Discourse dysfunction

IAPCT Troubled discourse
52

It’s difficult for me to perceive “specific examples of what people said and how people reacted to what was said that created this dysfunction” because none have been posted. And we may have avoided disputatious arguments but we are certainly engaged in an argument. I am arguing that an argument becomes “disputatious” (heated) when it is peppered with ad hominem comments. By that definition this has not been a disputatious argument because I have resisted replying in a heated manner to your ad hominem comments. I didn’t because I knew that you probably don’t even perceive them as ad hominem and therefore didn’t intend them as such.

An example of an ad hominem comment is your answer to my comment above. I said that “I don’t see how it’s possible to reduce the purported dysfunction of discussions on Discourse without seeing specific examples of dysfunction-causing dialog”. Instead of answering this comment directly – by giving some examples of dysfunction-causing dialog or explaining why such examples are not necessary – you said “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”.

Do you not see that this is an ad hominem reply? Perhaps the ad hominem (and hurtful) nature of the comment would be more obvious to you if you were on the receiving end of it. You are saying that I might not be able to see the obviously correct answer to my comment because of a personal failing in me – my desire to see blame and disputatious argument.

Indeed, this whole thread started with an ad hominem comment from you. I had said:

And you replied:

This is ad hominem because, again, rather than answering a straightforward question you are commenting on something about me. The implication is that I’m just a mischievous guy who knows the answer to my question and was asking it just to be a provocateur. In fact, I didn’t know the answer (and still don’t) and was only trying to “provoke” an answer.

At this point you do exactly what I ask! Thank you! Here are the two things that you say I did to cause the dysfunction in the Power Law discussion:

“appeal to authority (Maoz et al 2005) that did not address the mathematical critique in commensurate terms”

" other matters of fact that remain unremarked"

In other words, I caused dysfunction by not making my case about the power law to your satisfaction.

Yes, you have mischaracterized it but that’s beside the point. The point is that the “dysfunctional” things you say I did are the kind of things that happen all the time in scientific discussions. In the discussions here on Discourse Bill Powers is regularly appealed to as an authority on PCT and the factual basis of many of the authoritative claims that are made here are often left unremarked,

As I said, people, including you Bruce, are always appealing to the authority of Powers here on PCT, which is fine since Bill is certainly the authority. But my reference to Maoz et al (2005) was not an appeal to authority. I had already shown many times that there was no mistake in my derivation of the mathematical relationship between velocity and curvature. I referred to Maoz et al to show that some of the leading figures in power law research had discovered the same thing we did, well before we did. By saying that my reference to Maoz et al was ad verecundiam (an appeal to authority) you are violating your own caveat about jumping to conclusions about what a person intends based on their overt behavior.

I don’t see what the problem was in the interchange with Erling. I wasn’t trying to be flashy or score points. I said only that the power law is, in fact, an irrelevant side effect of control. I demonstrated that in my publications on the power law with modeling, just as Erling suggested. I don’t see how my side of the interaction could be considered dysfunctional. Nor was Erling’s, though I think he could have done without implying that my analysis of the power law was “hubris”, unless he meant that it is hubris from the point of view of power law researchers.

Based on the interaction with Erling it seems to me that what is perceived by others as my being snide, supercilious, demeaning, dismissive, snarky, and sarcastic is just me disagreeing with them in as polite a way as possible.

Thanks, but I can’t see that any of the specific examples of my contributing dysfunction to discussion on Discourse are anything other than me disagreeing strongly with what you and others say relevant to PCT. To the extent that I have made comments that could be construed as ad hominem, I will try to stop that. But as long as people keep saying things that I see as being wrong about PCT I will continue to argue against them, as substantively and as politely as possible.

I dislike the idea that the goal of science is to arrive at truth and I certainly dislike the idea that that can be done by winning arguments though “facile debate”. I think science is an approach to the best understanding of how the world works and that the best way to do that is by testing models against data. That doesn’t necessarily win arguments but it’s the best way to try.

I believe that the best way to reduce the perceived dysfunction of discussions on Discourse is to hold people accountable when they post comments that appear to be ad hominem. You don’t have to blame anyone. Just politely say (in public) something like “What you just posted [quoted here] could be taken as being ad hominem. Did you intend it that way? If so, it would be nice if you could apologize and try not to do it again. Thank you.”.

Best, Rick

53

I think I see another difference of perception that is clouding our communication here. It may be that you think of ‘dysfunction’ as a state or condition involving personal attack, name-calling, etc.

I arrive at this because you are using the Latin label ad hominem only in the sense of ‘ad hominem attack’, meaning name-calling, etc. Vituperative personal attacks result from a process of deterioration in communication. In my view, the ‘dysfunction’ is in that process, of which the extreme manifestations are a symptom.

