Controlling; controlling uncertainty

[From Bill Powers (940525.1630 MDT)]

Rick Marken (940525.0900) --

Here are some of the things that I'm having trouble >understanding

-- all from (of all people) Bill Powers.
....

Hmm. So it's OK to call people who post Thigh Cream ads on
internet "idiots" but it's wrong for me to call religious
people who tell their followers that it's a sin to use birth
control the same thing?

Maybe my excuse is the time scale involved, or something like that.
I felt the impact of the Thigh Cream ad the way I would experience a
mugging. Here was someone taking the first step toward destroying my
link with everyone out there, a link on which I depend for a great
part of my intellectual life. That's an immediate threat and I want
to take immediate action against it while it's small.

I also feel, as you do, that population growth, or even maintenance
at present levels, is a horrible mistake and that people who promote
continued blind procreation have to be counteracted. But there the
problem is less immediate and can't be solved by using beliefs about
the present system to create deterrence. Furthermore, this problem
is created by beliefs strongly held by billions of people, and
direct action to prevent its getting worse would be completely
futile. So I don't use the same approach; in this case, it does
matter a great deal whether the means of action simply arouses
strong counteractions.

Is this the same Bill Powers who wrote the chapter on Conflict
and Control in BCP? Is this the Bill Powers who said that there
must be more intelligent ways to solve conflicts than via
agression?

Yep. Same one. This doesn't mean that better methods are always
available right now. When the mugger is upon you, it's too late to
sit down at the conference table and show him a better way to get
what he wants.

Actually, although I hesitate to spell this out in public, nothing I
have done so far about Mr. Thigh Cream has involved any direct
physical coercion. If the steps I have taken so far work out as I
hope they may work out, this particular pest will no longer pester
the net, and will have experienced nothing worse than failure to
achieve something by forcing his ads on others who don't want them.
He may also get the impression that what he did is not evidence of
cleverness, in the eyes of other beholders, and will not create any
noticeable degree of admiration. It is possible that he will get the
idea that continuing on this path could lead to extremely
undesirable consequences, and that he is not necessarily smart
enough to avoid them.

Let's smoke out the bastard.

Jeez. Then what was wrong with the FBI trying to tear gas out
the Branch Dividians? ... Or are the intentions of people who shoot

federal agents in cold blood not as bad as those of people who post
silly Thigh Cream ads?

It's a little hard for me to see the parallels; I do not propose to
shoot down Mr. Thigh Cream in cold (or even warm) blood. I just want
to make it very difficult for him to get what he wants by the
particular means he chose, which created a disturbance smack in the
middle of my world. And I'm also describing the sorts of things that
others will encounter if they try to use the internet as a cheap way
of advertising their wares, whether scams are involved or not. Of
course if nobody else reacts in the same way, my efforts will go for
nothing. Then, as soon as a few people show that the coast is clear,
we will be flooded with junk email just as people now get flooded
with junk faxes.

Since the disturbance (the Thigh Cream ad) is created by a
control system (probably) isn't it possible that this control
system might notice the cause of the countering disturbance and
decide that that disturbance should stop.

Sure. There's a potential for direct conflict here. If you were out
walking with Linda and a mugger attacked her, he might interpret
your attempts to protect her as a disturbance and try to make the
disturbance stop. Would the potential for direct conflict be a
reason for not trying to protect her?

How can you be sure that the result of your disturbance will be
that Mr. Thigh Cream thinks responsibly, ie. concludes that
"the wisest course would be to desist"? How do you know that
the result of your disturbance won't be a dead fish wrapped in
newspaper on your door step.

I hope that Mr. TC will conclude that the side-effects of this
approach exceed its potential for profit. I will do what I can to
make that true. If I act alone, then of course my own risk is
greater. But that's what social systems are about, not so? We have a
social system on the internet that can exert a lot of
counterpressure against disturbances. When that counterpressure
comes from many sources, the risk to any one source is diminished.
The riskiest time is in the beginning, like now. But if many people
take up the same idea, no one person can be singled out any more.

