Please substitute the word explain for describe in my reply and continue.
In one class of cases not all participants in the collective perceive the variable concurrently. Whoever is perceiving the variable acts to affect its state while they are perceiving it, given appropriate relation between gain and size of error. (“Damn! I’m going to call Town Hall. This pothole is getting bigger. Somebody might break an axel.”)
In what reply? Continue what?
In this case, the size of the pothole is the controlled variable and, presumably, both Town Hall and the person who called have the same reference for that value of that variable: zero. If Town Hall is responsive at all they will fix it, bringing it to the reference state of the Town Hall and of the person who called. So the the size of the pothole ends up at the non-virtual reference state of both the caller and Town Hall.
This fixation on conflict may shift if you take your own advice and look at phenomena first. Kent and Martin have referred to numerous examples of social phenomena. You can provide others if you look around at your built world. Look at something that didn’t grow there or walk fly swim crawl or flutter there in the Darwinian ecological world that we call ‘nature’. Look at some artifact or social arrangement. What disturbances tend to disrupt it or put it in disarray, disturb its integrity or usefulness. (Yes, artifacts commonly have uses in environmental feedback paths.) What maintains the integrity of that artifact in the face of such disturbances? I previously gave the example of crosswalks painted on pavement. I just gave the example of potholes in pavement. Money I mentioned. How about music, western harmonic structure or gamelan or Sino-Tibetan and what is a disturbance to either. The artifactual universe of collectively controlled variables surrounds you. Collective control sustains your way of life for you. Consult any novel or film depicting catastrophic collapse of civilization for illustration. Or more optimistically, imagining our way in a better way, The ministry for the future by Kim Robinson. Or for the great variety of ways our ancestors have experimented with together in communities, The dawn of everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Collectively controlled variables everywhere you look. But you do have to look. At phenomena. Social phenomena.
Please reply to what I originally said, with the word ‘describe’ replacing the word ‘explain’.
My fixation on conflict is because Kent’s model IS A MODEL OF VIRTUAL CONTROL RESULTING FROM CONFLICT!!
As have I, in the Social Control chapter of SCLS. Indeed,one reason I have repeatedly given for not being a fan of Kent’s model is because I can’t think of any examples collective control that involve conflict (other than those I’ve mentioned: arm wrestling, tug of war and war itself). So I can’t think of any interesting examples of collective control phenomena to which his model applies.
What did you originally say? Why not just post what you said again with the word “describe” replacing the word “explain”?
–Rick
Jeez! Ever heard of the ‘imagination mode’?!
Hi Rick, yes, that last example is where we are getting at, and becomes particularly interesting if we think that different people inevitably (because their brains developed independently within their own craniums) have slightly different input functions for a variable, slightly different input signals from their perspective on the environment, and slightly different reference values for the variable, AND that control is hierarchical (the high level controlled variable is ‘car off snow’ but the lower level variables used to achieve this may be different (e.g. perceive car moving forwards; perceive snow melting; perceive a non-snowy path ahead), then collective control seems like the best way to describe it. Your summary is a handy simplification that is probably the most correct it could be as a simplification, but it doesn’t hold at a granular and multi-temporal level of analysis…
Substitute “example” for “case”. The point in this class of cases, of which this is one example, is that because not all participants perceive the variable concurrently, there is no conflict. This removes it from your fixation on conflict. You counter by denying that the state of a pothole in a public road is a collectively controlled variable. You deny this although it is perceived by many individuals in a public, any one or any plurality of whom may control their perceptions of it (swerving to avoid it, slowing to reduce the bump, calling Town Hall, stopping the patrol car and putting out a trestle with a blinking yellow light, consulting plans, schedules, and budgets, in one’s office far from the pothole, etc.).