Personal attacks are ad hominem, but not all ad hominem arguments involve personal attack. The familiar phrase “consider the source” encapsulates the meaning. When our local representatives to the Massachusetts legislature supported a bill affecting the salaries of state senators and representatives, some people responded “of course they’d support an increase to their own salaries”. That’s an ad hominem argument. It distracts from the substance of the debate. It has some validity, but only to the extent that the implied presupposition (“they’re doing this to enrich themselves”) becomes part of the substantive content of discussion.

An ad hominem argument is an objectionable fallacy because it does not respond to the substance of the issue. It may allude to relevant matters of substance, but if it does then those matters need to be substantively stated. The ad hominem argument doesn’t do that. In the example, Dylan Fernandez and Julian Cyr patiently explained that it was an adjustment for travel expenses, it affected only the relative minority outside Boston and its exurbs, and had been proposed by legislators out in Western MA, but yes they did indeed support it, don’t you?

Paul Grahame put this in a “hierarchy of disagreement” (resembling Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg
Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg1061×795 90.1 KB

I’m concerned that you felt hurt by some things I wrote, and you’re right, it was not my intent that you should feel hurt. But if I am correct about a difference in perception of ‘dysfunction’ (the topic under discussion), I invite you to reconsider what I wrote in the context of my perception of ‘dysfunction’. To recap, it seems to me that for you the dysfunction is the occurrence of personal attacks, whereas for me the dysfunction is in the communication processes that can lead (and have led) to the bottom five layers of Grahame’s pyramid, with personal attacks at the bottom extreme.

I have said that there are many obvious examples in Dag’s PDF and in the course of this conversation. You have said no, there are no examples. I said “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.” Can you see that here I was beginning to suspect a difference in perception, and that you couldn’t perceive these as examples of dysfunction because they didn’t involve personal attacks and insults? Can you see that this was intended as a gentle inquiry about how you were perceiving things? I didn’t express it very well, because my perception of the difference was in process of development.

If the ad hominem argument is made impolitely or as a personal attack, or anything in between, that’s an expression of the fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops that generate somatic arousal and emotions. These surely contribute to the process of communicative dysfunction that can lead to personal attacks and other symptoms of that process at its extremes.

Naming these somatic and emotional concomitants of the discussion and talking about them results in their having less influence upon what we say and how we say it. “Wow, I felt hurt and angry when you said ____.” (I have several times posted a reference to fMRI research supporting this description of a communicative act that is available to us.) It also gives the other person the opportunity to state their intention behind what was perceived as hurtful. For example, I did not intend to say or imply that you are cognitively defective, but I was genuinely flummoxed to understand why you were not perceiving what to me seem to be obvious examples of communicative dysfunction, identified and discussed as such. It would have been really helpful to me if you had talked about the disturbance at the time, and asked me if that was my intention.

I am glad to see your agreement with this principle:

Sterling! With the proviso that to keep our scientific discussions ‘functional’ and avoid communicative ‘dysfunction’ we need to have in mind the entire gamut of Grahame’s hierarchy and not just the bottom two levels, ad hominem argument and its extreme form, personal attack (‘name-calling’). I couldn’t agree more with the template (if you will) of identifying an annoyance and asking about intention at the time that we feel annoyed.

In fact, I propose that the annoyed person should identify not only the disturbance but also what CVs of theirs are being disturbed. When this obligation is neglected we go down a level (in MoL terms), and that contributes to the discussion going downhill from there. Undeclared and unrecognized CVs may otherwise be known as ulterior motives and unconscious motives, respectively. Their inaccessibility can make resolution of a conflict inaccessible (just as in MoL). To identify the CVs that are being disturbed we have to experience those CVs from a level above them. We can even consider whether CVs at that higher level are also being disturbed. Imagine that!

54

Yes, I think we are talking about somewhat different things in this discussion of “Discourse dysfunction”.

I think personal attacks are actions aimed at protecting a controlled variable from disturbance. They are inappropriate actions from the point of view of people like me who are controlling for avoiding that kind of action but, inappropriate or not, they are actions that will be used when the controller knows no other way to counter the disturbance or is not controlling for avoiding that kind of action.

I think that is only true when the “source” of what is perceived as an ad hominem argument is intentionally trying to make such an argument. I think the best approach is to assume that what appear to be ad hominem comments were not done intentionally.

Yes, and probably intentionally so.

Actually, in this case I would say that it does respond to the substance of the issue, which was the appropriateness of a self-given pay raise, so I think it was reasonable to consider the possibility that the pay raise might have been due to personal greed.

Good on them. Seems like a nice, decent way to deal with it. It’s good that they didn’t get all insulted and angry but, instead, explained the actual reason for the pay raise – or what they said was the actual reason, anyway.

