HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
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Date:         Wed, 6 Jan 1993 09:03:50 -0800
From:         Marken@COURIER4.AERO.ORG
Subject:      Testers/Testees

[From Rick Marken (930106.0830)]

Martin Taylor and Bill Powers are right on target about tests:

 Martin Taylor (930105.1800)says:

>... it seems to me that the testers are justified in being
>happy that (more people survive the cancer longer| more
>students can read the instructions in a manual| more people are
>happy using the isntrument), even if the differences are
>measurable only statistically.  It's a question of whose
>control systems are you worrying about, the tester's or the
>testees'.

and Bill Powers (930105.2130) says:

>Precisely. The insurance company cares earnestly about the
>statistical effects of hazardous substances or conditions. The  teacher cares
>(or if certain policies are carried out, will come
>to care) about turning out class after class that scores high, as
>a population, on national tests. Mass statistics apply to masses.

>The individual, however, is well-advised to avoid being part of
>such mass systems, because the tradeoff is never in the
>individual's favor.

This is really what most social science is about -- producing
average effects on groups. Psychology is really the science
of groups; unfortunately, it thinks it is about individuals,
and this is mainly self-deception. Now that I think of it, the
only places PCT has been able to have ANY impact on
conventional psychology is where this psychology is REALLY
about individuals -- as in much of perceptual psychology,
operant psychology and clinical psychology. PCT is
a model of individuals -- so right off the bat, a hugh
amount of psychological data, based on averaging over
individuals (ie. mass data based on sample measurements)
becomes irrelevant. Of course, it would not be irrelevant
if there were almost no variance across individuals and/or
if the reliabilities of the measurements were on the order of
.99. So Martin's point is well taken -- high reliabilities are
most important if you care about individuals (testees); you
can be a lot more sloppy if you just care about getting
mass data results that satisfy yourself (the tester) -- and
so the question to the people who want to do the testing
at my company is "are you doing this for the individuals
in the company, or for yourselves"? I'm sure that they im-
agine that they are doing it for the former; my job will be
to gently point out that they are really doing it for the
latter.

By the way Martin, thanks for the wonderful "loose
canon [sic]" article from your paper; I am having it framed.

Best

Rick
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Date:         Mon, 11 Jan 1993 12:30:32 EST
From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
Subject:      reframing

[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 12:10:56)]

[ Rick Marken (930111.0900)]

>Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 11:11:11) --
>
>>The following outline of ideas from a fellow BBNer, Al Boulanger,
>>seems to me like a fruitful direction to look for certain aspects
>>of higher level control and reorganization as involved in
>>learning at those levels.
>
>Having read it I must ask "why"?

What goes on when you have an "aha!" experience?  Boulanger talks
of "housing" a problem in alternative coordinate systems.  Viewed
from one perspective, a problem is impenetrable; from another,
obvious.

In my personal experience, I draw an analogy between the
perceptions that are problematic and other, remembered
perceptions that are well known to me.  These are often physical,
spatial metaphors for perceptions that are not necessarily
spatial or even physical (in the same sense).  An "aha!" may
result in (or with, or from) a shift to a different metaphor.
The well-known perceptions (the "model" to which the analogy is
made) are very much in the background, as indeed are the
processes of analogizing; what is in the foreground are the
perceptions that are problematic.  Reframing may be a shift to a
different basis for analogy.  I suspect that each of us resorts
to remembered and imagined physical analogs to orient our
thinking and organize our perceptions when on unfamiliar ground
or in the face of unexpected perceptions in the midst of what we
had thought familiar.  I suspect that these are relatively few
for each of us, and perhaps to a degree idiosyncratic,
differences of a "family" sort accounting perhaps for some of
what was traditionally called temperament.  It seems plausible
that a mathematical treatment of their geometry would organize
them into families (not necessarily the same) in a useful and
revealing way related to Boulanger's preliminary and sketchy
ideas about coordinate systems.

There's presumably more, but this I think is the drift of the
intuition that told me this was relevant.

        Bruce
        bn@bbn.com
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Date:         Wed, 6 Jan 1993 14:21:00 -0500
From:         Len.Lansky@UC.EDU
Subject:      thanks and the seminar

 (len lansky [9201061420])

THanks to those who responded to my requestis for help with the
seminar.  Please excuse the delay.  Tom Bourbon--I hope you will
get together that outline for an intro course which you
mentioned.

I am going to use AMer Beh Scientist volume as "a text."  I have
also put together a number of posts, including Dag's inro to the
net.  I susepct the participants (3-10--do not know enrolment
yet) will be signing up, raising questions, etc.

