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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Then I was wrong in my guess about what you meant by debate growing ‘heated’.
I’m trying to stick with what is productive and useful. Rather than fix the blame on anyone I’d rather we fix the problem, so I won’t respond here to claims of blame or innocence. And aside from that, no response often means agreement with something that doesn’t seem to need any response (‘no disturbance’).
A tangential but substantive point: I have no skin in the power law debate, and am not aware of saying anything either promoting or disparaging your point of view. The only thing I recall is my comments about people steering cars and ants following pheromones, which apparently are not relevant.
I understand your reticence but I don’t see how we (or I) can figure out how to make these discussions less dysfunctional without knowing what people are doing to make them dysfunctional. It seems to me that figuring this out would have to involve pointing out what specifically people are doing to make things dysfunctional, which would probably make the people who are doing it identifiable.
I personally wouldn’t mind being identified as a person who is contributing to the dysfunction and I would like to know specifically what I have done to produce this dysfunction so that I can avoid doing it in the future. And I think it might make things less scary for those who are being scared away from discussions on Discourse if these dysfunction causing things were discussed on Discourse. It would show that we all care about making Discourse a more hospitable place to teach and learn PCT.
But in the interests of trying to find out for myself what I can do to make my communications contribute less to the dysfunction on Discourse I invite people who read my posts to send a personal email to me at rsmarken@gmail.com if they find that something about a post contributes to the dysfunction on Discourse.
When I say “avoid assuming intent” I am not talking about the actions that produce the apparently intended result but, rather, the consequences of those actions that are seen as behaviors such as ridiculing, misquoting, making misleading quotations out of context, paraphrasing in a form that can be trivialized, etc.
These behaviors are perceptions from the point of view of both the actor (me) and the observer (you). If these behaviors are perceptions that are being controlled by the actor then they are intentional and the observer is correctly seeing them as intentional behavior; if they are not perceptions being controlled by the actor then they are unintended side effects of control and the observer is mistakenly seeing them as intentional.
For example, what the observer perceives as intentionally produced ridicule could be an unintended side effect of the actor controlling for pointing out a perceived error in what the observer wrote. Similarly, what the observer perceives as intentionally making misleading quotations out of context could be an unintended side effect of the actor controlling for keeping the observer’s quotations concise. And what the observer perceives as intentionally paraphrasing in a form that can be trivialized could be an unintended side effect of the actor controlling for keeping the meaning using different words – that is, paraphrasing.
So Bill’s statement that “All (intentional) behavior is to control some perception” is true. The problem is that the actions, whether simple or complex, that produce intended perceptions – intentional behavior – produce many perceptual results besides the controlled one. This is what happens in the case of the power law; among the many perceptual results that are produced when an actor controls for producing the perception of curved movement is the perception, for an observer, of an approximately -1/3 power relationship between curvature and velocity.
I built my mindreading demo to demonstrate the problem of discriminating intended from unintended results of action. In that demo your actions are mouse movements that produce three different perceptual results simultaneously – the movements of the three avatars. But you can pick one of the avatars and move it around in an arbitrary pattern intentionally; the other two avatars are being moved as well, but their movements are unintended side effects of your actions. I’ve had students, acting as observers, try to identify the intentionally moved avatar and they never do better than chance.
The computer can tell, with very good accuracy, which avatar is being moved intentionally (assuming you are controlling it well) because it is testing to see which avatar’s position is being controlled. But it’s difficult if not impossible to do such testing in an ongoing conversation – not with any precision anyway – which is why I say that it is a good idea to never assume intent in the conversations on Discourse. It’s bound to increase conflict whether your guess about intent is right or wrong.
We seem to be thinking alike on this one. My comment was more about the ambiguity of your language than about PCT as a theory and practice. We always assume intent, but it’s not always easy to perceive what that intent was, and whether the effects on the environment are what was intended or are side-effects, without using some kind of test, perhaps just asking “Did you mean to produce this effect, which your actions did produce?”
Yes, that could escalate into blame and defense unless it’s done in a collective “what’s happening and how do we fix it?” manner.
I join you in that, yes. An open invitation: Please let me know if I’m stepping on your toes or acting ugly.
Sending private email is one way, of course. Then when the two parties feel that they have a clear statement of what’s going on (ideally, when they have a PCT model of it), they could bring it out of private discussion as a topic here.
I listed a number of other resources within Discourse in this earlier post (#22). Again, no claim the list is complete—you’ve just added conventional email—but here it is again:
Post a private message to an individual. Here’s how. Use the person’s Discourse member name, which identifies them in the post that you want to talk to them about.
Reply to a post that concerns you.
