Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1992 11:18:14 CST
From:         John Gabriel <gabriel@EID.ANL.GOV>
Subject: Re: One Whole Minute

[Gabriel to Powers 921214 10:28]

Bill, I'm reposting your msg in full because I have readers
not on CSGNET. Thanks for your reply, mine follows lower down the
page(s); I think the discussion is very worthwhile.

>[From Bill Powers (921213.0700)]

>John Gabriel, Bill Cunningham, Tom Baines, Martin Taylor, et. al.

>At the risk of alienating friends, I have to make some further
>comments on John Gabriel's post of 921211 11:12CST.

>My first impression was that we are seeing hints of a great and
>complex work by a group of people who have vast mathematical
>expertise and deep experience with the world. After a night's
>sleep, I awoke with the different impression. If this work is so
>fundamental and important, why don't I understand it? And why,
>beneath this work, does there seen to be such an unthinking
>acceptance of the premises of military philosophers? Would a
>scientific advisor to a torturer find it just as easy to become
>immersed in the technical problems, and to ignore the underlying
>repulsiveness of the whole undertaking?

>I'm perfectly aware of my limitations and my ignorance, but the
>fact is that when, as a teenager, I read Einstein's explanation
>of relativity, I may not have known what a tensor was, but I
>understood the idea perfectly well. When I read Norbert Wiener's
>account of control processes in living organisms, I may not have
>seen the relevance of stationary time series or followed his
>arguments about Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, but I understood
>how a control process worked and what it had to do with behavior.
>When people describe a phenomenon of nature and offer a clean and
>simple explanation of it, I usually understand what they are
>getting at. So, I think, do most people.

>When I read your post, John, I could not figure out what you and
>the others were getting at. Beneath my surface reaction, I was
>wondering "Why are they making it so complicated? What are all
>these theorems supposed to be about? What makes them think that
>any of this has anything to do with reality? Are these people
>really of such a different order of human intelligence that they
>can see simplicity and order in such seemingly vague and abstract
>conjectures?"

>Frankly, I don't think that the answer to the last question is
>"yes" for ANYBODY who works in the field of human behavior. What
>I see in morning's light is mathematics leading people around by
>the nose, while they struggle to find real applications that will
>give the resulting abstractions some shred of meaning. I see a
>search for understanding of the mysteries of human behavior
>misdirected, so it becomes a search for mathematical truths in an
>imaginary universe.

>What bothers me most is that this project of yours seems to
>accept that the solution to human problems like warfare is to
>figure out better ways to defeat the enemy. This is a total
>misapprehension of the nature of the enemy and of the problem. It
>bespeaks an acceptance of warfare as a fact of nature, something
>we simply have to live or die with and about which we can do
>nothing at all except to try to come out the winners. To applyPCT in this way
 is
> like using Galileo's telescope to hammer a
>nail.

>In PCT there is the potential for understanding human conflict
>and its resolution. That kind of understanding, not the endless
>improvement of physical and organizational might, is what will
>finally make the inthinkable undoable.

>I wish you all would do the simple tracking experiments in Demo 1
>and Demo 2, and ponder the outcome of the experiments at the end
>of Demo 2. Here we have a model that will explain a simple motor
>behavior carried out by a human being for one minute. It explains
>it by predictively simulating the detailed movements by which a
>person counteracts a random disturbance. If you fit the model
>carefully, you can then predict the person's movements for any
>new pattern of random disturbances, for a whole minute, with an
>accuracy of about 3 percent of the peak-to-peak excursion of the
>control handle. As Tom Bourbon has showed, you can predict with
>this sort of accuracy how the person will behave a year later;
>you can get the same predictively accuracy for 100 people picked
>at random. Rick Marken has done the similar experiments in two
>dimensions and with more complex controlled variables. If you
>didn't look very carefully at the traces of real and simulated
>handle movements, you wouldn't know which one represented the
>human being's behavior and which one represented the model's
>behavior.

>Think about it. We can predict human behavior with this accuracy
>for a WHOLE MINUTE. Tom Bourbon has shown that this can be done
>with two people interacting in the presence of unpredictable
>disturbances; two models will interact in the same way, with the
>same accuracy, for ONE WHOLE MINUTE. Rick Marken has shown that
>you can predict motions in two dimensions, with two-dimensional
>disturbances and with a coupling between the dimensions, for ONE
>WHOLE MINUTE.