It is too easy to suppose that this ‘pothole’ is a unitary homogeneous entity which is perceived in the same way by all who perceive it and who may seek to control such perceptions. It takes some memory of actual situations and some imagination of possible situations to adduce additional participants in the environing public, to see differences as to what aspects of a collectively controlled variable are perceived, and as to what aspects of the collectively controlled variable are affected by their diverse control capacities and processes. In an odd way, a pothole because of its seeming concrete specificity is too abstract an example—the many participants are not personally known to you and perhaps seem facelessly unknowable, and their diverse perceptual inputs, circumstances, and means of control are accordingly accessible only by imagination.
You object that in the example the two named participants have the same reference value, which you quantify as “zero”. (Odd looking asphalt patch, that zero.) But they are not the only participants, and the reference values of participants often differ for reasons including those that Warren adduced and because they have different uses of the given artifact in environmental feedback paths for their idiosyncratic control of other variables.
Suppose (heaven forefend) that your computer has a problem such that you can’t use it in numerous environmental feedback paths for controlling a great variety of variables which you are accustomed to control thereby. Let us stipulate (whether it is true or not) that you are not a computer technician. In this circumstance, you may well call on someone to fix it so let us further suppose that you do. She is also controlling numerous variables, some of them by environmental feedback paths that pass through your computer and its proper functioning or lack thereof. One of them might be a perception of you buying a new computer, but we’ll set that cynical thought aside. She is perceiving problems to be solved, money to be earned, creditworthiness, and many other variables which are to be controlled through her interventions in aspects of your computer that you do not perceive and therefore do not control, but which are aspects of what is now a collectively controlled variable (your computer functioning). Suffice to say that the variables that she controls which (when controlled well) result in you perceiving that your computer is fixed, and the variables that you control when you perceive that your computer is fixed, are largely not the same variables; I did stipulate that you are not a computer technician.
Within the participating population are differences in what aspects of the collectively controlled variables are perceived and what aspects of the collectively controlled variables are affected by control processes.
Continuing on, her perception of your satisfaction is not your feeling of satisfaction, payment of money is an asymmetrical transaction, and so on. These variables and more are controlled by feedback paths that pass through the functioning of your computer.
Here, it is important to recognize that controlling some distal variable by a feedback path that passes through a collectively controlled variable is a part of, and a form of, participation in the collective control of that variable. To see this, note that disturbance of the collectively controlled variable is resisted when it consequently disturbs your control of the distal variable via the collectively controlled variable.
So start thinking about examples of collective control that don’t involve conflict. Oh, right, you deny that this is possible.
Kent denies this. He probably knows his model of collective control better than you do.
It is evident from your words (such as those quoted above) that you are constraining the word “model” to computer implementations, and that for you “model” is a computer implementation of the PCT model of a behavioral situation. Because there are no other computer simulations of collective control, for you the words “Kent’s model” refer to Kent’s demo programs in the early 1990s.
There’s an important distinction between the PCT model of a behavioral situation and a computer implementation that simulates that situation by replicating data measured in it.
A revision of your statement would say
I think Kent’s simulations of conflict are excellent, but I think he takes the wrong message from them. The message he takes from his simulations is that conflict can produce “social stability” in the form of a variable being kept at a virtual reference level. The message I take from his simulations is that conflict can be very destructive to the individuals involved.
You are saying that Kent arrived at his understanding of collective control by generalizing from his computer demos of conflict. I believe Kent arrived at his understanding of collective control by many years of observing social phenomena with ‘control theory glasses’ and that his computer demos were a first demonstration of principles.
Kent has acknowledged that conflict is a limiting case involving very small populations (two, three, or few). Even within that constraint, his demonstrations of principle in the early 1990s are extremely artificial. Without intervention of higher levels of control conflict does result in ‘stabilization’ of the contested variable at an intermediate level from which in each contestant there persists an error signal and a control output affecting the variable. But higher levels of control are never absent in living control systems. In arm wrestling or a tug of war higher level control of participation in the game overrides other systems (no doubt quit archaic evolutionary inheritances) which on meeting such resistance would ordinarily control alternative variables instead, as illustrated by the video I posted of W at the locked door in Shanghai.
