resource limitation

[_Martin_Taylor]

[Martin Taylor 951219 10:30]

Bill Powers (951218.1715 MST)

Martin Taylor 951218 15:00 --

    The cost function I envisage can be seen by analogy. To a person
    with $2, the "cost" of a $1 item is greater than it is to a person
    with $10.

If you ever go into business with someone, Martin, do NOT volunteer to
keep the books.

To the shopkeeper, it doesn't matter whether the purchaser has $10 or $2.
It's the shopkeeper who has the books "in business". The guy with $2
has his own books, and those are not the same books as are used by the
guy with $10. Each of the three keeps a separate set of accounts.

The "cost" in this case is psychological. Don't you ever have times when
you think you haven't got enough money to afford something you want, whereas
at other times you could have done so? I certainly have. At some moments
a $10 item "isn't worth it" whereas at other times I would buy the same thing
at the same price without a second thought. What something "costs" depends
enormously on how much money I have.

OK, you've invented a nonlinear cost function. This requires the rat to
know how much of the resource is left, as well as how much it is
getting,

What does "how much it is getting" (of food pellets) have to do with
how much of the resource (energy, time, number of paws...whatever) it
has available? These things come together only in some sense of value.
Is it worth stopping playing the piano in order to get a drink? You can't
do both at once. To the rat, is it worth pressing the lever to exhaustion
in order to get one lousy food pellet?

but what the hell, if you want to prove a point you just assume
whatever works.

These assumptions may be over specific, but I don't think it is in the least
unnatural, or suggested by "reinforcement" that it costs you more to give
up something of which you have only a little than to give up the same
quantity of something of which you have a lot.

You still didn't deal with the claim (in effect) that loss of
reinforcement from a running wheel is equivalent to a loss of food
reinforcements.

Where is the reinforcement from a running wheel? Does the rat find it fun?

This argument lumps all reinforcers together, so that it
is total reinforcement from all sources that increases the probability
of bar-pressing, not just reinforcements generated by bar-pressing.

Huh? I simply don't understand this comment. It comes "right out of left
field". I lump all resources of a given kind together, as one must. If you
get tired doing one thing, you can't do another energetic thing as well. If
you are using all ten fingers to play a chord, you can't play an eleventh
note in a different octave. If the rat is running on a wheel, he can't
be pressing a lever.

How this relates to reinforcements, I'm afraid I cannot see, except that a
reinforcement has a value and a resource usage has a cost. The value of
a reinforcement presumably relates to how much of it you have compared to
how much you want, just as I think the cost of a resource relates to how
much you have to expend out of how much you have.

But what this has to do with lumping all reinforcements of DIFFERENT
behaviours together as reinforcements for ONE behaviour, I cannot see. If
there is anything in reinforcement theory at all, shouldn't reinforcements
for different behaviours should combine subtractively, rather than additively?
If you reinforce behaviour X at level A, then reinforcing behaviour Y at
level B should lead to less of X if you increase B, shouldn't it? Or is this
just common sense and not reinforcement theory?

Is
this another of those varieties of reinforcement theory that we keep
hearing about?

As you should be well aware, I don't know any varieties of reinforcement
theory except what I read here on CSG-L or what I vaguely remember from
a course almost 40 years ago. All I am doing now is saying how I
interpreted a paragraph from Samuel Saunders, on which you commented in a
way I thought missed his point. As you miss mine. I assume that since
he brought it up, it has some relevance to reinforcement.

No, I didn't catch any algebraic errors. It would be interesting,
however, to see your justification for the cost function you chose as a
starting point, and how it relates to the problem of modeling
reinforcement.

The justification for the cost function is, like many of your justifications
for particular perceptions, simple everyday experience. It costs a lot
to give up your last dime. How the cost function relates to the problem
of modelling reinforcement I would leave to people who might be interested
in that topic.

All I wanted to say was that it seemed to me that Saunders had presented
what you asked him to present--a common-sense non-linear cost function
that prevented the runaway you asserted to be implicit in his presentation.

Martin

[SHANNON_M_WILLIAMS_D]

[From Shannon Williams (951219)]

Martin Taylor 951219 10:30-

What something "costs" depends enormously on how much money I have.

Or it depends on how many loops must be disturbed in order to satisfy one.