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 think we’re generally agreed we don’t want an escalation of injury and retaliation. Your question, it seems to me, is how can we talk about a bothersome transaction (and the bother) in neutral, descriptive terms without blame, which is a form of retaliation. Is that a fair paraphrase? These dance steps are not new or unique to present company. Just making it a topic of description and conversation moves ‘up a level’, and in the manner of MOL asking questions in a genuinely curious way. “It seems to me you’re saying ____. Is that what you mean to say?” or “You left out the context where she said ___. Does that mean you think it’s irrelevant, or did it just not fit the flow of your argument?”, and so on. Identifying what is bothering me about what he said, paraphrasing that, and asking if that was intentional, what perceptions does saying that help him control. Inviting questions, e.g. “I’m not sure you’re aware how that looks from my point of view.”
But I predict that just the heightened alertness will go far to eliminating such problems. We may come to perceive them as careless or ignorant rather than purposeful.
That to take someone’s use of language at face value and criticise it without question, without being curious as to the goal, intent, perception of the individual when they used that term or phrase, is to take the outsider’s view of behaviour, which PCT tells us is not the correct or helpful viewpoint to take.
Here’s a neat Discourse trick. Warren quoted a snippet from my post. The context was lost, resulting in some uncertainty for you, Rick, as to what it was about. My login name appears at the top of the quotation. Click it; it’s a link to the source of the quote, with the quoted text highlighted.
Yes, very neat trick. Actually, I figured out a kludgy way to find it but the tricky way is much easlier.
While we’re on the topic of neat tricks in Discourse, I could use your help with the following: I would like to post my reply to your and Warren’s posts under a new Topic in the Category Learning PCT. If I could give the topic a fairly long name I would call it “PCT Approach to Learning PCT”. Is there a way to do this or should I just reply in this thread?
I was going to comment on this in a separate topic (on teaching PCT) but I think it’s not really related to teaching but to the topic area it is already in, Discourse dysfunction. So I’ll comment on it here.
Warren said:
I’ve got a couple questions about this that are intended to solicit clarification and not to criticize.
First, what is the ‘face value’ of language? What would I be inappropriately criticizing if I were to take someone’s use of language at face value? An example would be helpful.
Second, is it sufficient to just be curious about a person’s goal, intent, and perception in order to avoid taking the outsider’s view of behavior in a discussion or is something more required?
There is a special irony here. The original context affirmed that if you do not have the context of a person’s words in mind it is more likely that you will fail to understand them as intended. Warren quoted two sentences out of context.
You asked
Of course the referential word “this” refers to something that was said in the omitted context. You could have looked there, or Warren could have quoted more, but he took a third option. He may have been paraphrasing, giving his understanding of what he thought was my intended meaning. Or he may have stating his understanding of the quote without having the context in memory.
From there the exchange with Warren went even farther from the need to bear the writer’s context in mind. Your first question takes Warren’s abstraction ‘the face value of language’ … umm, using the phrase advisedly … at face value as an abstraction.
Warren’s paraphrase of what I said implies that there is a single ‘face value’ of an utterance. First, ambiguity is pervasive in language; second, context disambiguates. Taking someone’s use of language “at its face value” as you perceive it amounts to taking your understanding to be the intended understanding. To do that isn’t criticizing, it’s merely presumptuous. Well, it can be more than that. Depending on how and how much it departs from the intended understanding, it can be trivializing, demeaning, distracting, etc. It’s true that these are ways in which the person perceives herself to be misunderstood, but it is also possible for the person ‘taking words at their face value’ actually to intend such perceptions to result, and furthermore for that intention to be deniable, preserving innocence. That’s the kind of thing I mean by phrases like ‘ulterior motive’. Control of ulterior variables may be either conscious or not.
I think the point is rather to make a deliberate habit (controlled perception) of enquiring further rather than presuming that you understand the intended meaning. One way to enquire is to paraphrase: “:It sounds like you’re saying _____, is that what you mean?”
Then you asked:
Well, you have to act on that curiosity by inquiring, and you have to suspend control of a desired outcome of the inquiry. Controlling a desired outcome of the inquiry (ulterior control) is a way of taking the outsider’s point of view. Temporarily, you have to suspend control of perceiving that they have the understanding that you want them to have. Only then can you perceive what they actually do understand, and the terms in which they understand it. This is what Bill Leach was talking about.
The context of the quote was Bill Leach’s observation about how variability of Bill’s way of expressing the same PCT concepts to different people in different contexts, and that if you quote Bill without taking this into account you can become mistaken about what he intended that person to understand in that context. A further part of the context was my suggestion that this principle should be taken as context for the many CSGnet contentions around “purity of PCT-talk” (with a link to such contentions).
Here’s Warren’s quote in context.
Back to that referential word “this” in the two sentences that Warren quoted. It refers to CSGnet “contentions around purity of PCT-talk”. You might disagree. You might think it’s absolutely necessary and proper to require people to use PCT terminology always in the same consistent and precise way. That would be a good conversation to have, in light of Bill Leach’s observation about context-dependent variablility in Bill’s ways of vebalizing principles of PCT. But without that context, your questions about precise definitions of words in Warren’s summary lead away from that conversation, and they may presuppose a desired outcome for it.
