Hello everybody,
Adam Mastroianni runs a very interesting Substack blog called Experimental History. I highly recommend his recent lecture at the Santa Fe Institute:
He discusses many (controversial) topics found at his blog and closes revealing his discovery of PCT as “the roadmap for a revolution” in Psychology.
Best,
Hugo
Great find Hugo. Where is the section in the talk on PCT?
Hi Warren!
It starts around 42min. He wraps up his main criticisms and then presents PCT.
This is amazing! I sent him an email last February, introducing PCT after I read his blog "You can’t be too happy, literally, where he talked about control but didn’t touch on perceptual control exactly. I never received a reply to that email, but who knows what helped tipping the scales?
Watching this video made my day. Adam’s blog is consistently good, inspiring and has an enormous reach!
Eva
I’m glad you liked it, Eva! Maybe your little disturbance became an opportunity for him to dig into PCT.
For those who don’t know Adam’s newsletter, I highly recommend it. It’s free and really good.
Hugo
Here’s another time Adam mentions Powers, 1:04 in this psychology podcast: Two psychologists, four beers. Doing science better.
Hope we can connect.
Eva
Can we feel the tide turning? Well done Eva. I’ve decided to email him too…
I’m not going to get excited about the “tide turning” until I see it turning – really turning, not just a wave coming in. But I sent him an email as well, letting him know that people are still interested in Powers theory and that one of them is me. And since he is an experimental psychologist purportedly interested in revolutionizing the field, I recommended my book The Study of Living Control Systems to him. I’ll be interested in hearing what he thinks of it.
There’s more from him on Control:
I’ve been in a conflict about whether I should or should not post about this blog article. On the one hand the author, Mastroianni, says many things about paradigms, control systems, and methodology that are wrong and I want to post corrections. On the other hand, Mastroianni’s article has apparently generated optimism among many people here about the “tide turning” towards a PCT-based psychology and I don’t want to burst any bubbles.
So I’ll try to approach this from what I think might be a “higher level” point of view – one of curiosity about why articles like Mastroianni’s might encourage such optimism. I would like to know what, specifically, is it in Mastroianni’s article that makes you think that he is part of a vanguard that is moving psychology towards a PCT view of the behavior of living systems?