks who stay on the ground munching away all during
this pointless exercise? They were hungrier than they were lonesome. One
piece of grain on the ground, they say to themselves, is worth two birds in
the air. Neither people nor birds are all the same.

Best,

Bill P.

7

[Avery Andrews 961020]
(Bill Powers (961018.0745 MDT))

Avery Andrews 961018 --

>Something that puzzles me is why my musings on `conflictive control'
>have given rise to what to me seems to be a rather pointless argument
>about attractors, rather than about whether `conflictive control' is
>really as prevalent as I understood Kent's paper to be saying it was.

Good point. The basic thing we're doing there is discussing PCT and human
behavior, and here we have some people doing it by wanting the discussion to
be about attractors while others want it to be about conflictive control.
Naturally there's some insistence by the various parties to the discussion
that the discussion stay on one track or the other, but somehow, despite
this tugging in different directions, the conversation goes on.

Sounds like conflictive control to me. Or do you think that the best thing
to do would be for those who want to talk about each subject to start their
own discussion groups, so we wouldn't have this conflict? Reaction here [ ].

It doesn't sound like what I understood `conflictive control' to mean
when I read Kent's paper, so maybe I better read it again. The
conversation goes on and remains related to PCT because that's what
pretty much everybody is controlling for, in spite of conflicts on
other matters. Control in the presence of conflict certaintly exists,
but that's not what I understood `conflictive control' to actually mean.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au

8

[From Bill Powers (961020.1130 MDT)]

Avery Andrews 961020 --

The
conversation goes on and remains related to PCT because that's what
pretty much everybody is controlling for, in spite of conflicts on
other matters. Control in the presence of conflict certaintly exists,
but that's not what I understood `conflictive control' to actually mean.

The conflict is over what specific conversations amount to "being related to
PCT." We agree that we'd like to do something entertaining tonight. So
what's it going to be, go to a chamber music recital or a wrestling match?
To talk about PCT should we talk about conflictive control or attractors?

Think about "what we talk about" as the input variables one level down from
the "discussing PCT" control system. You want those variables in one state,
somebody else wants them in another state. You're willing to say that either
way we're "more or less" talking about PCT, but there's a conflict at the
lower level. Even so, if someone else came along and said "Let's talk about
this great recipe I found for thigh cream," that person would experience
immediate opposition from everyone, just as if there were a single control
system operating.

It's probably easier to imagine conflictive control if you think of 2000
control systems instead of 2. Two people can work out a conflict through
discussion, but 2000 people controlling 2000 related variables can't. In any
aggregation of people there are multiple disturbances, with everyone trying
to maintain control while having to resist disturbances -- small ones,
maybe, but many of them -- from other people's control actions. I once
proposed a "theorem" which says that it's easier for an individual to
control in a large group than a small one, because the disturbances will
tend to cancel better in a large group. At equilibrium (after Martin
Taylor's process of interactive reorganization has come to a steady state)
all parties will be experiencing some average nonzero error, and there will
be an average nonzero degree of conflict in the system. When the number of
people approaches the number of degrees of freedom in the environment (at
the various levels at which people control), the degree of conflict rises,
probably very steeply. But the whole aggregate can still act like a virtual
control system with respect to any one variable. As it moves closer to the
reference levels of some people, it moves farther from the reference levels
of others. Those who see a bigger error push back harder, and those that see
less error relax. The net effect is to maintain that variable very strongly
at its virtual reference level. And an outside disturbance that pushes very
hard on the variable will elicit a lot of small but coordinated pushes back,
as if a single very strong control system were acting.

There isn't any _advantage_ of conflictive control over non-conflictive
control (a question you once raised). But the reality of social life is that
there's no way to zero out every possible conflict, and the more people who
try to interact, the harder it gets to avoid conflict. Even just walking
along in a crowd, you have to deviate from the shortest path to your
destination to avoid bumping into others. You don't deviate any farther than
you have to and you expect others to avoid bumping into you, too, but
basically you're always experiencing a higher level of steering error than
you would if the other people were't there. If you're walking on the
promenade of a cruise ship, and the ship tips to one side, however, you'll
see the whole crowd acting as if in concert to oppose this disturbance, no
matter in what direction each person is walking. Virtual control of the mean
position of all the people.

Best,

Bill P.