But from that beginning 30 years ago Kent has gone on to develop how PCT can model more complex social arrangements and interactions. Working with him, Martin has shown logical and mathematical considerations that must be taken into account for building computer simulations of more complex examples. However, no one with the necessary skills has been interested in building simulations and demos of such complexity.
Kent has affirmed that he lacks computer skills and the knowledge and training in the design and execution of psychological experiments.
In addition, the requirements for experiment wrt social interactions are very different from the requirements wrt monadic control phenomena such as tracking and pursuit. This fact you have ignored. Instead, you simplify social phenomena to a form that is comfortably within the scope of simulation programming that is most familiar to you. This simplification is evident in your perceiving every example of collective control as a conflict and in your substitution of region (i.e. proximity) in place of esteem in Labov’s findings.
No one will fault you if you are uninterested in tackling this. But if to justify this to yourself you need to deny the existence of social phenomena don’t expect very many people to believe you. Maybe naive extremes of ‘libertarians’ and ‘rational agent’ economists will find it convincing.
RM: …Indeed, one reason I have repeatedly given for not being a fan of Kent’s model is because I can’t think of any examples collective control that involve conflict (other than those I’ve mentioned: arm wrestling, tug of war and war itself). So I can’t think of any interesting examples of collective control phenomena to which his model applies.
Why do we need democracy, parties, elections and elections campaigns? I think we need them and/or they exist because we human beings as members of a society inevitably have different variables we control (with different gains) and different references for similar variables. From these differences follow conflicts: direct conflicts from different references for same variables and more indirect (resource) conflicts from different controlled variables. There could be different ways to solve these conflicts. One possibility is the Hobbesian war of all against all where the strongest participants may oppress or kill their opponents. The Hobbesian story continues that because the results of these wars are insecure and because all control for safety people made a social contract and gave the highest power of decision to the sovereign ruler. Did this end the conflicts? No, I don’t think so, even though it stopped the internal war and stabilized the current situation of oppression (and changed the wars external between the sovereigns). But back to democracy: We use to have elections every few years where we elect our representatives to the sovereign administrative organs like parliaments. Does this end the conflicts? No, I don’t think so. Democratic society is much less oppressive than feudal because in principle everyone can say their word but this does not mean that everyone can as well control their variables. Just because the conflicts remain we need repetitive elections. The war of all against all is now the almost continuous electoral campaign – it is expensive but not as expensive than the war.
So we have continuous conflicts in our society. Can you imagine it? Are our societies instable? Not very, not most of the time. Is it easy to change the virtual reference values of those conflicted variables? The parties try it all the time. Is the situations destructive for us? Do we suffer all the time from the five hundred-fold error? Perhaps we do, but we don’t seem to care much about it. Many feel that it gives them strength – for the next campaigns.
Eetu
To me, the speculation about different input functions, different reference specifications and hierarchical control is irrelevant to whether or not something is collective control. I call it “collective control” whenever more than one control system agent is involved in the controlling.
My “simplification” was just to show that a car being pushed out of the snow by several agents is an example of collective control without conflict to which Kent’s model would apply. But I can’t think of many others. Most of the collective controlling that I see going on – such as the examples described in the Social Control chapter of SCLS --involve no conflict. So I see Kent’s model of collective control as having very limited application.
I think a model that gives a much better idea of how PCT can contribute to our understanding of collective control is Bill’s CROWD model. He built this model to show sociologists how to model collective behavior using PCT. My guess is that this model didn’t catch on because the prevailing zeitgeist in sociology demands a belief in a “collective level” explanation of collective phenomena. Bill’s approach (which, I believe, would have to be considered the PCT approach;-) explains collective phenomena in terms of the controlling done by individuals; there is no extra-individual expanation of the collective phenomena explained by the CROWD demo (forming rings, queues, etc.)
