The problem with loftily ignoring something is that no-one knows you’re loftily ignoring it. So for the record, I did notice that interpretation (i.e. William Powers, or me, or pjeby, is a man with a hammer), and loftily ignored it. In fact, of all the people I know personally who are involved in PCT, I would say that Powers is the least likely to ever manifest the syndrome.
You have to have some positive reason for accusing someone of man-with-a-hammer syndrome beyond the fact that they have a big idea, or it just becomes an all-purpose refutation. “Man-with-a-hammer syndrome” has to be the conclusion of seeing them overapply their big idea, not a privileged hypothesis to give attention to whenever you encounter a big idea. Otherwise it is just a licence to ignore big ideas—the more fundamental and important, the more licence to dismiss them.
for the record, I did notice that interpretation (i.e. William Powers, or me, or pjeby, is a man with a hammer), and loftily ignored it.
For the record, I too am lofty. I did notice that interpretation (that your question was rhetorical loftiness) but loftily ignored it. (Because I unashamedly appreciate my own joke and also think the PCT example is relevant to this context and demonstrates the trap.)
You have to have some positive reason for accusing someone of man-with-a-hammer syndrome beyond the fact that they have a big idea, or it just becomes an all-purpose refutation.
The positive reason for asserting pjeby was using PCT as a big hammer for several months there was that he was using it as a big hammer in the full sense of the intended meaning. It isn’t particularly bad as far as hammers go, it’s a damn good way of modelling systems and has plenty of applicability to human behaviour. Unfortunately if you try to force the idea too much it becomes harder to engage with other ways of looking at things. In the case of PCT, over-applying the concept gave it negative connotations where it may otherwise have become one of the useful jargon phrases (like ‘cached thought’, ‘fully general counterargument’, ‘near vs far’ and ‘shut up and multiply’).
(And that observed reaction is something that PCT could explain quite well.)
Agreed. There were many specific cases where it was a good model, e.g. where biologists weren’t seeing a set of numerous chemical reactions as a giant negative feedback loop. But then pjeby started using extremely metaphorical applications of it for very high-level human behavior, where he was clearly just using his intuition and then post hoc relabeling it in PCT terminology.
Any explanation of anything is a metaphor. Negative feedback loops and finite state machines are not real entities; they’re simply descriptions of patterns of behavior, in the same way that the number 3 is not a real entity; it’s a label we apply to a quantity.
That is, three by itself can’t exist; there have to be three of “something”. Feedback loops and FSMs (not to be confused with the Flying Spaghetti Monster) do not exist in themselves either; there has to be some other thing to which we apply the label.
And every model or description of the world at some point becomes either unwieldy in detail, or inaccurate to some degree. But different models or descriptions give different benefits. For example, it’s extremely difficult to do arithmetic using Roman numerals.
In my work, the PCT model has led me to two new ways of understanding and changing behavior. The first turned out to be of limited usefulness in practice (unless I wanted to spend hours upon hours walking people through analyzing their control networks, which I don’t).
The second insight, however, has turned out to be much more useful, and it’s the source of various reasons why I hardly ever post here any more.
Agree with your first three paragraphs but that’s exactly my point: you can model anything, including high-level behavior like mate-seeking, with feedback loops, and yes, different models give different benefits.
But you never were able to break down the high-level behaviors into a useful model. Just like a literal Turing machine would be unwieldly for a model of a phenomenon, so would a feedback control model be unwieldly for the human behavior you claim it explained.
In contrast, viewing the biological system I referred to above as a negative feedback loop does simplify things and allows you insight into the function of various subsystems.
In my work, the PCT model has led me to two new ways of understanding and changing behavior.
I don’t want to go over the specific arguments again, but my whole point was that this just isn’t true. All evidence showed that you were just going by intuition and then applying PCT labels that gave no explanatory (data-compressive) insight. You were never able to give an example of how PCT modeling got you (or would have gotten you) to a crucial insight any faster.