To quote Bill Glasser, _Take Control of Your Life_.

What if Mr. Thigh Cream read it too?

Then he will take control of his life, too. Actually, he already has
control of his life, as we do of ours. But controlling your own life
involves a system concept under which you choose to live, and which,
if it means anything to you, you will defend. If Mr. TC has a system
concept that demands advertising on the internet, I suppose he will
defend it. I'm willing to listen to his arguments, but I don't know
who he is. Once he is tracked down (which is what "smoking him out"
means, metaphorically), we can talk with him. In the meantime, I'm
still prepared to defend my controlled variables against anonymous
disturbances. There may be one or two others who feel the same way.

ยทยทยท

--------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Baines (940525) --

    So, what's the relationship between who we PCT'rs "feel"
    about Mr. Thigh Cream and how we "feel" about panhandlers
    outside public buildings?

I don't know how "we" feel. I don't feel equipped to raise all
panhandlers out of poverty out of my own pocket, and I strongly
resist agressive ones ("Back off, I'm a cop" works very well). I
used to give a buck every couple of days to the Wolf Man, who played
terrific a capella baritone sax jazz on the Michigan Avenue Bridge
in the summer (he spent his winters, like any successful panhandler,
in Florida). I have helped a homeless person out to some small
extent, on occasion. I don't see any point in establishing general
principles about such people: the only way to handle the general
problem is by general means, social reform. But if they do something
to disturb what you're controlling for, then I suppose the only
choices are to stop controlling for it, or resist.

By the way, Thomas, it would help if you would preface your posts
with

[From Thomas Baines (yymmdd.time)]

or some such; when I discard my headers, I also discard all
information about who sent the post except what is in the text. So
unless I happen to read about the 11th line in the fine print in the
headers before I delete them, your posts come through with no
indication of who wrote them.
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Bill Cunningham (940525.1335) -- (writing to Rick, but who cares?)

What perception were you trying to control?

Would it be zero uncertainty about some aspect of those you >asked?

If not zero uncertainty, would reduced uncertainty be a

better choice of terms?

Trying to sneak some information theory into the discussion, eh?
I don't think that "uncertainty" qualifies, very often, as a
controlled perception. If I ask you to tell me your middle name, the
controlled variable is a name, which is presently blank and which I
wish to perceive filled in with any character string. This can be
_characterized_ as reduction of uncertainty (under a number of
rather complicated premises, such as what list of names I have in
mind and the probability I assign to reading each one in your
reply), but it's not uncertainty I am trying to perceive in any
particular state. I want only to perceive a name -- any name --
instead of no name.

Uncertainty is in the same class of concepts as utility. If I adjust
the setting of a room thermostat, you could say that I am trying to
maximize the utility, for me, of the room temperature. In fact, I am
just acting to raise or lower the temperature I feel according to
whether I feel too warm or too cold. You can define utility to be
some large constant minus the square of the deviation of the room
temperature from some fixed maximum-utility temperature, and so
"prove" that I am really maximizing utility. But the fact is that I
am not considering utility at all: just temperature.

The same goes for uncertainty. You can define a formal way of
calculating uncertainty, and apply it to any situation you please,
but this does not mean that uncertainty is actually involved as a
system variable. It just means that you choose to represent the
operation of the system in terms of a derived quantity. You can do
this whether or not the system itself operates in terms of
uncertainty. When I am controlling for knowing your middle name, I
am only controlling for hearing a name, and can be said to be
controlling for minimum uncertainty only in a metaphorical sense.

My typing this constitutes behavior, implying that I'm
controlling a perception. What perception?

Ah, good question! But how about trying to answer it yourself? As
you type, what are you perceiving that is under control? What simple
perceptions are you controlling as a means of controlling more
complex ones? How many levels of control of this kind can you find?
A hint: somewhere up the line you will arrive at the perception of a
letter or a word on the computer screen. I would be interested in
seeing what sorts of controlled perceptions you would come up with.
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Best to all,

Bill P.