Rick, probably we need go no farther than Dag’s statement of his motivation, namely, a long-standing recurrent phenomenon disturbs his perceptions of the progress and future of PCT away from values for those perceptions that he cares about. Recently, the Board has asked him to identify a video clip of Bill to show at the conference. However long ago he assembled that email compilation, I can easily imagine that he came across it during that search, was reminded by it, and that this was the immediate occasion for posting it, rather than any recent examples of ‘troubled discourse’. But my imaginings about this may be wrong. Dag can speak for himself.
Well, I hope his posting those old discussions got that perception under control for him. But I did find it very interesting and illuminating so I appreciate his posting it.
Yes, indeed.
But whether he does or doesn’t, I think there is some very good grist in the discussions Dag posted for a PCT-based discussion of how to have scientific discussions – and disagreements – in a more professional and collegial way.
Best, Rick
I’ve been thinking about why Bill would in 2009 have been using the expression “When Martin comes on with his intellectual superiority act.” After reading this long set of threads, I now think that “act” is likely to have referred to my having used something I had been taught that Bill didn’t learn in his academic career and hadn’t invented for himself or had decided for himself that it was of no value and should therefore not be mentioned on CSGnet.
I think 2009 was around the time I had been trying to explain to him how useful Laplace Transforms could be with analysis of linear systems, not realizing that Bill already “knew” that Laplace Transforms were useless mathematical nonsense. Since Bill “knew” that the very idea of a Laplace Transform was mathematical nonsense, my attempt to demonstrate their value (which I had learned in second-year undergraduate engineering physics) was ipso facto an “intellectual superiority act”.
Could be. He did know and apply the convolution theorem for image processing and in the artificial cerebellum. I understand that these and Fourier analysis are all related, but I have no expertise in these matters.
I have had a repeated impression that his lack of credentials was an easily disturbed perception. I can personally affirm that being on the nether side of privilege is a tough thing to get past, and conversely privilege is invisible to the privileged. I understand that you have a family background associated with intellectual ‘aristocracy’, maybe comparable to what I know of Gregory Bateson’s background. I think it is likely that on occasion what for you was a casual reference to presumed common experience felt like a dig at a felt lack of that experience and a lack of commonality. That seems to me a much better fit to the phrase ‘intellectual superiority act’. But I may be no more than projecting onto him what I have experienced in academia and in wider areas of life.
An example that recurred from memory today, your account of playing cricket and having caught and perhaps played the ball at a level of perception faster than your awareness, or something like that. Someone expressed his irritation with what he perceived as pretentiousness, I don’t remember who (not Bill or Rick). I remember being a bit puzzled. Maybe just the reference to playing cricket seemed somehow pretentious to him, or maybe it was the reference to athleticism in your youth. My attention was on remembered experiences in which attention apparently shifted to the Event or Configuration level and time seemed to slow.
‘American exceptionalism’ is one aspect of an American ‘inferiority complex’, especially wrt Mother Britannia. So what’s perceived as ‘an English accent’ we perceive as pretentious.
There’s much to-do about the centenary of Eliot’s ‘The waste land’. We I think often lose sight of Eliot the ex-patriot American who moved to Sussex. I wonder how much he felt himself a poseur or even a fraud, tapping Oriental plunder of the Raj for axel-tree and world-weariness, and the playful ditties of ‘Cats’ more comfortable by far.
Envy, privilege, disadvantage … not just in Oz do we wear green-colored glasses.
When I referred to that, I was thinking of it as an example of the speed of non-conscious, highly practiced, control as compared to conscious control using what we normally call “thinking”. At that age, the captain of a visiting English select team said that he thought only one professional player in English cricket was faster at the “gully” position I played. How could I talk about how that feels from inside without referring to myself? I simply don’t know what other elite players of any sport or game feel inside when they do what most other people cannot do. Is it pretentious to ask that kind of question having a data point in hand?
I suspect all high-level athletes (which selection for Canada asserted that at least some people thought I was) do the same, make the right move much faster than they could do by conscious thinking control, as do chess grand masters who are said to require thousands of hours to attain their standard. Is it pretentious to use one’s personal experiences as a data point in a scientific discussion when they are not the kind of experiences most people ever have?
Right now, I think as I have written in PPC and as many people have suggested in different ways, we learn non-conscious control at least in part by synaptic strengthening and weakening when the same thinking leads to the same control actions many times – the “I’ve seen that before and fixed it this way” effect at a grand scale when “many times” is inserted before “before”.