THanks again.

len lansky
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Posted-Date: Wed, 06 Jan 93 18:46:55 PST
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Date:         Wed, 6 Jan 1993 18:46:55 PST
From:         marken@AERO.ORG
Subject:      Statistics

[From Rick Marken (930106.1800)]

Dennis Delprato (930106) --

>Those who work with psychological and social data and
>take a strict anti-statistical stance might find of
>interest an article entitled "How Hard is Hard Science,
>How Soft Is Soft Science?" authored by L. V. Hedges
>(American Psychologist, 1987, v. 42, 443-455).

What's the point of the article? That physics is
based on statistical analysis, just like psychology?
I never saw a t test or an anova in the Principia.

>My point here is that anti-statistical positions such
>as taken by operant psychologists and PCT experts might
>appear naive from the perspective of science as a whole
>unless they are qualified.

But we do qualify it -- nobody in PCT is against statistics;
we are against using statistical studies of group behavior as
a basis for understanding individual behavior. Even when
statistics are applied to individual behavior (it can be) we
argue that statistics based on a causal model of behavior
(like the general linear model) are still inappropriate --
not, in this case, because they are statistics but because
they are based on the wrong model of behavior.

For the record -- I am NOT ANTI-STATISTICS; some of my best
freinds are statistics. I am anti the inappropriate use of
statistics -- as when group data is applied to individuals
or when a linear regression model is applied to closed loop
control.

Best Regards

Rick (friend of statistics) Marken
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Date:         Tue, 12 Jan 1993 11:56:18 EST
From:         mmt@BEN.DCIEM.DND.CA
Subject: Re: reframing

[Martin Taylor 930112 11:45]
(Bruce Nevin 930111 11.11.11 to Rick Marken 930111 09.00)

>>Bruce Nevin (Mon 930111 11:11:11) --
>>
>>>The following outline of ideas from a fellow BBNer, Al Boulanger,
>>>seems to me like a fruitful direction to look for certain aspects
>>>of higher level control and reorganization as involved in
>>>learning at those levels.
>>
>>Having read it I must ask "why"?
>
>What goes on when you have an "aha!" experience?  Boulanger talks
>of "housing" a problem in alternative coordinate systems.  Viewed
>from one perspective, a problem is impenetrable; from another,
>obvious.

Rick,

The original from Boulanger was talking about how and why Perceptual Input
Functions develop as they do, even though he may not have seen it that way.
If reorganization provides an informationally efficient representation, it
will stick around.  It will be relatively noise-free and thus more readily
controllable than an informationally inefficient representation.

If my Mac had not been disconnected from the Unix system from which I mail,
I would by now have posted a working draft I wrote in 1972 on Okham (Occam
Ogham ...) 's razor that speaks to this point and much else that has been
passing the net on descriptive models, generative models, and explanation.
It uses just the same point of view as Boulanger.

When I'm reconnected (which they daily promise) I'll send it out.  I had
intended it as part of the "information leads to PCT" paper on which I am
working, but it can stand on its own.  Then Rick can ask "why" again.

Martin
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Date:         Wed, 6 Jan 1993 11:21:52 -0700
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Drifting reference levels

[From Bill Powers (930106.1115)]

Avery Andrews (930106.1856) --

>  a) conventional psychologists aren't interested explaining
>     macro-phenomena

>  b) their quantitative standards for micro-phenomena are too
>     low to prevent them from getting buried in trash.

>I have a suspicion that this is true of the institutional
>structure of psychology, though I suspect that (a) is false for
>many individual psychologists, and even more for people on the
>margins of psychology, such as AI-ers, broad minded linguists,
>etc.

The only psychologists I know of of whom these statements aren't
true are those who have discovered that there are behavioral
experiments, however simple, that will generate reproducible and
accurate results for each indivual. Once having had such an
experience, such psychologists are no longer able to go back to
the way experimental psychology has been done in the past.

---------------------------------
 RE: picking up finger, moving it, putting it back on spot with
eyes closed.

>My conjecture is that there is some component of the assortment
>of control systems involved here that is being pushed to its
>limits of resolution, kinesthetic memory being one obvious
>possibility, but there are others.

That's a start. I would want to get some instrumentation on this
before settling for a statistical summary of the results. For
example, is there any systematic drift in the kinesthetic
reference level that can be related to the movements in the time
before the finger comes down again? If I apply random (but known)
disturbances in x and y while the finger is off the paper, can I
influence the final landing position? Does the reference signal
drift with time even if the finger doesn't move while it's in the
air?

It seems to me that you could do this experiment with a mouse,
and get some real data on it.