As I said, I knew it was not intended and the hurt was very mild. I let those things slid off me, even if I think they were intended (like when Adam said that only s**t comes out of my mouth).

Yes, it seems that way to me too.

Sure. But it’s really hard not to see it as also ad hominem in the personal attack sense. Why not just deal with your question straight up? Show me one of the obvious (to you) examples from Dag’s PDF of one off my ad hominem communications that didn’t involve personal attacks and see if I consider it dysfunctional.

There is no such thing as “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” in PCT. There are just control loops. And when two loops are controlling the same or a similar variable relative to different references you get accelerating conflict that is limited only by the output capabilities of the two systems or by the intervention of another control system that dismantles one or both of the control systems involved in the conflict.

It sounds to me like what you’re saying is that a person making ad hominem arguments without personal attacks will disturb a variable that another person is controlling, causing them to counter the disturbance with a stronger, personal attack argument which will disturb the variable being controlled by the person who made the non-personal attack ad hominem arguments resulting in their coming back with an even stronger personal attack, and so on. And you want to nip this vicious cycle in the bud by eliminating the original, non-personal attack ad hominem arguments. Is that it?

And I was genuinely flummoxed to understand why virtually everyone in the power law discussion was not perceiving what to me seemed to be an obvious example of a behavioral illusion. I think the parties to an argument are always genuinely flummoxed to understand why their opponent(s) are not perceiving what is obvious to them. I think the best way to deal with this is to not worry about why they are flummoxed and just try to address their flummox itself. I think telling people why you think they are flummoxed is just a way to exacerbate the conflict.

Only the bottom 3 levels of the Graham hierarchy describe what I would call dysfunctional ways of doing scientific arguments. I would include the 4th level from the bottom (“States opposing case with little or no evidence”) as well, but it seems to me that there could be a lot of disagreement about what constitutes “evidence” so I’d just let it slide.

I think those things are pretty obvious in any substantive scientific discussion. The only time someone doesn’t identify what disturbed a CV is when they blame the disturbance on the source (the person who said something that was a disturbance). What makes an argument a disturbance is when it “pushes” a controlled variable from it’s reference. I am blaming the disturbance on the source (rather than on the fact that I am controlling a particular variable) if I say something like “You are purposefully misinterpreting me” rather than "What you say misses my point (my CV which is the meaning I am controlling for) and it does so in this way (it is a disturbance because…).

While I think it would be nice to have everyone state their ulterior motives, I think it’s highly unlikely that most people really know what they are or, if they do, that they would be willing to reveal them.

Discourse is a forum for scientific discussion, not therapy sessions. And scientific discussions involve conflict, which are debates about which of several conflicting explanations of observed phenomena is the best. These debates should ideally be resolved by tests of models against data. But that’s the ideal. Scientists are people and people have ulterior motives – Bill Powers called them agendas – and these motives will affect a scientist’s willingness to accept the results of tests.

So scientific debates can get pretty heated even if they are very substantive and there are no personal attacks. I think this was true of the power law debate; except for a few slips into personal attacks, I think it was a very substantive and useful debate. It certainly was for me; I learned a lot, had fun developing the spreadsheets to collect the data and test the models and got three publications out of it! But I can see how onlookers who are not familiar with the topic or are new to PCT might have been turned off by it. I hope they don’t go away because of it.

Best, Rick

55

Would you be interested in inquiring what I meant by that? Or is it enough to dismiss it as having no place in a PCT discussion? With the possible inference that I’m a pretty stupid guy to use such language here.

56

Of course I would. Please do. And would you be interested in knowing what I meant (actually, what I intended to mean) by my comment on “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops”? If inquiring about what people meant by each post is the way to avoid dysfunction in a discussion then it must apply to everyone involved in the discussion, right?

I certainly didn’t intend it to mean that I dismiss your “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” comment as having no place in PCT discussion. And I’m sorry that you took it be a suggestion that you were stupid to use such language. In fact, I think that you are very smart. Indeed, like everyone else in this discussion group, much smarter than I am.

But I’ll be happy to explain why I replied to your comment about “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” the way I did either before or after you explain what you meant by it, whatever you think is appropriate.

Best, Rick

57

Did I say something that suggests that I’m exempting myself? I’m not.

But there is an overgeneralization in your presupposition. I do not propose that we must inquire what each post means. The opportunity to inquire comes up when we disagree with something specific within a post.

When I disagree with something you say, the disagreement is usually with what I think you mean. The inquiry is to verify whether what I think you mean is in fact what you mean. Substantive disagreement is about the perceptions that the sender wants the recipient to control. We could elaborate that in technical terms, but that would be a tedious recitation of recursive control loops which has been done by others much better than I could do here. I think you know what I mean by substantive disagreement.