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Bruce,
I see in the mail header that you posted this to discourse, but I don’t see it there so I’ll answer it here to you directly.
You have a better chance of being correct than I do, so I will defer.
Martin
Pretension is always a perception by the other guy. We’re kind of powerless what they make of their perceptions. At best, maybe we can follow the example of Odysseus, when it was his turn to speak holding the speaking baton awkwardly like some country bumpkin so as not to remind his fellows of rhetorical skill and his clever and devious ways to achieve his goals. We can understand the social dynamics and compensate. Odysseus got away with it, but it certainly can backfire if it rings false and feels demeaning, like ‘slumming’.
On the relatively rare occasion when we perceive ourselves being pretentious it’s as though we were an independent observer. How we do that is an interesting question, but no doubt we can.
You were I think proud of the attributions and praise of your elite athletic skills, and justly so. But do note that this had no bearing on the technical PCT point about more deliberate conscious control and well-practiced non-conscious control (Bill’s distinction between transitions and events). Mentioning it was elective. Somebody may have perceived it as pretentiousness, though ostentation is probably closer to the mark. I’m sure you made the connection to the long practice that creates such skill, and by perceiving pretension that person may have revealed that he was missing the point.
My valuation of perhaps unusual vocabulary and phrasing might be seen as pretentious. The literary allusion to The Odyssey might seem pretension. I try to make such things always serve immediate purposes. More I think is out of my control, Plato’s shadow-play over in someone else’s cave than mine. (That last allusion is at least familiar coin in the CSGnet archive.)
This conversation develops better than I imagined, so I am no longer sure that Dag shouldn’t have posted the conversation. It seems to serve as a good start for reflections.
I’d like to contribute to this conversation but I’m not sure I know what Dag is referring to as the “dysfunction” on Discourse. I would appreciate it if someone (preferably Dag, since he brought it up, but anyone will do) would describe it here for us so we know what problem we’re trying to solve.
Best, Rick
Rick, I doubt that you truly lack the perceptual input functions to understand this. If you did, that would be truly alarming.
The PDF is an archive, not a ‘live’ conversation, and three participants in the email are not present. Given that character, and the personal nature of the examples, I think it’s best to identify issues and take them up in distinct topics in this subcategory or possibly elsewhere. I’ve recently done the latter.
One thing that this archive shows, I think, is how perceived personal injury and self-defense (often by counter-offense) has often been a major distraction. A couple of recent posts of mine were intended to open discussion of PCT models of how that works. This is the principled reason for not devolving this into an personal conversation between you and Dag.
I could be wrong.
That’s another principle, too often neglected in the heat of contradiction and perceived injury.
I’m suddenly recogizing an ambiguity that may very well be a root of confusion. In the topic title ‘Troubled Discourse’ and the topic title ‘Discourse dysfunction’ the word ‘discourse’ is ambiguous as to whether it refers to the Discourse platform and conduct in it, or to discourse (small-d) and to conversation in general.
In the historical record that Dag posted, it can only be discourse in general (small d), as exemplified during several decades of CSGnet.
Maybe we can identify characteristics of ‘dysfunction’ in small-d discourse, learn to perceive them clearly in an agreed-upon way, and bring them under collective control. Some have been changing already, maybe because the more clearly structured environment of cap-D Discourse better identifies collectively controllable variables (obviously e.g. staying on topic). My perception is that the kinds of ulterior conflicts that were too frequent in the unstructured email of CSGnet are becoming less frequent and less disruptive since we migrated to the more clearly structured Discourse environment. (This structure will be less obvious to those who only look at email and do not navigate the web interface.) For example, one problem identified in the archive was responding to each paragraph in turn, separately and out of context, without first taking in the whole. I recall the emotional tone of this, for the recipient, as disrespect. Other, less neutral words have been applied. I don’t see that kind of disorganized shoot-from-the-hip style happening here nearly as much. That’s a good change. As usual, I may be wrong. It is impossible to tell if someone has left and only their inactive account remains; no news is no news. A good many people have joined and I assume they are exploring the archives and listening in. I think we had an excellent conference, some of it already reflected here.
In the subcategory ‘Troubled Discourse’ the ambiguity remains. This is a subcategory of the category ‘IAPCT’. The quality of discourse (small d) in the Discourse (cap-D) environment is of concern in our control of the success of IAPCT in its purposes, which we have so far collectively agreed are as follows
The purpose of the corporation is to encourage and support research based on
William T. Powers original perceptual control theory, its continuing development, and its
use as a theory informing a wide range of applications. The corporation promotes
activities such as publishing and conferences in order to disseminate the results of such
work.