( Moving back a little...)

>so the only useful description of the results is a statistical
>one.

That would be giving up before you even start.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Best,

Bill
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Date:         Thu, 7 Jan 1993 09:36:20 -0600
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From:         "Gary A. Cziko" <g-cziko@UIUC.EDU>
Subject:      Finding a I-O Function

[from Gary Cziko 930107.1536 GMT]

Greg Williams (930107) responding to Bill Powers (930106.2100):

Bill:

>>Well, I think I do, but if you want to put your model where your
>>mouth is, I will pay attention. Of course I expect it to be a
>>real S-R model -- no feedback allowed!

Greg:

>I think you better be explicit about what you mean by "real S-R model." The
>kind of model a behaviorist would make is one which is a function of
>observables in the external world; in this case, cursor position and velocity,
>target position, and handle position and velocity. He/she would curve-fit with
>parametric variation a function relating cursor position and velocity and
>target position to handle position and velocity through time. Is that OK?

As I had mentioned earlier, I believe that function identification using
genetic programming (a la Koza) would be a useful way of examining this
relationship including all the aspects of the cursor mentioned by Greg.

Bill, can you send me some cursor-handle data from a well-controlled
tracking task?  I know that I can generate this myself using Demo1 and
Demo2, but I don't know how to pull out the numbers.  The first 2/3 of the
data could be used for curve fitting then the last 1/3 used to test the
model.--Gary
------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary A. Cziko                    Telephone: 217.333.8527
Educational Psychology           FAX: 217.244.7620
University of Illinois           E-mail: g-cziko@uiuc.edu
1310 S. Sixth Street             Radio: N9MJZ
210 Education Building
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Date:         Tue, 12 Jan 1993 19:05:33 EST
From:         Avery Andrews <andaling@FAC.ANU.EDU.AU>
Subject:      feedback too slow

[Avery.Andrews 930111.1905]

Reading around in the Osherson, ed. `foundations of cognitive science'
(1989) I came across the claim that feedback is to slow to solve inverse
kinematic & dynamic problems for fast movements.  Where can I read about
why this claim is false or irrelevant (e.g., true only for certain
kinds of highly skilled movements that people practice enough to make
it plausible that they have elaborate feedforward schemes for).


Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
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Date:         Mon, 4 Jan 1993 11:18:15 -0700
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Arlo Guthrie

[from Mary Powers 9301.04]

Dag (the other day)

Since none of the Boomers on the net have chosen to enlighten
you:
During the Woodstock era, Arlo Guthrie (son of the late, great
Woody) wrote and performed a humongous ballad/narrative
recaptured by Gary with perfect pitch in his demo post, which
should be sung to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant".
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Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 10:41:45 -0800
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Date:         Tue, 12 Jan 1993 10:41:45 -0800
From:         Marken@COURIER4.AERO.ORG
Subject:      Re: Koza, Genetic Programming, & LISP

[From Rick Marken (930112.1030)]

Oded Maler (930112) --

 >[Gary Cziko 930112.1620  and before and others]

>The last thing I want is to cool down the enthusiasm of the first
>encounter with machine learning, inductive inference and automatic
>programming. But.

Excellent post, Oded! I found it very reinforcing!
It's nice to have the reservations expressed by an expert in this field
confirm my (as usual, completely intuitive) suspicions.

>All this does not come to undetermine the impressive HACKING
>results achieved by Koza and others.

Well put.

Best

Rick
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Date:         Mon, 4 Jan 1993 11:16:41 -0600
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From:         "Gary A. Cziko" <g-cziko@UIUC.EDU>
Subject:      Mostly for Dag (optional for others)

[from Gary Cziko 930104.1530 GMT] (I think I got "93" down pretty well now)

Dag Forssell (930103 01.10) queries:

>Nice demo. Thanks for description. Who is Arlo Guthrie?

Arlo Guthrie is a folk song singer/composer who is the son of the late
Woody Guthrie.  Woody Guthrie is considered by some to be the father of
American folk-protest songs.

In the 1960s during the Vietnam War, Arlo Guthrie sang, recorded, and made
famous (to some) the song-story "Alice's Restaurant" in which he suggested
that young men being  inducted into the U.S. military sing a part of the
song "Alice's Restaurant" at their examination.  As transcribed from the
recording:

>And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know
>somebody in a similar situation, or _you_ may be in a similar
>situation,and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing
>you can do and that's walk into the shrink whereever you are, just
>walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's
>restaurant.".  And walk out.  You know, if one person, just one person
>does it they may think he's really sick and won't take him.  And if
>two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both
>faggots and they won't take either of them.  And three people, three,
>can you imagine, three people walking in sing a bar of Alice's
>Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization.  And
>can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking
>in sing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.  And friends they
>may thinks it's a movement.
>
>And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre
>Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it
>come's around on the guitar.

