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SilasBarta comments on Man-with-a-hammer syndrome - Less Wrong
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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:
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.)