My guess is that Kent’s perfectly good model of conflict caught on as the model of collective control (or the collective control model) because the concept of a “virtual controlled variable” seems like the kind of extra- individual explanation that fits into the sociological zeitgeist (or paradigm).
I have no idea how you came to that conclusion. My point throughout this discussion has been that most examples of collective control I can think of are non-conflictive. All the examples of collective control described in The Study of Living Control Systems (SCLS) are non-conflictive: lifting a couch, flocking, divergence of pronunciation, etc.
I can think of some significant examples of collective control that are conflictive, such as creating legislation. But by and large the collective control I see is mainly cooperative, either intentionally or unintentionally (as discussed in SLCS).
What exactly is it that Kent denies? That it is a model of virtual control? That it is a model of conflict? Or that it is a model of virtual control that results from conflict? I can’t believe Kent would deny what his model clearly shows.
I didn’t know that. What is the distinction?
That’s fine with me. I consider the models (simulations if you like) and PCT to be identical. Modeling is central to PCT. As is testing the models against data. Whether you can do modeling or not, you have to understand the modeling and how those models map to actual behavior in order to be able to do a proper PCT analysis of any kind of behavior: individual behavior, collective behavior, abnormal behavior, etc.
No, I’m saying that Kent’s virtual control model applies to only a small subset of what I would call “collective control”. For example, it doesn’t apply to the flocking of birds or the development of regional dialects.
No more artificial than any of the demonstrations of principle developed by Bill Powers, many of which have been brilliantly re-written as on-line demos by my best old ex-friend Adam Matic.
Kent’s demos were excellent demonstrations of many of the principles that are involved when two control sytstems are trying to control the same perceptual variable. My only complaint about Kent’s modeling is that he hasn’t shown how this model applies to any particular example of collective control. The best way to do this would be to show how the model accounts for data collected from some relevaant example of collective control.
Well, he had enough skill to develop his marvelous spreadsheet models of conflict. I think the appropriate next step for him would be to test this model against data before going on to develop more complex models. He might find that he doesn’t need all the complexity that you imagine is needed. Look at all the different kinds of collective controlling that can be explained by the relatively simple control models that are implemented as the agents in the CROWD program.
I didn’t ignore them becuase I didn’t know they existed. In fact, I don’t think that there are different requirements for social interactions and “monadic” control phenomena. Please tell me what the difference is.
I hope you now know that I don’t perceive every example of collective control as a conflict. Indeed, as I said before, I can’t think of very many that involve conflict. More importantly, I can’t think of any collective control phenomena that involve a conflict that keeps a variable in a virtual reference state. Can you?
And I didn’t substitute region for esteem in Labov’s findings. I picked region because I could assume that people in the same region would be talking with each other more than with people in another region. I could have picked esteem rather than region as the variable that had to do with differences in pronunciaiotn but it doesn’t seem like that has much to do with who you talk to most often and it seemed to me that my best bet for accounting for Labov’s lovely data was a “control for imitation” model.
What is “this” that I am uninterested in tackling?
I don’t deny the existence of social phenomena (see SCLS ch. 7). And I don’t expect – or want – anyone to “believe” me; I want them to understand me. But I don’t expect that either. I know I’m probably just whistling in the wind here but I enjoy doing this and I feel I owe it to Bill Powers; I know I’m whistling his song, but perhaps a little more shrilly.
Yes, these are excellent examples of collective control that involve conflict. And the virtual control model could be a start at understanding these processes. But I think the difference between what happens in producing legislation – the main aim of political activity – and what happen’s in the virtual control model (at least in ostensibly democratic societies) is that the participants are (or should be) willing to take into account the pain (“error signals”) of the other participants as well as their own.
Ideally, successful democatic conflict resolution depends on all members of the collective having an interest in minimizing the overall “hurt” produced by legislation so that the resulting legislation – which is the “virtual reference state” of the variable controlled by the collective – is not simply a result of everyone trying as hard as they can to get what they want (as is currently the case in the virtual control model).
