Data; decisions; tempting proposal

[From Bill Powers (940924.0829 MDT)]

Rick Marken, Jeff Vancouver --

Jeff:

I believe Bandura and others have shown us the reasonableness of these
propositions.

Rick:

To paraphrase George S. Kaufman (who, on his deathbed, said "Dying is
easy; comedy is hard" -- a favorite expression of my comedy-writer
father-in-law, who died) belief is easy; knowledge is hard. What leads
you to believe that Bandura has shown us the "reasonableness" of these
propositions.

I'm beginning to get the feeling of watching trench warfare here. One
side lobs a general reference to unnamed literature at the other; the
other lobs back statements that nothing in that literature is any good.
To one who has read little of the literature, the whole argument is
content-free. It's like hearing two people arguing about what a friend
of theirs said, without ever mentioning what was said.

If we're going to make any pronouncements about Bandura's scientific
findings, how about someone summarizing the data? Even just one
experiment. I see nothing terribly unreasonable about saying that people
will choose goals on the basis of their assessment of their own ability
to reach them, if that is what "self-efficacy" means. That is just what
common sense and personal experience would say. I would like to
experience space flight, but I don't think I could make it through the
astronout training program at my age, so I have regretfully deleted that
goal from the list of those I actually try to achieve.

The only question I have is whether we can take this informal sort of
statement as having been formally established as a scientific truth. As
everyone must be aware by now, I am concerned about general statements
that are untrue of a substantial part of a tested population, yet which
are treated as if they were true of everyone. I'm concerned with the
truth-value of such statements, not so much one statement at a time but
as these statements are used in systems of reasoning that depend on the
simultaneous truth of several or many statements. I don't need to go
through that argument again (unless asked by someone who missed it).

So if Bandura has made statements about the relationship of self-
efficacy to other factors, I would like to know, aside from what the
statements were, how well his data support them. How many individuals
counted as positive instances of the statements, how many as negative
instances, and how many were indeterminate, as a fraction of the total
population studied? Before I accept experimental evidence as supporting
any general statement about people, I would really like to know that
essentially all of the people in the study behaved in a way that
supports the general statement. I vastly prefer statements that apply to
every individual.

The reason I ask is that if Bandura or Locke or anyone else has noticed
real phenomena of goal-seeking behavior, these phenomena should be grist
for the PCT mill. If we think that the phenomena are interesting but
that the method of establishing them was lacking in some respect, then
we should be able to design a PCT experiment to investigate further, and
carry it out. Even if Bandura and Locke aren't interested in the result,
some people might be interested.

ยทยทยท

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Jeff:

I have no trouble (as a working hypothesis) with "nothing beyond
perceiving the elements of the situation and applying an algorithm that
yields an answer based on the elements and logic or arithmetic." This
strikes me as a reasonable description of the DM process. But the next
question is which elements are perceived?

Is any general answer to that question possible? There are so many
different bases for "decision making" and so many algorithms, ranging
from mathematical to crazy, that it would be hard to come up with "the"
elements that are perceived when decisions or choices are made. Better
to start with examples, and see what is generalizable and what is not.

When Mary goes grocery-shopping, she decides which product to buy, for
certain products but not all, on the basis of the price-per-weight
sticker that grocery stores now carry. Of course quality also figures
in; carob cookies are cheaper than chocolate ones, but she knows that I
turn my nose up at carob. There are many variables to consider, but the
overall result is pretty much ordained by the weights given to the
variables and the logic that is applied. The final result in each case
is to pick up this package rather than that, from a set of similar
products. As Mary has said on the net, the only time she thinks of this
process as "decision-making" is when there is a conflict: when the data
and the reasoning do not automatically select just one result, and there
are several possibilities with no basis for choosing among them.

My shopping methods are very different. I know what kinds of cookies I
like, so I scan along the shelves until I find one of them, and I buy
it. If I had scanned further I might have found another kind I like
better, but my loop gain for cookies is not very high so that doesn't
bother me. If I don't find any cookies I like I don't buy any.

Mary no longer allows me to go shopping with her. I am in and out of
there in 10 minutes, about 50 minutes before Mary is ready to go. She
considers a lot more variables than I do, and likes to have in mind what
all the choices are before she lands on one. And she buys groceries for
a lot less money than I would.

