[From Bill Powers (2005.08.19.0822 MDT)]
Dag Forssell (2005 Aug 18, 10:00 pm)]
I have just updated the website www.livingcontrolsystems.com to reflect Tim Carey's book (still being polished before final relase later this year).
Dag, that web site is looking better and better. Your little piece, Once Around the Loop, has shaped up into a really good paper -- it pays to keep fussing with things.
Now at the risk of embarrassing Rick, I have to write the following.
I would like to call special attention to an appendix that is mentioned here:
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/files/powers_runkel_contents.html\
The Appendix is by Rick Marken, and it's called Teaching Dogma in Psychology. It's Rick's farewell address at Augsburg College, in which he gives his reasons for not wanting to teach conventional ideas any more. It's a wonderful introduction to control theory for psychologists, including all the reasons why psychologists might and might not want to learn about it. Reading it now, some 20 years after it was written, I realize that Rick's grasp of control theory and its implications was fully formed even in the first year that the Control Systems Group existed.
I think that many people who have joined the Hate Rick Club forget that they themselves played a major part in creating the escalating conflicts that nearly wrecked CSGnet, and for that matter, the CSG. It may be true that when goaded sufficiently, Rick resorted to counterproductive modes of argument (e.g., he lost it). But that was never the beginning. The beginning was almost always a statement by someone who knew less than Rick did about PCT, or at least forgot, temporarily, what he or she knew.
I wish that people would examine what preceded the blowups, which was almost always someone trying to push some idea that was really not consistent with PCT -- and which Rick, lacking my tact (or the tact that I once thought I had), immediately objected to, quite correctly if not always gently. In reply, Rick was attacked for being a thought policeman, for being closed-minded, for being arrogant in insisting on "PCT purity." And of course that infuriated him, and Rick infuriated is not the Rick of Teaching Dogma in Psychology. When he is angry Rick pours gasoline on the flames. Or he used to. But I have yet to see a case where he lit the match.
I have recently been told (not for the first time) by one of my oldest and dearest friends in the CSG that if Rick shows up at a meeting, this person will leave. If Rick is included in a discussion, this person will cease to participate. There are others who have expressed similar, if not quite such extreme, views -- despite the considerable degree of support given to Rick by a significant group of others on CSGnet. What all these people cite as justification is what was said at the peak of a conflict. Nobody seems to want to consider how there came to be a conflict in the first place, before the escalation got under way. I have never seen a one-sided conflict. I don't think that there is a single person involved who could say he or she is free of responsibility for making things worse, then worse again, and then still worse. Each person, focusing on the intransigence and excesses of the other, fails to see his or her own intransigence and excesses. If you simply focus on who said the most hurtful things just before everything collapsed, you will miss the point that the phenomenon of conflict arises from opposing goals and actions, and an inability to reorganize fast enough. It takes at least two to create, maintain, and increase a conflict. But it only takes one to nurture it for years and years and years.
After considerable wresting with my own conflicts, I have decided that I will not make the choice I am being pressured to make. I expect other people to resolve conflicts, not to exacerbate them. I will not take sides in what is basically a pathological social relationship. I do not want to encourage people who indulge in tempers or hold childish grudges -- either one -- or who otherwise hunker down and refuse to change. Such behavior is against
the interests of the CSG and a direct threat to my life's work.
Read the Appendix linked to above. See if you think the man who write that eloquent farewell address as he uprooted himself to follow the banner of PCT should be declared anathema and banned from the company of all Right Thinkers. Myself, I think that would be a really dumb idea and I don't intend to do it.
Best,
Bill P.