But I think there is a role for the virtual control model to play in the study of producing legislation; it could be a model that shows what would be expected in a “worst case scenario”, where it’s every agent for themselves; capitalism in tooth and claw. The result produced by the model could be compared to what actually happens. And that could be further compared to what would be the “best case” result if everyone cooperated to that each person’s error is simultaneously at a minimum.
Coincidentally, Tim Carey, who understands PCT as well as I do (because he knows that behavior IS control, the essential first step to understanding PCT) has a wonderful blog article that is very relevant to this discussion. I highly recommend it.
Yes, indeed. And I think PCT science – the approach that involves comparing model behavior to data – could contribute to understanding the best way to solve these conflicts. I suspect that any approach to minimizing the overall error in legislative conflict will require that everyone in the collective have a goal somewhat like the one stated by Powers’ and quoted in Tim’s blog article: “The childhood of the human race is far from over. We have a long way to go before most people will understand that what they do for others is just as important to their well-being as what they do for themselves.”
Unfortunately, the childhood of the human race is, indeed, far from over, though. Which is why we still have free-market afficionados who are committed to the idea that what they do for themselves is just as, if not more, important for the well being of others as it is for themselves. That is, they believe that greed is good. And they’ve got the money and power to prove it.
I think one important thing has been forgotten or dismissed in this discussion about collective (or social) control, namely the (source of) disturbance or the “common enemy”. I think that into the models should be added as one more “agent” the source of disturbance which its own gain and reference. Of course it is not a real controller but it can behave as if it were. I mean that the (virtual or not) controlled variable has some (stable or changing) value also when the real controllers are not controlling it and this value is as if the disturbances reference.
Here and there in the literature and discussions is mentioned “overwhelming disturbance”. In those cases the gain of the disturbance is (much) higher than the available gain of the controller.
For example if you control for a stone to be 1,5 meters above the ground but the stone is too heave and you can lift it only a few centimeters, then the disturbance’s (gravity’s) “reference” is 0 meters and its gain is quite overwhelmingly greater that yours. As a consequence your error is high. But now there comes a friend who happens to control for the same stone to be 1 meter above the ground. You and your friend have conflicting references but together you may be able to lift it at least to that 1 one meter and perhaps even some centimeters above it. Now in spite of your conflict you control much better than you would alone and thus without a conflict. In this case the conflict is beneficial for the controllers because the “conflict” with the disturbance can be at least partially solved by the conflictual collective control.
So there is no strict and fixed borderline between collaborative and conflictual collective control but it depends on conditions. Because of our individual differences which Warren mentioned it seems quite improbable that in any collaboration all participants would have exactly same controlled variables and exactly same references for them. Instead there is always also a lesser or greater conflict. But in any case the control tends to create stabilities which in happy cases are more or less beneficial to all or most participants – even if no one were absolutely satisfied.
Eetu
Actually, there are two sources of disturbance that were neither forgotten nor dismissed in the discussion of Kent’s collective control model. One was the active disturbance of the effect of each agent’s actions on the commonly controlled variable; to the extent that the agents have different references for the state of that variable, what each does to move the variable to their preferred reference state pushes it away from the reference state preferred by the others.
The other source of disturbance was passive in the sense that it was not generated by any agent. The fact that this passive disturbance has little or no effect on the commonly controlled variable is what allows us to see that this variable is being maintained in a virtual reference state.
It’s not clear whether you are describing an active or passive disturbance, but it doesn’t matter since both types of disturbance are already part of the model.
In Kent’s model, it’s not the controlled variable that is virtual; it’s the reference state of the controlled variable that is virtual. And when there are no controllers controlling a variable, the value of that variable is never in a reference state of any kind, real, virtual or whatever. It simply varies along with whatever forces (disturbances) are affecting it.
I’ve seen causal models used to explain control phenomena but this is the first time (since reading Aristotle, anyway) that I’ve seen a control model used to explain a causal phenomenon.
