Continuing the discussion from Your brain may not actually make decisions:
Hi Rick, this might seem like semantic quibbling, but bear with me as I think through why your post didn’t quite “land” with me.
I wonder if you can see that your way of phrasing things could be read as implying:
your guess is that
PCT being “about a phenomenon most behavioural scientists don’t recognize or fully understand” is the cause of
my expressing that I like something that reassures me on the cult/bubble front. (via some kind of “PCT seems like a cult” phenomenon.)
[I know you didn’t mention my expressing that, but presumably that was the bit of my post you were responding to]
If that were the guess then it doesn’t seem consistent with PCT!
Similarly:
Maybe it’s obvious, but perhaps I may be so annoying as to try and render it non-obvious, as PCT’s implications and Bill’s statements don’t have a causal effect here. All I know for certain about people that have somehow been labelled “behavioural scientist” is that they are living perceptual control systems, each with a quite idiosyncratic perceptual hierarchy. We probably can’t get far without having some at least initial guesses beyond that…but if we’re going to guess rather than ask or investigate, the guess should be about what kinds of things they tend to control for. Shouldn’t it?
On this topic, I liked Mary Powers’ intervention “Is PCT a religion?” Living Control Systems Publishing
…and now I check I see you named there Rick! 
To the extent that it’s worth while to make generalised guesses about ‘behavioural scientists’, if something is happening relevant to this “seems like a cult” thing then my guess would be that they too might have systems concepts engaged in their work. So we and behavioral scientists probably have that in common!
I like that about PCT too. I’m reading Robertson and Powers’ Intro to Modern Psychology, and so coming back to the rubber band experiment for the umpteenth time…this time getting ready to set up a spreadsheet to get to grips with the calculations around the loop. [Don’t worry, I intend to get to your Mind Readings spreadsheet before too long too].
I liked a phrase I read there, “familiarity and self-persuasion”:
With a little practice, you could become so adept at interpreting sensory phenomena as consequences of action that this would begin to seem the only reasonable view. But if mere familiarity and self-persuasion were the only reasons you had for looking at behavior in this way, you would be no better off than those who hold the other view for similar reasons. - (Robertson and Powers)
One thing I find reassuring is when PCT authors shows signs of being aware that they too might be being lulled by “familiarity and self-persuasion”.
A good example of this is in Carey, Tai and Griffiths’ Deconstructing Health Inequity: A Perceptual Control Theory Perspective, where along with a lot of paradigm-busting talk they say:
“We continued to entertain the idea that we were misunderstanding the literature and unintentionally building straw men that we could knock down”.
I guess I’m trying to reconcile two things I find in PCT: a certainty, but usually a kind of openness and curiosity as well - recognising that we absolutely know one thing about people i.e. that they control, while appreciating that given the idiosyncracies of 8 billion people’s hierarchies, there are approximately 8 billion gajillion things we don’t know about people.
