[Martin Taylor 931124 13:20]
(Hal Pepinsky Message and the one I'm responding to--241193, just after 11 am es
t.
Okay?)
Better, but "[Hal Pepinsky 931124 11:10]" would be more conventional.
Even when one doesn't like to be conventional, it helps communication
if we abide by some conventions.
I believe, as I read, that much of the occurrence of positive and
negative feedback is essentially random to y'all, stochastic one might
say.
It's kind of puzzling that you read this out of the CSG-L traffic. Are
you thinking about the process or reorganization? That has stochastic
aspects, because the reorganizing system has no way to know what changes
will bring the feedback loops into a negative state. But given a particular
configuration of one or more control systems (within one or more people and
their environment), it is not a stochastic matter as to whether the
feedback loops are positive or negative. Choose a situation at random,
then of course you can't say in advance whether a particular subsystem
(perception function, comparator, output function) will lead to positive
or negative feedback when it is pluked into that situation. But a
reorganizing system will eventually arrive at a negative feedback state
if it doesn't kill itself first. "Violence" is naturally damped, though
a lot may be expressed before the conflicts vanish.
Rick, was it not, was surprised by the student's inability to get
lines to meet or cross a circle.
Even if I hadn't known from reading the postings that this was wrong,
I would be surprised to hear of such a reaction from Rick! I would
imagine that he would have been very surprised if the student had been
successful. But that's just my imagination running riot (violent
imagery, no?).
Martin