Sigh. I really don’t want to go into this again, but some of the particularly valuable bits that PCT has relative to other negative-feedback theories of human behavior are the aspects of:
The central importance of conflicting reference values in behavioral problems
Nothing else that I know of in the fields of psychology or self-help combines these elements in the same framework; even those self-help authors who’ve addressed high-level feedback loops in human behavior (e.g. Maltz’s psycho-cybernetics, Eker’s “wealth thermostat”, etc.) have barely touched on any of the above.
All evidence showed that you were just going by intuition and then applying PCT labels that gave no explanatory (data-compressive) insight
Be precise. What you have, specifically, is no evidence that you could not also use as evidence for your position, and therefore you choose to assume that I’m lying and/or deluded. (Why, I couldn’t say.)
You were never able to give an example of how PCT modeling got you (or would have gotten you) to a crucial insight any faster.
Any faster than what?
Honestly, all of your arguments on this subject have struck me as similar to a creationist saying that evolution isn’t any simpler, because you still have to explain how every single creature evolved, so how does that save you anything?
AFAICT, it’s the exact same argument, and also a fully-general counterargument for ANY modeling method.
Wow. I like this comment, and am surprised it went into karma freefall. The list of 4 key points that actually do distinguish PCT from not-PCT are useful (although I cannot confirm whether or not each of the elements distinguished in the model actually match observations in humans well.)
The arguments against PCT have tended to lack rigour. (Of course, they haven’t needed to be rigorous because pj’s advocacy was poorly calibrated to this audience. It was too easy to object to PCT primarily based on the association to disliked style.)
No. (I assume materials circulated to my private clients do not count as “public”.)
Contra SilasBarta’s assertion of no data compression in PCT, I can’t actually explain it compactly without assuming at least several of PCT’s background assumptions or conclusions, plus a variety of other material I’ve previously alluded to (such as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis).
With that background, it’s an “aha” that puts an important piece in place for how people end up with the sort of blocks and compulsions that they do, with a clear implication of how to fix them. Without that background, it’s a “huh, wat? lol” instead.
For that reason, I do not plan to include the insight itself in the book I’m working on, even though many of its practical ramifications will be worked out therein. It would be a distraction from the main point of the book. I do have another book I want to write, though, which might be a good place to include it.
I can’t actually explain it compactly without assuming at least several of PCT’s background assumptions or conclusions, plus a variety of other material I’ve previously alluded to (such as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis).
Do you have a book recommendation for either subject?
“Behavior: The Control Of Perception” by William T. Powers. I first learned about the SMH from Temple Grandin’s “Animals In Translation”, but it’s hardly a reference. I just got the idea of feelings being used as a predictive mechanism from that, and read about the SMH (and other work by D’Amasio) later on. Affective asynchrony and reconsolidation are among the other concepts I’ve mentioned here in the past that are also involved.
ETA: Almost forgot, the MPF or “Memory Prediction Framework” adds some useful detail to PCT, effectively bridging a bit between the SMH and PCT. (This is another way in which SilasBarta errs in classifying my responses as “hammer syndrome”; I have a lot of stuff in my toolkit besides hammers. PCT just filled a gap and provided a nice organizational structure to connect and classify the other tools with.)
Oh, and btw, these various TLAs (two/three-letter acronyms) come from completely different people. PCT, MPF, AA, SMH, and reconsolidation were researched by entirely unrelated groups or individuals, with AFAIK no mutual interaction or knowledge.
I do remember there being a discussion here about that general phenomenon in the context of PCT. Someone explained it by an analogy to an approximating function. You have a “function”—the number of areas an idea is applicable to. You then estimate how widely applicable it is. It turns out you underestimated—it’s more general than you thought. If this happens more than once, you try to err in the opposite direction, overestimating its generality.
Then, I remember pjeby agreed with this comparison to PCT. I’ll try to find that discussion.
(Avoided making wisecrack about omg, there’s something PCT can’t explain, &c.)
ETA: Oops, first instinct and wisecrack were more appropriate...
ETA: Oops, first instinct and wisecrack were more appropriate...