I think the inspiration for the end of my demo post should be clear (I
would never use the word "faggots" this way on my own in CSGnet company
without being able to blame it on somebody else).--Gary

P.S.  I found the transcription (and guitar chords) for "Alice's
Restaurant" while exploring the Internet with Gopher.  There are lyrics and
chords for what must be hundreds if not thousands of songs on the Minnesota
Gopher server.  Got from Gopher and played "The River" by Bruce Springsteen
for the family last night (very sad).  Greg, do you see now why you need
Gopher?

P.P.S.  Who is Dag Forssell?
------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary A. Cziko                    Telephone: 217.333.8527
Educational Psychology           FAX: 217.244.7620
University of Illinois           E-mail: g-cziko@uiuc.edu
1310 S. Sixth Street             Radio: N9MJZ
210 Education Building
Champaign, Illinois 61820-6990
USA
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From:         "Gary A. Cziko" <g-cziko@UIUC.EDU>
Subject:      Astronony and Science

[from Gary Cziko 930104.1730 GMT] (Damn, I typed "92" again.)

Bill Powers (930104.0900) observes:

>Today, Jan. 4, is the day of latest sunrise; the earliest sunset
>occurred way back on Dec. 7. We got an elliptical orbit.

Bill, you were more careful last time you made astronomical observations
when you took into consideration that not everyone on CSGnet lives north of
the equator.

Let's see if I can figure out how the southern hemispherians see this.
Since their days are long when ours are in the north are short, today must
be the day of either the earliest sunrise or latest sunset.  To figure out
which is bit harder.

Since we all use the same terminator (earth shadow line) for sunrise, and
share the "other" terminator for sunset (the earth spins in the same
direction no matter where you), I don't see why they should have the
earliest sunrise while we have our latest.  So I can only guess that today
must be the latest sunset down under.

Avery, am I right?--Gary

P.S.  Isn't it interesting how being part of a global community gives a
different perspective on things.  General statements are less likely to be
true.  I suspect that this is how science approaches the truth.  The more
people testing out proposed general theories the more likely the refutation
of inadequate and the (if only  temporary) retention of better ones.

A colleague of mine has school children do science projects on stuff like
this via e-mail.  Things like comparing the shadow length of vertical meter
stick at local noon on the same day in Fairbanks, New York, and Miami
provides lots of interesting data for these kids.  Isn't this sort of what
we're doing on CSGnet?--Gary
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Gary A. Cziko                    Telephone: 217.333.8527
Educational Psychology           FAX: 217.244.7620
University of Illinois           E-mail: g-cziko@uiuc.edu
1310 S. Sixth Street             Radio: N9MJZ
210 Education Building
Champaign, Illinois 61820-6990
USA
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Date:         Tue, 5 Jan 1993 00:16:00 GMT
From:         Dag Forssell <0004742580@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      congruency, revolution

[From Dag Forssell (930104)]            Bill Powers (930104.0900)

>I think it's important to keep asking, as you read your own writing,
>"Is this the sort of thing anyone could say no matter what theory they
>believed in?"

Did you refer to the control diagram when you read the admonitions about
effectiveness? I keep the diagram on an easel and point to it.

>Even when you do say things that are commonplace, the point should be
>to explain WHY these things are beneficial. Your students come out of
>the seminar understanding a lot more of the "why."

This is the point of PCT. The world looks and sounds the same, but your
understanding of control gives all the familiar things a brand new
context which changes your understanding and makes all the difference.

>Can't more of that get into the printed matter?

Not until I write my book. The slides should have as little as possible,
not to distract from the presentation while keeping it on track.
My book may be entitled "Purposeful Leadership". Got notification today
of trademark number 1,740,117 from a vendor who wants me to send $120 for
a plaque to "preserve the beauty of my trademark." I guess this means I
graduate from TM to Circle R. (Clearly higher in the hierarchy).

This section of my post dealt with congruency between private and public
posts. Any comment on that? Do disputes arise when participants on the
net have objectives other than understanding PCT and supporting the
effectiveness of others (when they use PCT) for other, clearly stated
objectives.
-------------------------------------------------------

How about the other section of my post? Does anyone think it is
worthwhile to develop a context of scientific revolutions as a way to go
up a level for the introduction of PCT? Is my outline a way?

Best to all, Dag
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