>There has never been this kind of ability to predict any human
>behavior whatsoever in the whole previous history of the life
>sciences -- not even the simplest of behaviors. Most
>psychologists, cyberneticists, physiologists, and so on who have
>seen this demonstration or who have reviewed articles about some
>version of it have completely missed the point: they have never
>seen anything remotely resembling this kind of accuracy of
>prediction of behavior; as a consequence, they miss seeing it
>altogether. They don't understand what the demonstration is
>showing. You can say to them, ten minutes later, "Control theory
>has the potential of explaining behavior with the precision of a
>physical theory," and they will immediately launch into
>counterarguments about variability and population statistics and
>individual differences and environmental influences and  such
>like, proving conclusively that they didn't understand what was
>in front of their eyes.

>One whole minute, with one person or two persons, in one
>dimension or two dimensions. That's the best anyone in the worldcan do right
> now. That's where the true science of behavior
>stands. The next step is not to solve the problems of military
>organization or the causes of crime or the behavioral effects of
>chemical concoctions or the complexities of adaptive control in a
>network of 1E10 neurons with 1E14 connections. It is to try for
>two minutes, three people, three dimensions, five different kinds
>of controlled variables, always demanding that the prediction be
>precise and work for every individual. This is how a science of
>human behavior will arrive on this planet for the first time.

>The vast complexities of human interactions will still be there
>when this science of behavior has become able to handle them.
>They will also still be unsolved by any of the present
>approaches, even those that are trying to leapfrog all of the
>hard and detailed work that is actually needed to bring PCT to
>maturity. I think that any researcher who is trying to get lucky
>with applying PCT to vast systems is wasting time. We are still
>crouched beside Galileo, watching balls roll down an inclined
>plane and timing them with our pulses. Nobody can imagine what
>future will follow from these first primitive experiments. Of
>course that future will never arrive if everyone insists on
>trying to make a laser with the materials and knowledge available
>to Galileo.
>------------------------------------------------------------
>Best,

>Bill P.

Bil, I read, and I think I understand you. Put very simply, you are saying
that a human being can follow a random movement of a cursor with a finger,
and that this is explained by control theory.

The gang of three are interested in the reasons why people running software
projects don't seem to be able to follow what is, at least to the gang
of three, very obvious behaviour of a software project that tells
an observer "It's not under control" in the very exact detailed sense
of your book, and why the managers can't close the feedback loop.

If we take your premises, and the view that if we scale ALL the
time constants by three or four orders of magnitude the control problem
doen't change, your and Tom Bourbon's achievements of explaining control
for a minute in hand movement OUGHT to be applicable to managing software
projects - the time scales do go from milliseconds to seconds, for
fast actuators, and from seconds to hours for slow ones.

Why then are almost all software projects so badly screwed up, and why are
a very few great successes. Having been priveleged to participate in both
successes and failures, having put some five years of my life into what
turned out to be a very instructive failure for which I was largely
responsible, and seeing others make the same mistakes as I did, I'd
like to alleviate some of the frustration and waste I see out there
in softwareland.

I`d like to leave the answer on behalf of the gang of five to one
of our members who has more combat experience than I do. I think
there are a number of possible candidates, and one of them will step
forward onto the stage if we wait, and give them a chance to plan before
action.

About the mathematics. It's really just the way I think. It's only deep
to those who haven't happened to read the dictionary and grammar for
the lingo. But as Avery might tell us, we can't neglect to consider
that fact. And for me at least, it's both terrifying and wonderful
that a topologogist can't tell the difference between a donut and a
coffee cup. Terrifying because such abstraction misapplied leads to
some of the mistakes the Kennedy Camelot made. Wonderful because
the ability to abstract like that can lead to great discoveries
about things that are similar, but where the similarity is hidden by
a host of details. And that's just as true for Priestly's discovery
of oxygen, as it is for today's high energy physics, which is where
the mathematics I use to leverage insights comes from.

I don't think we are really as far apart on that issue as may seem to
be the case. But we all act on our perceptions.

Finally I want to reverse myself. I think the debate is proper for
the public forum, and I'm honoured to participate. Thankyou for your
patience and careful thought. There's a quote some place about all
travelling to the same ultimate destination. I'm proud to be among
your company if you will accept  me there.

Very Sincerely and in Friendship

                John (gabriel@athens.eid.anl.gov)
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