[From Bill Powers (930130.0830)]
Martin Taylor (930129.1900) --
Petronius Arbiter is talking about what happens when commanders
are selected by the Peter Principle. Having risen to their level
of incompetence, they are driven by anxiety which can't be
alleviated by accomplishment, because they don't know how to
accomplish what must be done. Therefore they reorganize
endlessly, passing over bad solutions and good ones alike because
they can't recognize a good solution when it turns up.
···
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Gary Cziko (930130.0430 GMT) --
Yoru suggestion about instrument disturbances for actions of
various speeds is a good one. The main difficulty is that human
control systems are too good: it's hard to build an
electromechanical system that can apply a known disturbance
faster than a human being can correct for it. It's possible, but
you need expensive torque motors and very fast servo amplifiers.
It's not the sort of thing I can do in my basement computer room.
... I have the intuition that at the very highest speeds
even the final position will not be well-controlled, at least
not without some patch-up correction at the end of the
movement.
There will be wobbles at the end of a very fast movement, but
they'll be on the same time scale that normally applies. That is,
if a disturbance occurs within a 40-millisecond jab, it will take
120 to 180 milliseconds to correct 95 - 99 percent of the final
position error -- the same as during normal movements.
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A thought about lexicons and other side-issues of PCT.
There seems to be a difference in the way scientists approach
studies of natural phenomena that parallels the differences
between some organized religions. In one religion it is claimed
that God's Truth can reach the common person, but only through
the intercession of qualified and approved theologians. In
another, it is claimed that each person has an individual contact
with God that requires no human intermediaries, no ritual, no
ceremony.
It seems to me that this same dispute occurs in science. One
group works on the basis that the great minds of the past have
revealed the basic working of nature to the less-inspired, so
that for the common scientist to learn Truth, there must be a
devoted study of the wisdom of the past, and observance of the
rituals prescribed by the most gifted of scientists. But another
group -- much smaller, I fear -- believes that any individual can
explore nature directly, without any intermediary and without the
need for observing customary rituals.
This distinction is particularly important in studies of human
nature. The first group decided some time ago that subjective
observations of human nature are untrustworthy and misleading, so
that to discover his or her own workings, an individual must
learn the methods of objective science and study the findings
about human behavior that our illustrious forebears have
established. But the second group, of which I am obviously a
member, believes that truths about human nature are available to
anyone who takes the trouble to ask the right questions and
observe himself/herself closely and with honesty.
Ed Ford, whatever his theological leanings, has shown himself to
be a scientist of the second kind. He has shown that anyone,
given a couple of rubber bands and a willing partner or two, can
rediscover fundamental phenomena of control quite independently
of what anyone else says they are, without mathematical rituals,
and without asking any authority whether he has it right. The
question is put directly to nature, and nature, acting as it
must, demonstrates the answer.
We may, of course, dispute within and among ourselves as to what
the answer signifies, because significance gets us into
speculation about what we haven't observed. But each of us has a
working brain, of which we see far more than anyone else can see
even if we can't see it all. Each of us lives in a private world
of experience of which no one else knows anything. Each person,
alone, can explore this laboratory and learn at least something
about how its apparatus works. How strange to think that one
might decide to ignore this laboratory, and judge human nature
only on the basis of what certain others, working in their own
private laboratories somewhere else and long ago, have said about
it.
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Best to all,
Bill P.