[Avery Andrews 930410.1200]
(Rick Marken (930409.1600))
>Well, "anti" is a bit stong but I suggest that you read all the
>posts in this series, look at all the data and then read
>Bill Powers (930409.0930 MDT) delightful "PCT/IT: impetus vs
>Newton's Laws". Maybe Scholasticism is just your cup of tea?
Well, I don't have time to read all of them carefully, and I wouldn't
want to say much about Allan & Martin's contributions before having
read and thought about some of the relevant material on Allan's
big bibliography (looks like at least a year's work to me, probably more,
to digest the stuff well enough to say anything sensible about it).
I think Bill Powers' recent post is a more profitable line to take on IT -
it is quite clear that we don't need it to make progress on useful
things like how to get breakfast into rather than onto your face, so
it is entirely rational for anyone interested in PCT to ignore it, until
someone shows why it is more useful (at the moment) than Bill thinks it
is, which I don't think has actually been done--the stuff about the
feedback keeping info out of the system might be true, but I don't get
much of a sense of why it is useful.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au