Deja vu all over again

[From Rick Marken (920803.0930)]

Bill Powers (920902.0800) quotes the following from Chapman:

2.2 Situatedness

"Situations change continually. Algorithms which formally solve your
problem are of no use if they terminate after the problem has changed
or solved itself or turned into a disaster."

"Real situations, in particular, make it hard to know exactly what the
outcome of your actions will be."

As Bill notes, these and some of the other quotes from Chapman sound
about as close to PCT as you can be without being there. Reading them,
I had a sort of deja vu -- and I realized that it was based on the
fact that I had read nearly the same kind of stuff in the early 80s;
it was written by the likes of Turvey, Kelso, Shaw, etc. They called
themselves the "Bernstein" school then (after the Russian physiologist)
who proposed the idea that we now know as "coordinative structures". The
Bernstein school has now become the nonlinear dynamics group after learning
some chaos theory.

The point is that the Bernstein school (like the interactionists or whatever
Chapman calls himself) was as close to PCT as you can be; they understood
that consistent behavioral results are produced in the context of variable
disturbances (they called it context conditioned variability); they knew
that it was impossible to compute the many outputs required to produce a
particular result (they called this the degrees o freedom problem). Some
had a glimmer that perception was important to the "invariance" of
behavior (they were Gibsonians, after all). So they were exactly where
Chapman is right now, then. But they steadfastly refused to consider
PCT as a solution to the problems that they correctly identified -- in
fact, they actively rejected PCT (in the Fowler-Turvey article). So now
they are off, happily poking down trendy dead end after trendy dead end.
I predict the same fate for Chapman et al. After the interactionist
verbalizations get tiresome they'll move off to the next trendy thing; and
another group of young turks will come along, rediscover control and not
know what they are looking at, and proceed to repeat the cycle again.

And PCT will just keep slowly rollin' along, with solutions to all the
problems that are being rediscoverd again and again, and making slow
progress because there are only two or three people doing the research
and modelling work.

What is it about PCT? Why don't people like it? Why do they prefer
trendy junk (Chapman, Turvey, Brooks, etc) to solid quality (Powers)?
Is there something wrong with PCT? Or is it the influence of network TV?

Best regards

Rick

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Richard S. Marken USMail: 10459 Holman Ave
The Aerospace Corporation Los Angeles, CA 90024
E-mail: marken@aero.org
(310) 336-6214 (day)
(310) 474-0313 (evening)

Bill Cunningham (921202.1100)

Hate to admit this, but I first heard the Poles in right half plane
joke a little over 30 years ago in much the same circumstances. The
accompanying comment was that the Poles in the left half plane were
all designing roller coasters. Exciting or unexciting, depending on
how you deal with imagination and reality.

My apologies to the control engineers amongst us. The rest don't want to
know, lest it Bode ill for them.

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Bill P and John Gabriel:

For perhaps 12-14 years, I've considered organizations in terms of
feedback control systems, starting with the observation that volunteer
organizations behave like Type 0 systems with low loop gain. There
has to be enough error signal to motivate the volunteers into action.
A well run volunteer organization is typically a first order system
with moderate gain, but only if the leader is the integrator. If the
integrator is one of the workers and the leader is not, the worker
gets disgusted and leaves. If the gain is too high, too many workers
unvolunteer. PCT explains why. Attempting to make a volunteer organization
into a second order system doesn't work. A professional organization,
however, relies on first order thinkers at the working level and will fail
if the organization is not second order or higher.

An imprecise metaphor, perhaps. But part of the background that led to
fascination with PCT.

Bill C.