It is always more fun when wisecracks can double as literal truths so I appreciated your analysis. I actually think your PCT model fits reasonably well to at least part of the phenomenon and it would quite probably be a useful tool to consider when trying to recalibrate your hammer use.
Can you elaborate on that? No particular interpretation of the phenomenon in the light of PCT occurs to me.
I’m glad I’m not the only one whose jokes oft go ungotten.
The problem with loftily ignoring something is that no-one knows you’re loftily ignoring it. So for the record, I did notice that interpretation (i.e. William Powers, or me, or pjeby, is a man with a hammer), and loftily ignored it. In fact, of all the people I know personally who are involved in PCT, I would say that Powers is the least likely to ever manifest the syndrome.
You have to have some positive reason for accusing someone of man-with-a-hammer syndrome beyond the fact that they have a big idea, or it just becomes an all-purpose refutation. “Man-with-a-hammer syndrome” has to be the conclusion of seeing them overapply their big idea, not a privileged hypothesis to give attention to whenever you encounter a big idea. Otherwise it is just a licence to ignore big ideas—the more fundamental and important, the more licence to dismiss them.
Now, Bayes theorem...
For the record, I too am lofty. I did notice that interpretation (that your question was rhetorical loftiness) but loftily ignored it. (Because I unashamedly appreciate my own joke and also think the PCT example is relevant to this context and demonstrates the trap.)
The positive reason for asserting pjeby was using PCT as a big hammer for several months there was that he was using it as a big hammer in the full sense of the intended meaning. It isn’t particularly bad as far as hammers go, it’s a damn good way of modelling systems and has plenty of applicability to human behaviour. Unfortunately if you try to force the idea too much it becomes harder to engage with other ways of looking at things. In the case of PCT, over-applying the concept gave it negative connotations where it may otherwise have become one of the useful jargon phrases (like ‘cached thought’, ‘fully general counterargument’, ‘near vs far’ and ‘shut up and multiply’).
(And that observed reaction is something that PCT could explain quite well.)
Agreed. There were many specific cases where it was a good model, e.g. where biologists weren’t seeing a set of numerous chemical reactions as a giant negative feedback loop. But then pjeby started using extremely metaphorical applications of it for very high-level human behavior, where he was clearly just using his intuition and then post hoc relabeling it in PCT terminology.
Any explanation of anything is a metaphor. Negative feedback loops and finite state machines are not real entities; they’re simply descriptions of patterns of behavior, in the same way that the number 3 is not a real entity; it’s a label we apply to a quantity.
That is, three by itself can’t exist; there have to be three of “something”. Feedback loops and FSMs (not to be confused with the Flying Spaghetti Monster) do not exist in themselves either; there has to be some other thing to which we apply the label.
And every model or description of the world at some point becomes either unwieldy in detail, or inaccurate to some degree. But different models or descriptions give different benefits. For example, it’s extremely difficult to do arithmetic using Roman numerals.
In my work, the PCT model has led me to two new ways of understanding and changing behavior. The first turned out to be of limited usefulness in practice (unless I wanted to spend hours upon hours walking people through analyzing their control networks, which I don’t).
The second insight, however, has turned out to be much more useful, and it’s the source of various reasons why I hardly ever post here any more.
Agree with your first three paragraphs but that’s exactly my point: you can model anything, including high-level behavior like mate-seeking, with feedback loops, and yes, different models give different benefits.
But you never were able to break down the high-level behaviors into a useful model. Just like a literal Turing machine would be unwieldly for a model of a phenomenon, so would a feedback control model be unwieldly for the human behavior you claim it explained.
In contrast, viewing the biological system I referred to above as a negative feedback loop does simplify things and allows you insight into the function of various subsystems.
I don’t want to go over the specific arguments again, but my whole point was that this just isn’t true. All evidence showed that you were just going by intuition and then applying PCT labels that gave no explanatory (data-compressive) insight. You were never able to give an example of how PCT modeling got you (or would have gotten you) to a crucial insight any faster.