There is another kind of disagreement, about the form of a communication rather than about the intended substance. It’s important to have agreed-upon ways of talking about the objects and relations of our subject-matter. Every technical field, and especially every field and subfield of science, imposes constraints on word-combinings in addition to the constraints that constitute common usage of the given language. Technically, this is called a sublanguage. The sublanguage phenomenon has a formal definition. I see three classes of people who may lapse from the technical sublanguage of PCT into common usage (or may appear to do so). Some people may do this because they don’t yet understand control or PCT as an explanation of control; some because they haven’t yet mastered the technical sublanguage. Thirdly, experts may do so (Bill often did) when communicating with people in those two classes.

Confusion of these two kinds of disagreement, as well as efforts to clarify what is and is not in the sublanguage of PCT, contributed to what I called verbal sclerosis.

As above, disagreement about the form of communication (the correctness of the language) is much less disruptive if the first step upon disagreeing is to inquire curiously into what the sender intended us to perceive, however unskillfully they expressed it. Instruction about the specialized sublanguage of PCT can then be effective, but without that first inquiry into the substance the challenge to the form becomes its own distracting subject matter, and often is resisted as disturbances to the person’s mastery of our common language.

So we have two questions about intended meaning before us. You have said that I got your intended meaning wrong, so let’s start there.

Really? You said there’s no such thing, there are only control loops.

How is that anything other than a dismissal? What did you intend me to understand when you said this? I’m obviously missing something important.

You then went on to talk about conflict between control loops. You said that conflict is limited only in two ways, by the output capacities of the conflicting loops, or if a higher-level loop dismantles one or both of the conflicting loops. Does ‘dismantling’ refer to reorganization? If so, I think ‘dismantling’ is just one way a higher system can intervene. That should lead into a good on-topic discussion, but please let’s defer that discussion for a bit (best in a different topic) and clear up these two questions. I’ll answer your question next.

58

No, and I didn’t ask because I thought you were. Rather, I asked because I wanted to make it clear to anyone who might be listening in on this conversation that this is what you are proposing: that all parties to conversations on Discourse should always be inquiring about what each other means.

It seems to me that even limiting inquiries about what a person means to when there is disagreement with something specific in a post would make discussions tedious and ungainly. Wouldn’t it just be easier to reduce the (purported) dysfunction on Discourse by making it a rule that ad hominem comments are not allowed and enforcing that rule?

But I seem to disagree with you here so maybe I should just ask what you mean.

I disagree with this too. What do you mean by substantive disagreement? How do you know when you are having one? That is, how do you know when it’s time to stop asking “what do you mean”?

As I said, it’s not a dismissal of your “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” comment as having no place in PCT discussion. My comment is a correction, not a dismissal. Your comment certainly has a place in PCT discussion because it is something that is often said about the behaviors you name. Fight, flight, fawn and flee are descriptions of behaviors. PCT explains these behaviors as the observed side effects of controlling perceptions: perceptions of things like defending against and producing hits, increasing distance from an opponent, getting a kindly demeanor from the opponent and, again, swiftly increasing distance from an opponent, respectively.

Yes, because I wanted to briefly note that those observed behaviors – fight, flight, fawn and flee – are observed side effects of conflict between control loops.

OK, over to you.

Best, Rick

59

Yes, the proposal that we should verify what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree applies to everyone, and in particular anything I propose I should apply to myself.

However, “always” is an overgeneralization. Next step is trivialization. I’m not saying that you intend to trivialize this principle. It’s an effect of the overgeneralizing.

“Inquiring about what people meant by each post” is recursive with no limit. Inquiring what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree is not recursive and ends when the other person agrees that we have understood. That’s the answer to your question

A number of your other questions can be paraphrased, I think, as What is an agreement? How do we perceive agreement? I’m setting aside the paragraphs that I drafted while thinking about those questions because in this context we can rely upon a lifetime of experience reaching agreements with others (or not) and abiding by them (or not). It’s a worthy topic for the Collective Phenomena category, and for research into collective control. Here, it’s a distraction.

Our topic is discourse dysfunction, including
I posit that disagreement, conflict, and contention always precede the discourse dysfunction that is our topic here. Controlling to correct things we disagree with establishes and strengthens conflict and is by definition disagreeable. Controlling to establish agreements is inherently more agreeable than controlling to correct things we disagree with.

When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to conflict is to tell them they’re wrong and correct what they said.

When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to agreement is to paraphrase what they said, clearly expressing the parts that you don’t like, and ask if that’s what they really intended to say.

You have provided an example. When I asked what you meant you explained that you were correcting me for naming the behaviors fight, flight, fawn and flee without saying that they are the observed side effects of controlling perceptions.