Yes, that is demonstrated in Kent’s model when the agents have the same reference for the controlled variable.
True, there is no borderline. But there is a gradient between collaborative and conflictual control and it is very steep. The benefits of having more than one person controlling the same variable are greatest when there is zero difference between the references of the agents involved. As this difference increases these benefits decline very quickly to become huge liabilities with none of the agents getting the commonly controlled variable into their desired state so that the error in each agent increases exponentially.
We’re not talking about modeling physics or environmentally present living control systems here, we’re talking about perceptions constructed within LCSs and projected by them into the environment as though ‘real’. (We all do this all the time, of course, with varying degrees of justification.)
Perception of an “enemy” is very often a collectively controlled perception. Whether or not collectively controlled, it is a perception of a source of past, present, or potential disturbances to one’s control.
In polemics against S-R psychology it’s been important to say that the supposed stimulus (the disturbance) need not even be perceived for the CS to resist its effect on the CV. But of course the disturbance may be perceived, it may be traced to its source, and effective control may be directed there rather than to the CV.
The perception of an “enemy” attributes agency to a source of disturbances. The attributing of agency by the annoyed control system is quite independent of whether the source of disturbance is a ‘real’ control system, a virtual control system, or not a control system at all.
Personally, I’d be unlikely to attribute agency to a big stone, and to perceive that difficulty lifting it was due to its active resistance to my disturbing it. If I were trying to move it out of its embedment in the ground I might say “this stubborn stone just won’t budge!” but this can only be jocular, not a serious attribution of agency, if we think about it and place it within the collectively controlled perceptions that constitute our culture. But we do commonly talk that way. “This doggone ___ won’t cooperate!” And if we are attentive to our own subjective experience it might be difficult to deny there is an impulse to attribute agency, especially adverse or malign agency, contrary to our scientific understandings.
My cat is often enough mistrustful what some inanimate object might do, but how to discern whether some perception of animacy is in play. Researchers have attempted to tease this out. Have they succeeded? For example:
Abdai, Judit; Bence Ferdinandy; Cristina Baño Terencio; Ákos Pogány; & Ádám Miklósi (2017). Perception of animacy in dogs and humans. Biology Letters 13.6. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0156
Hofrichter, R.; Siddiqui, H.; Morrisey, M. N.; & Rutherford, M. D. (2021). Early Attention to Animacy: Change-Detection in 11-Month-Olds. Evolutionary Psychology , 19.2. DOI: 10.1177/14747049211028220
Diane Poulin-Dubois, Anouk Lepage, Doreen Ferland (1996). Infants’ concept of animacy. Cognitive Development 11.1:19-36. DOI: 10.1016/S0885-2014(96)90026-X.
Attributions of animacy have a fuller place among the collectively controlled perceptions of other cultures.
The nature of power in the universe is best understood in terms of four basic philosophical assumptions shared by most native Californian groups in their world view… (1) power is sentient and the principal causative agent in the universe; (2) power is distributed differentially … and possessed by anything having "life: or the will “to act”; (3) the universe is in a state of dynamic equilibrium in relation to power; and (4) man is the central figure in an interacting system of power holders. […] Power is sentient and possesses will… potentially extant in all things… Even seemingly inanimate things may possess power. A rock which suddenly moves downhill may thereby demonstrate an ability “to act” and therefore reveal itself to be a power source. […]
Bean, L. J. (1975). Power and its Applications in Native California. The Journal of California Anthropology, 2.1:25-33; repr. in Lowell J. Bean and Thomas C. Blackburn, eds. (1976) Native Californians: A Theoretical Retrospective. Ramona, California: Ballena Press, pp. 407-420 URL: Power and its Applications in Native California on JSTOR
We are? I thought we were talking about PCT.
Huh?
Do I have to go into the archives and find places where Bill wrote “about perceptions constructed within LCSs and projected by them into the environment as though ‘real’” in order for you to accept that we’re talking about PCT?