I don't think it is in the least
unnatural, or suggested by "reinforcement" that it costs you more to give
up something of which you have only a little than to give up the same
quantity of something of which you have a lot.

Is cost created/generated by our internal organization or by the
organization of our environment?

How do you model cost? If your model is based on 'how much stuff' is in
the environment, then it is based on the same common sense that leads to
reinforcement. It is based on the concept that to understand ourselves, we
analyse our environment.

-Shannon

[_Martin_Taylor]

[Martin Taylor 951219 13:20]

Shannon Williams (951219)

How do you model cost? If your model is based on 'how much stuff' is in
the environment, then it is based on the same common sense that leads to
reinforcement.

How could it relate to "how much stuff" is in the environment? I don't
follow. As I tried to make clear, and obviously didn't, the cost to you
is related to how much you must deplete your supply of whatever you pay
with, whether it is money, energy, availability of fingers... What's in
the environment has nothing to do with it. Or so I would assume. How would
you ever know how much was in the environment? And what would it mean for
the environment to be tired (the example I used in the post to which you
seem to be responding)?

Now a more subtle question, that raises an interesting issue:

Is cost created/generated by our internal organization or by the
organization of our environment?

The smart-ass answer is "Yes."

The less smart-ass answer has to be presented from a PCT point of view,
which rather takes away from its relevance to a discussion of reinforcement.
But we do perceive cost, or at least we are affected by related perceptions
such as tiredness or the need to multiplex outputs, so it is probably
worthwhile to discuss it anyway.

An effective reorganization builds a hierarchy in which the perceptions are
for the most part controllable. That means that they can be influenced
by outputs that act through reasonably stable environmental feedback paths.
If the internal organization doesn't in some way mirror something "real"
about the external environment, these stable feedback paths won't exist.
So in a sense, the internal organization of the hierarchy is, not
"determined", not "controlled", but "constrained" by the environment.

Certain organizations work, others wouldn't even if they were actually
to be constructed. But for every potentially useful organization that is
constructed, there are many that could have been constructed. Every
human has a hierarchy characteristically different from the hierarchy in
any raccoon, but within the similarities of all human hierarchies, every
human is different in detail. We perceive different things and act
differently as a function of particular patterns of error.

So the perception of cost (if it is perceived) would be generated
internally and constrained by the environment, just like any other
perception. But I don't think all cost is necessarily perceived, just
as the actions of a control system are not perceived in that particular
control system, though they can be perceived in other control systems.

I identify cost with the output side of control, not with the input. An
action that influences its perception only with difficulty or only
ineffectively is a costly action. An action that prevents or causes
difficulty for another control system in the same organism is costly,
which is the basis for my original interpretation of Saunders. These
costs need never be perceived (except perhaps by an outside analyst),
but they are as real as the perceptual and output functions of the
control system (also never perceived except by an outside analyst).

It's not at all clear whether "cost" should be a unidimensional quantity.
It certainly is when it is cast into external world terms such as "money."
But even there, the money cost of something is not its entire cost. The
time and effort involved in getting it, the environmental damage caused by
producing it, and so forth, these are all aspects of the cost of a product.
However, in the simplified translation of Saunders' paragraph, there's no
need to worry about such things, since we are dealing only with costs that
summate, costs based on the depletion of a single limited resource.

What something "costs" depends enormously on how much money I have.

Or it depends on how many loops must be disturbed in order to satisfy one.

I think the foregoing is my gloss on this comment of yours. The money is
a one-dimensional cost variable. The disturbance of one control loop by the
action of another is another aspect of cost that should be considered in
any full theory. But no reinforcement theory would contain such a construct,
would it?

Again, on further thought, your comment might just be a deeper reality
behind mine. If you take a little money from a large store, you will not
be creating conflict (much) with other control loops that have as part of
their environmental feedback path the use of money. But if you take the
same little money from a small store, you are setting up many potential
conflicts with other control loops that might have used the same money.
If this is so, we can combine our two sentences, thus:

What something "costs" depends enormously on how much money I have, because
that determines how many loops for the satisfaction of other perceptual
references may be disturbed in order to satisfy this one.

What does it cost me to write this note? Nothing, if I have all the time in
the world at my disposal. A lot, if I should be doing something else very
important in the same time frame.

Martin