Suppose the dialog had instead gone like this:

rsmarken:
It sounds like you’re talking about the conventional categories describing observed behavioral actions, without referring to the control loops that produce those appearances.

If you had formulated your response that way, you might have noticed that actually I did refer to the control loops that produce those behavioral manifestations. If you had read the prior discussions of the model of emotion, you might have remembered the use of the phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” and recognized this as a reference to that model. You might even have remembered where I said this a few weeks ago:

I wonder, did your control for correcting things you disagree with result in your reading only the disagreeable phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee”, rather than the entire phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops that generate somatic arousal and emotions”? It appears that way to me.

Now let me critique a reply of my own …

… in retrospect I think I should have stopped with just the first sentence. The second sentence depends upon an assumption as to what you meant. The third was to alert you to potential side effects of the sort that have irritated people in the past. Too much in one bundle, too distracting. Better to keep it simple and direct.

60

There’s a smidge of missing text in the emailed copy of this reply. I’ve fixed it in Discourse. This is not the first time that I accidentally had the Ctrl key down when I pressed Enter.

Cautionary note: Ctrl-Enter (or Alt-S) sends your reply.

61

I am always controlling to establish agreement with others in my discussions on Discourse. But those others keep disagreeing with me, sometimes rather rudely, and then, to add insult to injury, they blame me for the contention and rudeness on Discourse. Go figure?

But perhaps you know how I could have better handled my attempts to establish agreement. For example, I was unable to get anyone to agree with me that the power law is an excellent example of a behavioral illusion; that it is an irrelevant side effect of control that appears to tell us something about how curved movement is produced, but doesn’t. Was there some way I could have handled it so that we could all have come to agreement about that?

Best, Rick

62

I don’t remember anyone disagreeing that the common experimental finding of a power law relating curvature to along-track velocity is not a controlled variable. I think most were (and are) in agreement that it is a side-effect of controlling something. Side-effects are not behavioural illusions, by the way.

63

Yes, non sequitur is another invalid argument form that is liable to annoy others who are controlling participation in a collaborative conversation. You’ve just provided an example. You didn’t respond to the content, you didn’t acknowledge a direct question, much less answer it, and you changed the subject.

There are examples in the exchange about the ‘power law’. I won’t take sides on the substantial matter of fact, whether or not your math was correct. I will sketch my impression of the form of the argument, with some tests as to whether my perceptions there are accurate.

As I recall, you assume that the power law is a side effect of control, since as a prima faciae matter of principle what else could it be. The others accepted your assumption.

They added, however, the caveat that this had not actually been demonstrated, and that to demonstrate it requires identifying the CVs, testing and measuring experimentally, and creating generative models that produce the power law with the kinds and degrees of approximateness that is observed in nature.

You asserted that a mathematical formulation of the power law alone demonstrates that the appearance of the power law is a side effect of control.

They asserted that your formulation is mathematically incorrect.

You denied that your math is flawed.

One non sequitur is that they have said that you did not directly address their specific statements about the math, much less demonstrated that it was their math and not yours that was incorrect.

A covering non-sequitur is that you emphasized that the power law is a side effect of control, as though that were the matter in dispute. Like the one above, this changes the subject.

I could be wrong. This could be demonstrated if

  • The other parties had agreed with you that you directly addressed their specific statements about the math.
  • The other parties had agreed with you that it was their math and not yours that was incorrect. (Seems unlikely.)
  • You had agreed with them that the side-effect status of the power law could be taken for granted and needed no further discussion.

You did in fact agree with them about the need for experimental work to identify, test, and model control resulting in the appearance of the power law.

64

Side effects are behavioral illusions when, as in the case of the power law, they are thought to tell you something important about how behavior works.

65

Who said that the power law tells us something important about how behavior works? How did they say it?

A generative model whose output data conform to the power law would tell us something important about ‘how behavior works’. Did someone point out that the data of investigations into the power law are important for this? That would not be the same as a claim that the power law alone tells us something important about how behavior works.

67

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for explaining how I could have reduced the dysfunction in the power law argument. I asked you to explain it for me because I thought it might clarify what you saw as a non-dysfunctional discussion on Discourse. And indeed it did.

Clearly what you mean by a non-dysfunctional discussion is one where everyone ends up in agreement. And, in particular, they should all agree on what you think is the correct argument. In the power law discussion, you thought those arguing against me were right and I was wrong. So you saw my answers to their arguments the way my opponents saw them, as being non-responsive, evasive, or just plain wrong – that is, dysfunctional. But I see things very differently, as I’ll explain below.

No, I did not assume that it was a side effect; I demonstrated that it was an irrelevant side effect with models that accounted for data from many different movement studies. This work was described in many of the net discussions on CSGNet and Discourse and in Marken & Shaffer (2017) and Marken & Shaffer (2018) yet it was treated by my opponents in the argument as though it didn’t exist. I think this shows that, while I was seeking agreement about the power law based on the presentation of data and the models that accounted for it, there wasn’t much reciprocal agreement-seeking on the part of my opponents.

