From Tom Bourbon (930511.1712)
Ken Hacker [930506]
Ken Hacker [930509]
Ken Hacker [930509]
Ken, in those posts you alleged that several of us on the net were
attacking you and were denying the importance of things social. I have
looked through your posts several times, and I have read again those fro
others, in which you saw the attacks and denials. I am as puzzled by your
comments now as I was when I first saw them. Not one person on this net
ever attacked you, or said that social interactions, influences,
circumstances, and the like are unimportant. When I look back at the posts
from us that were interspersed with yours, I do see some of us asking you
questions such as, "Why do you think social interactions are important?"
But in every case, it was obvious that the question was simply a request
to see *your* reasons, so we could compare them with ours. The question
was not a veiled assertion that social events and interactions are
unimportant.
None of us ever intentionally or knowingly posted the kinds of things you
thought we did. And I certainly never said such things in the two little
articles you have rejected out of hand, without ever reading them. (That's
alright, I think several of the reviewers who rejected drafts of the
still-unpublished manuscript on the cooperative tracking task never read it,
either. Social scientists seem to just KNOW when someting can't be true --
it must be an aura or an aroma they detect.)
Ken, you have convinced me that I am correct in my decision to never again
submit a manuscript on interactive tracking and control to a real journal in
the social sciences. (I have one manuscript nearing completion on
"controlling behavior" -- taken both in the radical behavioral sense and in
the PCT sense -- that I will submit to a radical behavioral journal, but that
doesn't count as a social science journal.) Everything else will go into
the CSG archives, in the hills of Kentucky, or perhaps into *Closed Loop.*
Without reading my work or discussing it with me, you concluded that you
knew what I had done and what I said, that I had overstated the meaning of
my work, and that what I did could not possibly be relevant to the issues
that concern real sociologists, social psychologists and their ilk. And you
summarily dismissed tracking tasks (without examining the full range of
possible applications of those tasks), as "card stacking" and "head
scratching" -- things that you say cannot possibly be relevant to social
science. You left out one of the golden oldies used by our critics for
many years: "stick wiggling." (I guess now we would need to add, "pulling
tails on mice."
Your comments are in perfect accord with those of the reviewers and editors
who have rejected the paper on cooperation. You can see that paper when I
get it ready for Greg's archives -- after I strip out all of the citations
and descriptions of traditional, orthodox and acceptable studies and "social
models" that I put in to placate one set of reviewers, but that were called
superfluous by the next set. And I will remove the carefully worded
sections in which I said, up front, that the tasks and the method of
modeling are different from what people might be accustomed to seeing, and
that I offered them in the spirit of a modest proposal, in which I tried to
demonstrate an alternative way to conduct research on interactions, and to
gather and of explain bouts of continouos data on interactions. (Those
efforts earned the insightful comments that, "Readers of this journal are
not used to seeing work like this, therefore it should not be published
here," and "The authors attempt to model data from continuous
interactions, but there is no reason they could not have designed the
experiments to produce discrete data that would be more familiar to readers
of this journal." That from reviewers for a leading journal on
experimental social psychology.)
None of that stuff will remain. You will see a description of the setting,
the task, the models, and the data. And you will see my assertions that the
results have implications that go beyond just the social sciences.
Ken, you have helped me realize, once and for all, that I am not a social
scientist. I am not a behavioral scientist. I am not a neuroscientist. I
am a pseudo-scientist fascinated by the phenomenon of control, especially
by interactive coordinated control, and by the fact that I can study it and
model it, even if the circumstances I can model are simple, by my own
(unscientific) standards.
If you ever get around to reading my little papers, I think your reactions
can be predicted with near certainty. Try the earliest, least sophisticated
one first -- A control-theory analysis of interference during social
tracking, in Wayne Hershberger's book, Volitional action: conation and
control, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1989. That is the simplest of my
interactive programs -- two targets, two cursors, two control handles. One
of the handles affects only one of thecursors, but the other handle affects
both cursors. (Exciting, isn't it -- think of the possibilities for real
social interactions of the kind you like!)
