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orthonormal comments on Rationality quotes: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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The interaction you linked to was interesting. I didn't realize there was already a back story within this community with positions staked out and such. I offered the quote because it seemed like a beautifully mathematical objection to existing work that was "up this community's alley" but I haven't worked into the actual mathematics or experiments themselves. For example, I hadn't purchased either of the books that I linked to, not have I studied them - I simply assigned them high EV given the quality of the author's text.
Your comments, in the interaction you linked to, seem like a good arguments against Marken's theory (specifically the claim that his work involves more free parameters than data points appears to be a good argument against the theory, if true). However, in all of that back and forth, I noticed many links to "lesswrong heuristics" but I didn't notice any outside links to an actual research papers detailing methodology.
I'm substantially more ignorant on the subject than either you or your previous interlocutor and it took me a while to even understand that "PCT" was the theory Marken supports, that you two were taking the pro and con towards it, that your text was mostly between each other with a substantial amount of knowledge assumed. I wish you had both linked more, because it would have been educational.
That said, I'd like to see such links if you know of any. If I can swiftly dismiss Marken's work without further thought, that would be a very efficient use of time. Can you direct me to the links showing an example of his experimental work so I can verify that his research program is crippled by mathematical overfitting? The best I could find was Perceptual organization of behavior: A hierarchical control model of coordinated action but it was pay-walled so I can't access it now to look into it myself.
The paper discussed in that interaction can be found here without a paywall.
As stated then (the conversation can be taken up from about here if not earlier), I think it's quite likely that simple control circuits can be found in facets of motor response; but Powers, Marken and Eby had been talking about control theory in cognitive domains (like akrasia) as if they could isolate simple circuits there, and my search for any kind of evidence turned up only this sort of embarrassing tripe.
And really, the math here is important— it's not a matter of disagreeing with interpretation, it's the plain fact that a generic model with 4 free parameters can be tweaked to precisely fit 4 data points, and it's clear from the paper that this is what Marken did. You simply need more data points than free parameters in order to generate any evidence in favor of a model; the fact that he never mentioned this, and instead crowed about the impressive fit of his model to the data, indicate either gross ignorance of how mathematical models work, or outright intent to mislead (coupled with an utterly incompetent peer review process.)
The gauntlet remains thrown, if anyone wants to point to an experimental study which demonstrates a discernible control circuit in a cognitive task (apart from tasks, like tracking a dot, which have an obvious motor component— in these, I do expect control circuits to be a good model for certain behavior). I would be surprised, but it would suffice to give credence to the theory in my eyes.