Which is exactly what I demonstrated in those two papers (Marken & Shaffer, 2017; 2018) that Dennis and I published in Experimental Brain Research. The CVs are the one’s controlled by the models, different CVs for the different models. The behavior of these models was fit to actual movement behavior and the fit of models to data was excellent. And, of course, the model behavior, like the real movement behavior, exhibited the power law as a side effect.

This side effect was irrelevant to the control process that produced the movement in the sense that there was nothing in the models that specified that a power law should be a side effect of the movement. So those opposing my arguments either didn’t understand what Shaffer & I did or they were lying by saying that we hadn’t done it. Either way, not a very good example of them seeking agreement, I think.

No, my modeling and testing against real movement data showed that the observed relationship between speed and curvature is a side effect of control. The mathematical argument demonstrated why that relationship is typically close to a 1/3 power relationship. Again, either through ignorance or mendacity those opposing my arguments did not seem to be seeking agreement.

Yes, they did. Not very agreeable, were they?

Yes, and I demonstrated how I (and others, e.g. Moab et al) had derived that mathematical result. So I guess I wasn’t being very agreeable either. But, in my defense, at least I didn’t say that their arguments were “bullshit” or that nothing but “shit comes out of their mouth” or that they do “sloppy work”. After enough prodding I did finally succumb to the lure of the ad hominem retort by suggesting that the ability to see that the power law is an irrelevant side effect of control is a good test of one’s understanding of PCT, a test that my opponents have failed. I apologized for saying it. So far, no apologies from my opponents for their ad hominem comments, which is fine with me. I don’t need them.

I know. They asserted that I did those things. Indeed, they asserted a lot of things. Not very agreeable, were they? I tried to address their specific assertions about the math by showing how I and others arrived at the rather elementary algebraic solution to the relationship between the equations that power law researchers use to measure velocity and curvature. I don’t know what more I could have done. I think I was being as agreeable as anyone could possibly be.

Actually, what I was asserting was that the power law is an irrelevant side effect of producing curved movement. It’s irrelevant to the control process that produces the movement and, therefore, is irrelevant to the goal of research on the power law, which is to learn how organisms produce movement. So it was actually my opponents in the power law discussion who were being less than agreeable by attributing an argument to me that I wasn’t making.

So my arguments would not have been dysfunctional if the other parties judged them to “directly address their specific statements about the math”? Does this work for all parties or just for the one you like? Shouldn’t my opponents arguments also count as dysfunctional since they never directly addressed my specific question about what was wrong with the math?

I think this “test” makes it pretty clear that what you see as dysfunction in the power law discussion (and probably all other discussions on Discourse involving me) is simply my continuing to disagree with everyone else. You are saying that my arguments were dysfunctional because opponents disagreed with them. If they had agreed with me (which you deem, correctly, to have been unlikely) then I wouldn’t have been making dysfunctional arguments. But, again, doesn’t that count for them too. I disagreed with their arguments so it must be that their arguments were also dysfunctional.

And more evidence that the dysfunction is my failure to agree with my opponents’ arguments. All I had to do to not be dysfunctional was to agree with my opponents.

Of course I would agree with them about that. But in saying that there was a “need for experimental work to identify, and model control resulting in the appearance of the power law” they were implying that I hadn’t already done such work. In fact, I had done a considerable amount of this work. I started way back in 2016 when this whole power law thing started on CSGNet and all of my arguments about the power law have been based on this work, which continues to the present.

My main take-away from your analysis of the power law discussion is that it would not have been as dysfunctional as it was if I had just agreed with my opponents; admitted to all the things that they claim I did wrong and agreed that they were right about everything they claim. And, I presume, that I should also understand that their many unpleasant (to me, anyway) ad hominem remarks were actually my fault, caused by my persistent and annoying unwillingness to agree with them.

So pardon me if I don’t agree with your analysis of my behavior in the power law discussion or accept your recommendations for how to make the discussions less “dysfunctional”. I’m afraid I’ll continue to be “dysfunctional” from your (and all my opponents) point of view.

But there is a good way to stop my dysfunctional behavior, a way which is perfectly consistent with your analysis of my behavior in the power law debate; just stop disagreeing with me. Actually, I wouldn’t want that to happen. I benefit from the disagreement and often learn from it. I just would like it to be done politely.

So my recommended approach to reducing the dysfunctionality of discussions on Discourse is to just hold people accountable when they make impolite, ad hominem comments in their posts.

