[Martin Taylor 951124 16:50]
Rick Marken (951124.1310)
And speaking of testing, if this gets through, perhaps,
Martin, you could explain, in as simple a manner as possible, what
the problem is?
Yes, it got through, and so did your following message that contained
a theory about why Norbert Wiener did not invent PCT.
As far as I am concerned, your question is ill-posed. There isn't a "the
problem" in this thread, unless it is the consequences of recognizing
that un-noticed side-effects of control can be an essential part of some
other control loop. My discussion of ritual in the posting to which
you responded, and in an earlier posting, was intended to cover much
the same ground as you do for the explicit case of Wiener and psychology.
There IS a problem of why Wiener didn't discover PCT and Bill P. did,
and you may be right in your assessment. The situation is/was very complex,
but I think it can be boiled down to a persistence of ritual that has
some success in "opening doors of cat-holding boxes." The psychologists
may have perusaded Wiener that "lying on your side facing the clock"
was the right way to "open the door" of psychology; and, lo-and-behold,
it worked a lot of the time. Nobody may have told Bill that, or perhaps
they did and he said to himself "I can't see how that can work the miracle."
Not using the "lie on the side..." approach, and finding serendipitously
another "scratching at the stick" approach that worked reliably, he did
find PCT. And has been reliably refining it in an "error-free" learning
process ever since.
No, there's no one problem, but a lot of very interesting consequences of
an observation that initially presented itself to me as a vague anomaly.
We've looked at it as a problem in performing the Test while the cat is
rapidly reorganizing or while it is steretyped; we've looked at it from
the question of whether control can be faked in conditions with constrictions
of the feedback function possibilities; we've looked at it from the
viewpoint of how these "effective" side-effects can fake out the
cat-scientist; we've dealt with how they can lead to high IV-DV
correlations that say absolutely nothing about the truth underlying
the box; and we've looked at how this same phenomenon can perhaps
lead to a sensible explanation of ritualistic behaviour and taboo.
It's an observation of a fact, with implications that branch in many
directions, more than a problem. I think there are lots of ramifications
on which we have not yet touched. I'm finding the exploration of these
branches (the "trail out of the parking lot") fascinating, and I hope
you do, too.
Martin