Agree that the thing you’re mapping the word control to is metaphysically confused, and expect some people’s fuzzy notion of what the word means can have the issues you point to.
However, since there are far fewer words than structures/concepts we might want to use words for, I have a strong preference for mapping the scarce words to structures that are not metaphysically confused, rather than mapping them to ~useless metaphysically confused structures.
I make a bid for “define the word ‘control’ as an actually useful to be able to speak about thing[1], then point out the way this diffs with people’s kinda wonky notion of control and how some other definitions have metaphysical confusion so we shouldn’t use them”.
What does “control” mean here other than “determine the behavior of”, and a person cannot fully determine the behavior of another person. To say we can control someone is to be confused about how the world works. We can only exert some influence, and we have fairly limited capacities for modeling the effect of that influence (yes, we are better at modeling that influence than other animals are, but still quite limited).
Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between “I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn’t want to” and “I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out”.
You’re absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.
For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.
(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of “hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important”)
Agree that the thing you’re mapping the word control to is metaphysically confused, and expect some people’s fuzzy notion of what the word means can have the issues you point to.
However, since there are far fewer words than structures/concepts we might want to use words for, I have a strong preference for mapping the scarce words to structures that are not metaphysically confused, rather than mapping them to ~useless metaphysically confused structures.
I make a bid for “define the word ‘control’ as an actually useful to be able to speak about thing[1], then point out the way this diffs with people’s kinda wonky notion of control and how some other definitions have metaphysical confusion so we shouldn’t use them”.
probably the cybernetics people have some well nailed down definitions of a pretty useful structure to have short message length referents to.
What does “control” mean here other than “determine the behavior of”, and a person cannot fully determine the behavior of another person. To say we can control someone is to be confused about how the world works. We can only exert some influence, and we have fairly limited capacities for modeling the effect of that influence (yes, we are better at modeling that influence than other animals are, but still quite limited).
Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between “I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn’t want to” and “I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out”.
You’re absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.
For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.
(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of “hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important”)
outside of weird simple physics/math environments, at least