Best, Rick

68

For me a discussion is functional if it is (the participants are) searching for truth in spite of necessary disagreements. For someone else it seems to be functional if everybody either agrees with that person’s opinion or leaves the forum. That is very natural if that person deeply believes to own the truth, to have inherited it.

69

I’m sure the researchers who study the power law are doing it because they think it tells them something important about how movement behavior is produced. They might not say it explicitly in their papers but they have certainly said it implicitly by having produced over 40 years of research and publications on the power law. The publications are in journals having to do with motor control and the neural basis of behavior, which suggests that the researchers thought that their work on the power law had something to do with understanding motor behaviors, such as curved movement.

Yes, it certainly would and it certainly has. Generative control models of movement behavior have shown that the power law is an irrelevant side effect of control.

Here is a pertinent segment copied from Bill Powers’ 1978 Psych Review paper that speaks to this question.

image

image
image447×774 37.5 KB

The data from investigations of the power law were collected to solve an “old puzzle” – the puzzle of the power law relationship between speed and curvature that is observed when organisms produce curved movements – that the new PCT paradigm shows to no longer need solving. So, from a PCT perspective, the data from investigations of the power law are no more important to the study of movement behavior than the data from investigations of the properties of phlogiston are to the study of combustion.

My aim in the apparently never ending power law debate has been to show that this is the case – that the power law is a problem that no longer needs solving – and to encourage power law researchers to drop their investigations of the power law and redirect their considerable skills to the study of movement behavior as a control phenomenon. Unfortunately (or, possibly, fortunately) this discussion has shown Powers to have been right about what he said in the highlighted portion of the Psych Review quote. Consistent with Bill’s prediction, my explanation of the PCT view of the power law has resulted in a battle between the new paradigm and those who are unwilling to bypass altogether the old power law puzzle that they insist needs solving.

Paradigm shifts, like breaking up, are (as Neil Sedaka told us) hard to do.

Best, Rick

70

First, a PSA about quote tags. Your embedded quotes, after the first, include no author information.

Thus you begin with

The initial quote tag looks like this:

[quote=“bnhpct, post:63, topic:15960, full:true”]

The attribute ‘full:true’ indicates that you selected the entirety of the post and pressed the Quote widget, then inserted your rejoinders into the entire quotation. The result is that after your rejoinder to the first part, the quotation continues without author information, like this

There are no attributes after the [quote] tag.

This makes it difficult for readers to reconstruct who said what. To prevent this, use the Quote widget to quote each part that you want to reply to just before your reply.

I have gone through and pasted =“bnhpct, post:63, topic:15960” where it was missing, to keep it clear who said what even after someone perhaps quotes parts of this topic in another topic.

It is true that a fundamental aim of any field of science is to reach agreements about the subject-matter of the science. It’s also true that historically these agreements (‘scientific consensus’) are challenged by new findings and then superseded by new agreements. Consequently, it is perfectly possible for a substantive disagreement to persist in a science, sometimes for years, without the parties resorting to fallacious argument forms such as

  • contradiction with little or no supporting evidence
  • criticism of the tone without addressing the substance of the disagreement
  • attack upon the characteristics or authority of the other without addressing the substance of the disagreement
  • name-calling

All of these are ‘dysfunctional’ in scientific discourse. A ‘non-dysfunctional discussion’ is avoiding dysfunctional (logically invalid) argument forms, including but not limited to this list from Graham’s hierarchy.

For all but the last there are limited circumstances in which they may actually be functional. For example:

  • Supporting evidence may be included by reference to prior discussion, and sometimes that reference is not explicit. It may happen especially among people familiar with the terms of argument, and the missing ‘taken for granted’ references can always be made explicit. This can easily degrade into a gray area.
  • Criticism of the tone of discourse is functional for those who feel unsafe asking a question or making a proposal, and therefore (for just one example) functional for all who want to invite newcomers.
  • Questioning whether someone has got familiar with the basic terminology, methodology, and literature of the field is perfectly appropriate. However, to be functional this should not be an attack, it should direct them in a friendly and supportive way to what they need to learn. This can be tricky with folks who are already invested in being experts in what they perceive as the same or intersecting field.

It’s not a personal matter of what I think. There is universal agreement that some forms of argument are logically invalid, and that they should be excluded from scientific discourse. Fallacious argument forms assuredly do occur in scientific discourse, scientists are human, but nobody claims they’re proper.

See ambiguity of ‘irrelevant’, below.

I don’t think there was any disagreement about it being a side effect of control and not a cause of behavior. For example, Martin said “I finished my critique with the statement that perhaps the power law is indeed a behavioural illusion, though M&S sheds no light on that issue”.

Yes, they said there was a fundamental error in your mathematical argument and you said there was not. (More on that below.)

Attributing this to flaws in their education or qualifications (ignorance) or attributing it to a character defect (mendacity) is an ad hominem argument.