Now, both of us go into a store, pick items from a collection of similar
items, and buy them. Just looking at the behavior, an onlooker would say
that we are both making decisions and therefore must have a Decision
Maker inside of us. But there is not very much in common about our
methods for making selections. I do it by setting up a few target items
and scanning along the perceived items until there is a significant dip
in the error signal, a serial search process coupled with monitoring for
a reasonable degree of match with any of several reference signals. Mary
does it in parallel, keeping memories of available items in mind,
assigning weights (I presume) to them based on multiple characteristics
of each item, and looking for the item with the largest score (I
suppose). These are both methods for "making decisions," but the
algorithms are clearly very different (hers requires a lot more brain
power and time).

Also, if you look at the detailed processes involved in either method,
there isn't any one process that amounts to making a decision. Making a
decision -- that is, actually picking up one of the items -- is the
outcome of applying a lot of processes, none of which is a decision-
making process, and any one of which could be used for all kinds of
other processes as well.

I'm working on a paper that contains a little essay on two kinds of
models (descriptive and generative) and the problems that arise from
trying to mix them. I think that the concept of decision-making belongs
among descriptive models, while the PCT explanation of decision-making,
which does not include any explicit decision-maker, belongs among
generative models. Decision-making is a phenomenon; the processes that
create the appearance of decision-making consist of underlying functions
none of which is a decision-making process. Note that in the control-
system model itself, there is no box labeled "controller." Control is a
process at the descriptive level which arises from connecting functions
in a hypothetical underlying reality none of which can be called
"controlling." I'll post this essay when it's in a little better shape.
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Francisco (Arocha?) (940924.0325) --

I've always been very suspicious and critical of conventional
psychology (Myself, with some friends, wrote a book about it)

Full reference, please!

Forget about trying to convert the children of the Lockes and the
Banduras of this world. They have already made up their minds. They
already know what science is. They already know what psychology is. Let
them live their delusions.

A very tempting proposal. After all, how much time do they spend
patiently trying to understand _us_? I have come very close more than
once to reaching this conclusion. The only thing that stops me is
knowing that practically everyone who is now on our side came from
conventional fields. There are always a few who get the message. The
problem with appealing ONLY to dissenters is that you get not only the
free spirits and the independent thinkers, but all the crazies, too. At
least the people in conventional fields have some experience with
disciplined thinking, even if what they think about isn't so great.

Psychologists seem to have a great deal of loyalty to psychology -- my
science, right or wrong. For me this is a constant conflict that makes
it difficult to find a direction and pursue it. It doesn't seem possible
to have a simple discussion of things like statistics without arousing
instant opposition, from those who happen to use it a lot. Actually, it
really doesn't matter what the subject is; if PCTers offer even an
implied criticism, the defenders of the faith will oppose it even before
they start thinking about it. If we must continually worry about what we
say for fear of threatening someone's beliefs, we will always be
diverted into unprofitable arguments and away from our own pursuit of
truth, beauty, science, and chocolate-chip cookies.

But the other side of the coin is not only seeming to become a cult, but
actually doing so. If we ever start thinking that we are no longer
subject to the requirement of persuading others through logic and
demonstration, we will start acting exactly like our opponents, assuming
automatically that we are right and everyone else is so obviously wrong
that debate is no longer necessary. After that, Saint Bill is just
around the corner.

I know what we should do! We should train young people who haven't been
contaminated yet by the behavioral sciences and make sure they
understand PCT from the ground up. Then we should require them, right
after their training, to put on blue suits, white shirts, and neckties,
and go in pairs from door to door all across the country, carrying
copies of B:CP and equipped with openers such as "Do you know that Bill
loves you and your control systems?" We could prepare little pamphlets
....

I guess that this conflict will just go on, until we find a way out of
it that doesn't lead to a worse situation. Maybe the answer will come
out of our attempts to form a Center for the Study of Living Control
Systems. We'll think of something.
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As for Rick M., well, I like him. Stop complaining about his "bad
manners". He has done great experimental work and is the first defender
of the basic ideas of PCT. Besides, for me, he is to CSG-L what
chillies is to mexican food. It may make me sweat, but I sure like it.

Yes, people do tend to forget that Rick has done some of the best
experiments in PCT-world. When he demands that others come up with some
real evidence, he speaks as one who has DONE it. When people argue with
him, I think they're obligated to produce results of equal quality and
specificity before they're entitled to be taken seriously. I am getting
mighty tired of people putting their 0.3 correlations up against his
0.95+ correlations. It gets ridiculous.

Thanks for spicing up the conversation.
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Best to all,

Bill P.

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Best,

Bill P.