In the experimental runs described in that chapter, two people track -- one
unavoidably interferes with the cursor controlled by the other, but both do
very well on the task. And two PCT models, behaving in simulation,
duplicate what the people did, both after and before the fact of performance
by the people. Not much chance for a lot of communication and collaboration
on problem solving during those runs, but a clear demonstration of an
experimental procedure, for work with dyads, that produces crisp hard data,
and a demonstration that the performance of the two people can be modeled as
though it were produced by two simple control systems, each controlling
its own perceptual signal to match its own reference signal.
I did not have room for in that chapter to report on runs in which a person
and a PCT model performed together, with results nearly identical to those
from two people. Together with the data in the chapter on the "dyadic stick
wiggling task" (the PCT equivalent of social card stacking and head
scratching), these person-model runs show one way two independent agents can
interact through mutual influences on variables in a shared environment.
The simple experiment in the chapter can be elaborated in any of several
ways.
For example, four people can be shown the arrangement, but with a piece of
string looped around each control stick and extending in two directions.
If they are then asked to find a way to perform the task in such a way that
each person uses only one hand and only pulls on one end of a string, guess
what happens?
When the quartet solves the problem and is tracking nicely, four brains are
participating. In the original chapter, there were two brains.
The sticks can be replaced by a mouse, with movements in X replacing one
stick, and in Y, the other. Now one person can use one hand and arm (and
presumably one hemisphere of one brain) and duplicate the performance of two or
four
people -- and two independent PCT models nearly perfectly duplicate the
person's results. And I begin to experience a sense of mystery and awe.
The mouse can be attached to a stick that acts as a splint on the person's
arm, so the person now uses only movements around one ball joint (and
presumably a more circumscribed volume of brain) to duplicate all of the
previous results -- as do two independent control models.
One finger on the mouse -- less brain -- same results. And the PCT models
..
When the equipment is ready, the next step will be two EMG electrodes on my
arm, with the two signals amplified and used to affect the two cursors in
the same arrangement described in the chapter. The environment will be
as first reported, but now the parts of one brain that produce the same
effects on the environment will presumably be even smaller.
You are right, Ken, interactive tracking is not social in the usual sense.
And it is not traditional experimental psychology, or neuroscience, either.
Instead, tracking (garden variety, or intractive) is a demonstration of
something that includes, but goes far beyond, ordinary social science.
The original arrangement described in the chapter can lead in yet another
direction, one that even more clearly encroaches on the traditional social
sciences. The person whose handle affects both cursors can decide to do
something other than the original tracking. The possibilities (all of which
we have exlored, none of which we have published) include:
(1) helping or aiding the other person (by adopting a reference to produce
the same result as the aided person; either with or witout telling the
helpee -- think of the possibilities for social research);
(2) controlling the actions of the other person (in the radical behavioral
interpretation of control), by disturbing the other person's cursor in such a
way that IF THE "CONTROLLED" PERSON DESIRES TO REMAIN IN CONTROL OF A
RELATIONSHIP THAT INCLUDES THE CURSOR, the "controlled" person must move her
or his handle in the manner desired by the "controlling" (that is to say,
disturbing) other.
(3) cooperating, to create a pattern, or a set of trajectories of cursors,
that neither person can create alone (while using only one hand). Options 1
and 2, described above, can occur whether or not the target person knows the
intentions of the other, but cooperation requires deliberate collaboration,
in the best Median sense, Ken.
(4) pure conflict, when the two people select different reference signals,
calling for impossibly different states of the same cursor.
Two PCT models can duplicate all of those options, as can a PCT model
interacting with a person, as can a person using two hands. The only
exception is option 4 -- I cannot, nor has anyone else I asked been able to,
adopt two impossibly different goals, one to be achieved with each hand. I
just sit there thinking, this can't be done -- this is silly -- but I know
there are times in real life when I DO adopt conflicting intentions -- why
not in this situation?
There are more options, but I am late for dinner. These are just a few of
the possibilities for research and modeling with what is about the simplest
interactive tracking task I can imagine. This is not the program for the
cooperative task that Rick and Bill have described a few times during
recent conversations on the net; that one holds even more interesting
possibilities, especially for people with equipment to record and analyze
interactions, as in video recording.
I do not think of what I am doing as psychology, neuroscience, social
science, behavioral science, cognitive science -- any other traditional
label I can imagine. I am studying and trying to understand interactive
control. I am satisfied with that.
Until later,
Tom Bourbon