Mathematics is not subject to a lot of ambiguity, and conflicts in math are not resolved by exerting greater force until one or both reaches maximum output capacity.

I freely submit that I am not qualified to weigh in on the mathematical argument. The rustic but proud school system that I attended in central Florida offered no pre-calculus and but limited algebra, and it is not at all to my credit that I failed to remedy those deficiencies when I got into college. I have learned some since, but I claim no strength there.

Equivocation is one of the logical fallacies that Graham does not mention.

Equivocation depends upon or exploits ambiguity. “Disagreeable” (“not agreeable”) has two meanings. Disagreeing about the substance of the argument need not be ‘disagreeable’ in the sense of dysfunctional discourse. As I said above (and I believe that you and I have previously both remarked, maybe even agreed), scientists disagree fairly often about how to interpret findings, etc. Whether they do so ‘disagreeably’ or collegially is a different matter.

Here’s one place where it seems to me that you could have done more:

Martin:

since the formula for D was velocity (V)
times a constant in spatial variables, the equation is not an
equation from which one can determine V. The M&S claim that it
is an equation from which one can determine V is the core of my
critique.

Rick:

We said that what you said about it not being an equation that can be used to >predict V using linear regression is wrong. Which it is.

This sounds like “You’re wrong because we said so.” Note that I’m not taking sides as to who is correct. I’m pointing out that you contradicted without evidence. The very least “more” that you could have done could have been a reference to where you “said so”, i.e. the location of the specific refutation with evidence.

For other readers, a protracted portion of the exchange can be found in the CSGnet archive for 2018 by searching for “Bogus mathematics, (was Re: L’état de PCT, c’e st moi (was …))”, and selecting More… at the bottom of the initial list.

Here again I was trying to disclose the form of the argument. I identified this as a non-sequitur, changing the subject from the mathematical argument to the status of the power law as a side effect. I think the response was kinda like “Who cares, that’s probably true, but it’s not what we’re talking about. The math is wrong.”

But you emphasize that it’s not only a side effect, it’s irrelevant.

I think we’re running into equivocation over the word ‘irrelevant’. It is ambiguous as to its reference and scope.

  1. For the control system, the power law is irrelevant. I think everyone agrees that control systems do not carry out power-law calculations, and that the observed speed-curvature relation (which is not all that precise) is a side effect of control.
  2. For researchers building and testing generative models of behavior when organisms create or follow (trace) curved paths, behavioral data from research on the power law is deeply relevant.

Saying it’s irrelevant in sense (2) dismisses and trivializes any lab work on these lines that they are doing.

You asked for examples of your usage, that’s why yours are more in focus. You’ve called attention to their name-calling, so they’re not left out. They haven’t invited me to identify less severe fallacies in their argument. You’ve said that their mathematics is “bogus”, which looks like a claim that it is incorrect, but then you retracted that to say you just meant that it didn’t apply in the context of experiment. You’re welcome to identify other logical fallacies in their argument.

I said “I could be wrong”. What did I say I could be wrong about? I said I could be wrong about my entire attempt to summarize the form of the argument. I could be mistaken in various ways, including the ways that I listed. If any of those things is true, then the corresponding part of my attempt to summarize would be wrong.

For you to paraphrase this as you have done is a non sequitur. The non sequitur was created by taking a quotation out of context and changing its meaning. The full quotation means that if any of the items in the list is true, then my attempted summary is wrong in that respect. You took an excerpt from it to mean that these were tests whether or not your arguments were dysfunctional (i.e. fallacies).

No, it would just mean that I was mistaken about that.

This is not a test of who is at fault. It is a ‘test’ of the accuracy of my summary. If true, then I was mistaken in my perception that they still disagree with you.

Again, this only means that I was mistaken to think that there had been disagreement about this.

That’s a good start, but it’s even more necessary to identify the less extreme fallacies and hold people accountable for them before annoyance at them escalates to the point of name-calling (the extreme form of ad hominem argument).

71

Who inherited truth? How does one inherit truth?

Best, Rick

72

Got it. Will do.

Of course.

I was referring to your agreement with the substance, not the form, of my opponent’s arguments, though I assume you agree with both.

Actually, the rest of your post is a very detailed attempt to say that it’s the form and not the substance of my arguments that you are criticizing. I think it actually shows that you strongly agree with the substance of my opponents’ arguments and that what you consider to be dysfunctional about my arguments was that they didn’t answer the substance of their arguments to your satisfaction.

So I will stop my dysfunctional communication about the power law by arguing about it no more on Discourse. My last word (I hope;-) on the power law topic here on Discourse will by my previous post. If power law researchers want to keep chasing this Boojam there is clearly nothing I can do to convince them to stop.