That’s actually what I have been endeavoring to do in our present conversation, Rick. Maybe it’s difficult for you to perceive because of the absence of blame, and because of our success, so far, in avoiding disputatious argument.
As I said before, conflict is inevitable, contention is elective. When higher-level systems control to resolve conflict with minimal disturbance to control of other CVs, contention is not a necessary consequence of conflict.
You have previously advanced this guess about Dag’s intentions, and I still believe as I said then that you are mistaken. I alluded to the context of his work as archivist at the time that he came across this collection of email as sufficient explanation without any need for adducing additional motivation. An appeal to Ockham’s razor may not be very convincing, however, and unless we find and carry out some way of Testing what Dag was controlling at that time your allegation is unproven.
Please note the rhetorical effect of the shift I made from “guess” to “allegation”. The first word has associations specifically within the methodology of Testing for controlled variables; the second has associations with adversarial legal disputes. I do not intend those allusions seriously (though it is possible that they ring true for you, and that would be for you to say). I’m pointing out this example of my equivocal language use as context for a discussion of rhetoric later in this post. For our present PCT discussion I should have stuck with more disciplined PCT terminology.
An LPT analysis of those exchanges might be useful, but not with the presupposition that one participant was The Cause of ‘dysfunction’. As Bill said in the PDF archive from a decade or two ago, ‘it takes two to tango’ (two or more).
As I recall the power law exchange over the past five or more years, several people said there is a mathematical blunder in the paper that you co-authored, referring to principles of mathematics, and you maintained that there was no mathematical error because the formulation was essentially the same as that in a prior publication that you cited, Maoz et al (2005).
Concurrently, you maintained that the quasi-regularity known as the ‘power law’ is an incidental side effect of control and therefore not worthy of PCT investigation in its own right. Their reply (as I recall understanding) was that this must be demonstrated by (a) correct mathematics accounting for (b) data understood by researchers as representing the ‘power law’, the latter point being the reason that those data are worthy of PCT investigation, the former being requisite to such investigation.
Impatience escalated from that impasse.
In my wife’s family there was a maxim that one should never argue about matters of fact. Find out what the facts are, then argue about their interpretation and application if you must. The matters of fact can only be addressed when all parties put them in commensurate terms. The appeal to authority (Maoz et al 2005) did not address the mathematical critique in commensurate terms
There are other matters of fact that remain unremarked, so far as I recall. Maoz et al summarize that by prior researchers the power law is “generally attributed either to smoothness in hand- or joint-space or to the result of mechanisms that damp noise inherent in the motor system to produce the smooth trajectories evident in healthy human motion.” However, their concern is “that white Gaussian noise also obeys this power-law” and that researchers should exercise due “caution when running experiments aimed at verifying the power-law or assuming its underlying existence without proper analysis of the noise” and they propose “that the power-law might be derived […] from the correlated noise which is inherent in this motor system.” That this is the central thrust of their paper may be relevant to any appeal to the authority of their mathematical treatment.
(I question their assumption of “noise inherent in the motor system” and the presupposition which I take to be behind it, that smoothing this is the prime function of the cerebellum, but this concern isn’t specifically germane to the point here.)
More than that I think I can’t say about the Power Law dispute, and if I’ve mischaracterized it then those who know better than I can fix these descriptions if they are useful enough to be worth fixing.
Aside from ad verecundiam there are many other examples of questionable rhetoric in the CSGnet record, where the aim may be to achieve debating points or ‘zingers’, or even just to display a flashy turn of phrase. These can be entertaining if no one takes them seriously, but instead they too often distract from serious working-out of substantive differences in commensurate terms. It’s easy to find examples, Erling touched on a few instances in August of 2018. However innocently you may intend such flourishes, perhaps as verbal fun, they often are perceived by others as snide, supercilious, demeaning, dismissive, snarky, sarcastic … but most importantly as failing to address whatever substantive issue is at hand. They are not effective expressions of curiosity seeking to determine what the other person is trying to say, perhaps not in just the way that you or I might prefer to say it. It is my glad observation that in recent years you have been getting much better at reining in this kind of display.
As I said at the top, I’ve identified and tried to sidestep a number of instances of this sort, or what I have perceived as such, in the course of this current conversation.
I may be hypervigilant about this because of how the ‘main stream’ of my field, beginning in the 1960s, was led off into a swamp of quasi-religious polemic by facile debaters who apparently believe that scientists arrive at truth by winning arguments.