[From Rick Marken (960905.0810)]
Bruce Gregory (960904.1205 EDT) --
People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What makes them
_appear_ complicated is our continual insistence on interpreting their
behavior instead of discovering their goals.
I would rank this as a very profound observation. I'm not sure that people
are really very simple but I am pretty confident that what seems complicated
about their behavior is not what is really complicated about it. What
_seems_ complicated about human behavior is its appearance -- the irrelevant
side effects of controlling, such as the complex movements of the handle in a
tracking task. What _really_ is complicated about human behavior is the way
the nervous system computes perceeptual representations of the variables
people control, such as the representation of the distance between target and
cursor.
RSM