(The word ‘original’ is an echo of defenses against Carver & Scheier, Glasser, et al.)
I really have no idea what dysfunction Dag is alluding to. I know he posted some relatively old discussions about problems on CSGNet which centered around me. I thought what Bill said in those posts indicated that he saw things pretty much the same way I did – that I was an easy scapegoat for people who really wanted to bash him – and I thought he handled it rather well in his public and private posts.
But this is now, and apparently Dag doesn’t like the way the discussions on Discourse have been going. I have seen some ugliness in these discussions but it didn’t seem to bother the people in these discussions and I tried to let it role off my back when it was directed at me. So I really don’t know what Dag is talking about.
I can guess at what Dag is concerned about and answer based on that guess. But I think it would make more sense to deal with the problem that Dag (or, frankly, anyone else) sees in the discourse on Discourse.
Instead of focusing on instances of how things can go off the rails (and risking a self-fulfilling prophesy, or the skiier colliding with that tree between the open paths), or trailing off on who’s to blame, I think it’s best to focus on what keeps a conversation in balance.
Conflicts are inevitable, but contention is elective. Bill suggested not sending a potentially contentious response until after reviewing it the next day.
Bill proposed that the issues on CSGnet were about pathological social relationships. OK, so a PCT perspective on relationships is in order.
I quoted Bill Leach (no slouch) about Bill’s ‘expedient teaching’:
… one needs to think about the purpose of one of Bill’s writings before drawing too many conclusions. Especially when answering questions, Bill’s discussion could be using a very narrow (or very broad) meaning for a term depending upon which is more useful for the listener/reader to understand what he was trying to convey. By that I mean that when taken out of context it is also easy to misunderstand what he meant.
Take this as context for contentions around purity of PCT-talk. This amounts to taking observed behavior (the precise words used) to represent intentions (grasp of the concepts behind the words). With equal justification, or lack thereof, the language purist could be accused of not properly understanding PCT. They failed to test to find out what the person is controlling. Is the deficit on the input side (does she not grasp the concepts and recognize instances) or is it in verbal/memory output functions? Does he have the right CVs and reference values but poorly organized output functions for controlling them? Bill often turned attention to nonverbal control of PCT concepts and led from there back into various verbalizations.
In my experience, there was a noxious ‘gotcha!’ flavor to too many CSGnet exchanges. I think that we should avoid adversarial relationships like “obviously you don’t understand PCT because you said that wrong” and instead cultivate collaborative relationships like “I think maybe you’re trying to say this, is this what you want to say?” and expressing it in a way that we perceive as more correct. Not long ago I saw a recollection or a quoted observation that Bill had a way of guiding the conversation even more gently than that (even as disturbances in the Test ought to be gentle nudges), so that his interlocutors eventually arrived at an apt conclusion and then perceived (correctly) that they had arrived at their own conclusion themselves. Very Socratic (without hemlock). There are many examples in his long dialog with Phil Runkel.
In order to do this we have to know what a balanced conversation is. So what is a balanced conversation?
What is the difference between conflict and contention?
Yes, and the same kind of pathological social relationships exist on Discourse. They are reflected most clearly in the ad hominem statements that pop up in these discussions. I thought this was a moderated group so I have been surprised at the amount of ad hominem statements that get through. So either Discourse is not moderated or I just have a different idea about what constitutes an ad hominem statement than the moderator.
I think one reason for having a discussion group like this is to figure out, via back and forth dialog, what the participants in a discussion mean by what they are saying. And, of course, another reason for the group is for participants to see if they agree with what is meant.
The link led me to gmail but there was nothing there.
I think it’s hard to avoid giving that impression in any good scientific debate. Heck, Bill’s publications in Science (1973) and Psych Review (1978) were probably seen as noxious ‘gotcha’s’ by many (most?) scientific psychologists at the time. There might be a way to “tone down” the rebuttals in these debates. But I think the only way to overcome this “gotcha” problem is for the discussants to develop a more tolerant attitude toward each other. If, for example, one catches oneself saying “The problem with you is that you just won’t admit that you’re wrong” it’s probably a sign that it’s time to try to start developing such an attitude, possibly by reconsidering the importance of “winning” the debate.
