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Posted-Date: Fri, 04 Sep 92 13:51:33 PDT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Fri, 4 Sep 1992 13:51:33 PDT
From:         marken@AERO.ORG
Subject:      Manipulation and models

[From Rick Marken (920904.1330)]

Bill Powers (920904.0700) --

>I believe passionately in autonomy, not as a recommendation but as a
>fact. It is the nature of an organism to be autonomous. And it is the
>nature of an organism to control. When the one is invalidated by the
>other, we must consider this to be a malfunction, whether it is one
>person or a whole society that is destroying its own means of
>survival.

Well, there's the frontpiece to my book.

That was a wonderful post, Bill . I particularly liked your succint
description of the "real life" lessons of PCT:

>We need to develop a little
>respect for the will of others. We need to figure out what people want
>and try to give it to them, instead of withholding it to gain an
>advantage over them. We need a conception of life together that goes
>beyond competition, swaggering, and bullying. The message of control
>theory is that yes, you can control other people, but no, you can't
>make them hold still for it, and no, you're not going to get what you
>really want from life in that way.

Each of these suggestions will be a disturbance to one system concept
or another. I bet some people just can't accept the idea that a society
can work without competition. Others will claim that non-contingent giving is
the path to sloth. Others will say that a society without controllers will be
chaos. Similarly, each of these suggestions will be consistent with one
system concept or another as well.

What PCT offers (that goes beyond ideology) is a MODEL.

Capitalists can argue for the importance of incentives, competition and
lack of control while communists argue for the importance of non-
contingent giving, cooperation and strong controls. But control
theorists can take out their model of hierarchical control systems and
show what will happen IF people give without contingency  compete without
restraint, cooperate, provide incentives, and try to control.  The point of
doing PCT is to develop the model person (based on research) so that this
modeling effort can be done with a high degree of coherence and fidelity.
Then, instead of a fight between ideologies, it will just come down to
whether people want to believe the model or not.  People can hold out
against the models (there are still "flat earthers" running around); but
most people do seem to eventually come around, at least when the model is
very good.

I would like to suggest that the debate about control of behavior could
be settled rather quickly if we could sit down in front of a model hierarchical
control system (I volunteer my spreadsheet model) and see what really
happens when we try to control it. Eventually, we should be able to link
our terminology to operations on the model. Then our arguments
about whether or not control systems can be controlled could be aimed
at the model (which can readily be changed, if necessary) instead of at one
another (who cannot be so readily changed).


Best regards

Rick

     **************************************************************

Richard S. Marken                   USMail: 10459 Holman Ave
The Aerospace Corporation                   Los Angeles, CA 90024
E-mail: marken@aero.org
(310) 336-6214 (day)
(310) 474-0313 (evening)
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