Sigh. I really don’t want to go into this again, but some of the particularly valuable bits that PCT has relative to other negative-feedback theories of human behavior are the aspects of:
Hierarchical control structure
Parallel/simultaneous operation
Quasi-evolutionary unattended learning (“reorganization”)
The central importance of conflicting reference values in behavioral problems
Nothing else that I know of in the fields of psychology or self-help combines these elements in the same framework; even those self-help authors who’ve addressed high-level feedback loops in human behavior (e.g. Maltz’s psycho-cybernetics, Eker’s “wealth thermostat”, etc.) have barely touched on any of the above.
Be precise. What you have, specifically, is no evidence that you could not also use as evidence for your position, and therefore you choose to assume that I’m lying and/or deluded. (Why, I couldn’t say.)
Any faster than what?
Honestly, all of your arguments on this subject have struck me as similar to a creationist saying that evolution isn’t any simpler, because you still have to explain how every single creature evolved, so how does that save you anything?
AFAICT, it’s the exact same argument, and also a fully-general counterargument for ANY modeling method.
Wow. I like this comment, and am surprised it went into karma freefall. The list of 4 key points that actually do distinguish PCT from not-PCT are useful (although I cannot confirm whether or not each of the elements distinguished in the model actually match observations in humans well.)
The arguments against PCT have tended to lack rigour. (Of course, they haven’t needed to be rigorous because pj’s advocacy was poorly calibrated to this audience. It was too easy to object to PCT primarily based on the association to disliked style.)
Have you made said insight public in any form?
No. (I assume materials circulated to my private clients do not count as “public”.)
Contra SilasBarta’s assertion of no data compression in PCT, I can’t actually explain it compactly without assuming at least several of PCT’s background assumptions or conclusions, plus a variety of other material I’ve previously alluded to (such as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis).
With that background, it’s an “aha” that puts an important piece in place for how people end up with the sort of blocks and compulsions that they do, with a clear implication of how to fix them. Without that background, it’s a “huh, wat? lol” instead.
For that reason, I do not plan to include the insight itself in the book I’m working on, even though many of its practical ramifications will be worked out therein. It would be a distraction from the main point of the book. I do have another book I want to write, though, which might be a good place to include it.
Do you have a book recommendation for either subject?
“Behavior: The Control Of Perception” by William T. Powers. I first learned about the SMH from Temple Grandin’s “Animals In Translation”, but it’s hardly a reference. I just got the idea of feelings being used as a predictive mechanism from that, and read about the SMH (and other work by D’Amasio) later on. Affective asynchrony and reconsolidation are among the other concepts I’ve mentioned here in the past that are also involved.
ETA: Almost forgot, the MPF or “Memory Prediction Framework” adds some useful detail to PCT, effectively bridging a bit between the SMH and PCT. (This is another way in which SilasBarta errs in classifying my responses as “hammer syndrome”; I have a lot of stuff in my toolkit besides hammers. PCT just filled a gap and provided a nice organizational structure to connect and classify the other tools with.)
Oh, and btw, these various TLAs (two/three-letter acronyms) come from completely different people. PCT, MPF, AA, SMH, and reconsolidation were researched by entirely unrelated groups or individuals, with AFAIK no mutual interaction or knowledge.
I do remember there being a discussion here about that general phenomenon in the context of PCT. Someone explained it by an analogy to an approximating function. You have a “function”—the number of areas an idea is applicable to. You then estimate how widely applicable it is. It turns out you underestimated—it’s more general than you thought. If this happens more than once, you try to err in the opposite direction, overestimating its generality.
Then, I remember pjeby agreed with this comparison to PCT. I’ll try to find that discussion.
(Avoided making wisecrack about omg, there’s something PCT can’t explain, &c.)
ETA: Oops, first instinct and wisecrack were more appropriate...
It is always more fun when wisecracks can double as literal truths so I appreciated your analysis. I actually think your PCT model fits reasonably well to at least part of the phenomenon and it would quite probably be a useful tool to consider when trying to recalibrate your hammer use.