I think the debates on Discourse are inevitable. But they are conflicts so they can get quite heated. I think they are also very useful – I believe debate is essential to scientific progress. I think the trick to making these debates both useful and civil is to develop the ability to oppose ideas while not opposing the person proposing them. Sort of like “hate the behavior but love the child”.
Perhaps this is the difference between conflict and contention. On Discourse, conflict is (or should be) a good, solid debate about ideas; contention is a debate about characteristics of the people involved in the conflict. So my proposal for the solution to Discourse dysfunction is for a moderator or, if there is no moderator, for the Discourse community to call out instances of ad hominem debate when it occurs.
Best, Rick
My bad. I linked to the email from Discourse rather than to the topic in DIscourse. The link above is fixed. It just points to the source of the quote from Bill Leach.
Yes, I agree. Also the converse: “The problem with you is that you just won’t admit that I’m right.” Part of this is not tolerance so much as curiosity about what they intended by the words they used.
Debates and conflicts are inevitable. That they get ‘heated’ is not. What are the differences between a cool and hot debate? Which of these differences advance science? What is ‘heat’ in a debate? My sense of what ‘heat’ means here is the expression of aggression, frustration, anger, and the like. When you say debates can get heated, do you mean something other than that? Aggression can take the form of ridicule, misquotation or misleading quotation out of context, seeming paraphrase to a form that can be trivialized, and so on. It can be couched in deniable form. These are all breaches of trust and good faith. The juiciest examples are on display among our politicians.
Yes! But I’d avoid the parent-child relationship perception. The sin/sinner version has problems too, though I’m sure Augustine meant well.
A good start, I agree. I think the differences are more involved. For example, one can contend to win without getting ‘heated’ and arguing ad hominem. One can be in conflict while collaborating to resolve the conflict and move on to longer-term goals.
The vast majority of conflicts that we encounter, we resolve easily scant if any awareness. We both approach a doorway from opposite sides, one waits briefly, or more rarely (e.g. in an emergency situation) both turn sideways and brush by each other. For each, contesting who goes first would delay reaching their destination, and they control reaching their destination with higher gain than being King of the Road.
Contention is when at least one party in a conflict controls winning the conflict with high gain. Here is where it gets more complicated. DIverse variables can be controlled by winning conflicts. It may become important to enter into conflicts in order to control those ulterior CVs, which possibly are not consciously acknowledged. A person who is involved in a lot of conflicts may have more than the pursuit of science at stake.
I well remember a wise principle of science that I learned from two great scientists independently and twenty years apart, Zellig Harris and Bill Powers. A scientist must first do his or her best by every imaginable means to disprove the favored conjecture or hypothesis or model. This is the basis for scientific collaboration. Willingness to be wrong is that fundamental. When you enlist colleagues to collaborate in this challenge process, good, productive debates ensue, and the conflicts in those debates are conflicts of ideas, not of persons.
However, when we lose sight of that principle and defend our favored ideas by every means imaginable, the debated conflicts go off the rails and into conflict of persons. This abandonment of the basis of collaboration evokes emotions such as disappointment, annoyance, impatience, infuriation, and disgust. Heat indeed!
There are members who experience that kind of heat as unsafe. They go away, or they lurk without actively participating, or with some luck they may find a safe corner of the forum to work with like-minded peers. I know from direct testimony that this perception of safety is why we have so few women involved with PCT.
The latter. “The Discourse community” means collective control by all the members. Everyone has perceptions of what it is to converse in a collaborative, professional way. It doesn’t matter if those perceptions are not perfectly identical (harder to gauge the higher in the hierarchy they are), and the gain of control surely varies. And everyone is able to resist disturbances to control of those perceptions in one way or another. For example, one can
- Post a private message to an individual.
- Reply to a post that concerns them.
- Post a topic about the issue in the Troubled discourse category.
- Flag a post that is disturbing. This post says the purpose of the flagging mechanism is “for the community to be able to protect itself from the worst users, even without a moderator present” by putting enough flags on the topic. (How many depends on the DIscourse-assigned trust level of the flaggers.)
- Several people were assigned the moderator role when the forum was created. They will get a message about the flag, and will be able to take any of the above actions to alert the community, if so moved.
I doubt this list is exhaustive. What other means can we identify?
Relying on everyone to engage in collective control is an act of trust. Without that trust there is no community.
Rick,
I have the impression that the “dysfunction” in Discourse was used as a reaction to the personally attacking language used in a number of posts by a person who has since been disbarred from participating on Discourse.
Rich
Rich
The only difference is that at least two people actually said “The problem with you is that you just won’t admit that you’re wrong” to me in these discussions and I don’t recall anyone saying the converse.
I think a good heated debate that advances science is one where the “heat” consists of lots of facts, models and clear prose explanations of the logic behind the arguments.
Those emotions are inevitable in any conflict. But when one starts to feel inclined to deal with these emotions using the nuclear option – ad hominem attacks – it’s time to go up a level and turn down the heat.
Yes, when a person feels inclined to use those forms of aggression – particularly ridicule, which is an ad hominem attack – the debate has heated up in what I would consider a very unpleasant way. But intent is important. It’s very easy to mistakenly attribute intent when there was none. I’ve been accused of intentionally doing many of the things on your list – ridicule, misquotation or misleading quotation out of context, seeming paraphrase to a form that can be trivialized – when I didn’t intend to do them. A good way to avoid adding the wrong kind of heat to a conflict is to avoid assuming intent.
But I think ad hominem comments, intended or not, should be penalized in some way. Such comments will almost always add unwanted heat to the conflict. They can be fairly easily recognized because they find fault with the person advancing some argument rather than the argument itself. For example, saying "“The problem with you is that you just won’t admit that you are wrong (or that I am right)” is ad hominem since it is claiming a problem with the person advancing an argument rather than with the argument itself.
I agree. A good way to do this is to discuss with the aim of teaching/learning rather than winning.
Just because it appears to you that a person is controlling with higher gain than another doesn’t mean that the high gain person is controlling to “win”. Nor does it mean that the apparently less high gain person is not controlling to “win”.
But even if the high gain person is controlling to win and the low gain person isn’t, and even if the high gain person has ulterior motives (which, of course, they would; in PCT; ulterior motives are called higher level goals) I don’t see that this would necessarily result in Discourse dysfunction. If it is done w/o rancor or ad hominem attacks I think it would be exactly the kind of discussion we want on Discourse.
I couldn’t agree more. And I’ve been trying to enlist colleagues to join in my now 40 + year effort to disprove PCT by testing its predictions (so far, so good). That’s why I wrote The Study of Living Control Systems. It describes how to do research to test various predictions of PCT.
I think you might be talking about me in the power law debate. So, as I suspected, the “Discourse dysfunction” that you perceive comes not from ad hominem attacks (I know this because the many ad hominem attacks on me have been ignored) but because I argue forcefully for my position (probably one you disagree with) “using every means imaginable”.
But perhaps you didn’t notice that I was not doing this on my own. It takes two (or more) to be in a conflict and, as I recall, those debating with me were arguing pretty forcefully for their position as well and using several means that I hadn’t imagined, such as saying: that nothing but s**t comes out of my mouth, that I’m a sloppy researcher not worth referencing and that I don’t know physics so I couldn’t possibly be right, all excellent examples of ad hominem attacks.
So is it really just me who is responsible for the perceived dysfunction on Discourse?
I don’t know why you think the heat of the conflict should particularly affect women. But I’m sorry if anyone feels unsafe about entering into the discussions on Discourse. I can imagine that entering some discussions, like the one about the power law, would be particularly scary to many people since it’s pretty specialized stuff and rather technical.
Nevertheless, I have tried to write my posts about the power law in a way that might be of interest to a non-specialist who is just interested in learning PCT (the power law being a good example of an irrelevant side effect of control being taken for a controlled result). And I have tried to keep the heat down in that discussion by avoiding in kind reactions to ad hominem comments and by making my replies substantive and, hopefully, informative. I’m sure I could have done a better job but, then, so could my opponents.
If you are using “collective control” to refer to the kind of control going on in Kent’s model, then I think the people posting to Discourse (not those who are just reading the posts) are already doing collective control. Presumably they are all controlling nearly the same perception when they post – the level of collaborative/ professionalism of their posts. And all those who post are acting to control this variable by the way they say what they mean to say in their posts. And they are all controlling this variable relative to different reference levels.
So the level of collaborative/ professionalism that you see on Discourse – the level that you see as dysfunction – is the virtual reference state of the level of collaborative/ professionalism being collectively controlled on Discourse relative to different references. If you want to decrease the level of dysfunction you see on Discourse you have to either persuade those with a low reference for collaborative/ professionalism to lower their output gain (which can be lowered to 0 by not allowing them to post at all) or increase their reference for collaborative/ professionalism.
But even if you could persuade people to do this, you will only be changing the virtual reference state of collaborative/ professionalism, so many (or all) of those participating in Discourse discussions will still find the dysfunction on the net (the virtual level of collaborative/ professionalism) to be unacceptable.
“All (intentional) behaviour is to control some perception”. I know that’s not a exact quote, but it is the general nature of PCT in any of its forms, whether they would have been approved by Powers or not. This being so, I’m wondering how one can interpret a statement that some actions of appreciable complexity are performed without intent. Are they the results of random noise in the neural system?
Rich, the person you refer to isn’t mentioned in that archival PDF because he came into the picture later. The dates of email in the PDF are between 2005 and 2010. The discussion refers mainly to CSGnet email from its inception about 1990, and somewhat to conferences and other communications during that period. Boris joined CSGnet in 2007. I suppose he could have come up because of his CSGnet activities in 2009 and 2010, but there was no particular reason for Bill and Dag to talk about whatever is going on with him, which as a new phenomenon surely was even more puzzling then than it is now.
Boris’s posts to CSGnet and to Discourse do include disturbances to good scientific discussion or debate. I guess it’s worth a summarizing review ‘for the record’. I will will try to say nothing that might be construed as criticizing or insulting, though of course that’s (nominally) 50% in the eye of the reader.
I had a number of email conversations with Boris. He told me that his first contact with Bill was in 1999. His initial introduction to PCT was Kent’s 1994, 1996, and 1998 presentations, I guess in 1999, possibly 1998. He told me that he “needed some years to get through Bill’s books with their “heavy” terminology” and that “Kent’s literature was much easier to read and understand PCT.” He said that he had only occasional contacts with Bill after 1999, and that “Our relation went wrong when I proposed ‘arrow’ from genetic source to intrinsic variables.” That occurred in a CSGnet conversation with Bill in August 2009 in reference to Fig. 14.1 in B:CP. He said he joined CSGnet in 2007.
The relevant portion of Fig. 14.1 is below. ‘Neural or chemical signals’ from the somatic branch are transformed by an input function into ‘intrinsic perceptual signals’. In a comparator, these are compared to ‘intrinsic reference signals’ originating in the ‘genetic source’, yielding ‘intrinsic error signals’. Their only effect, through the output function, is to alter the organization of the HPCT hierarchy. Fig. 14.1 has no arrows from above down into the ‘intrinsic quantities’, only arrows coming upward from them to the input function for that comparator.
In the first post of a CSGnet thread under the subject heading ‘Re: memory’ in August 1999, Bill was reconsidering the role of homeostatic systems, control systems in the somatic branch of the hierarchy. After sending a reply privately to Warren Mansell, he decided to send a copy of it “to CSGnet because this is a major reorganization of my thinking about the reorganizing system.” This was a recognition that the output based on intrinsic error should complete a control loop through the intrinsic quantities sensed in the somatic branch, as well as causing reorganization when the intrinsic error is not reduced.
Boris claims that this change was his idea. In a note affixed to Dag’s revision of Figure 14.1, he said that Bill requested this change in a CSGnet post of 20 August 2009:
He does not say from whom Bill requested that change.
In his 8/20/2009 post, Bill provided this diagram:
About this diagram, Bill said
Boris is very familiar with homeostatic systems. I don’t think he quarreled with Bill’s description (though it’s sometimes hard to tell), so I don’t think he meant that an arrow should go directly from the genetic source to the intrinsic somatic quantities, bypassing the homeostatic systems, though a reader might come away with that interpretation.
Dag pointed out that plural arrows would be appropriate, and stood ready to provide the revised figure below once Bill’s thinking about it had stablilized. At that point, Bill referred to his communications with Alice; maybe another revision of B:CP was in the air. Maybe Boris is referring to that offer as a ‘request for a change’ to the diagram. Here’s Dag’s revision.
From Boris’s commentaries about it, one might get the impression that this is a diagram that Boris created and gave to Bill.
Bill’s post of 20 August is here in the midst of the ‘Re: memory’ email thread from 17-25 August 2009. On any reading of this thread it is evident that their “relation went wrong” by the end of it. In it, Bill (and Dag) also showed that Bill had thought of these ideas two years before, in 2007, but had set them aside.
This discussion of a change in Bill’s conception of the reorganization system is intrinsically an important reference, but also more narrowly this thread is worth reading through in its entirety as context for Boris’s perpetual complaints about his ideas being stolen from him.