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erratio comments on The Blue-Minimizing Robot - Less Wrong
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Okay, we agree that the simple robot described here is behaviorist and the thermostat is PCT. And I certainly see where you're coming from with the rats being PCT because hunger only works as a motivator if you're hungry. But I do have a few questions:
There are some things behaviorism can explain pretty well that I don't know how to model in PCT. For example, consider heroin addiction. An animal can go its whole life not wanting heroin until it's exposed to some. Then suddenly heroin becomes extraordinarily motivating and it will preferentially choose shots of heroin to food, water, or almost anything else. What is the PCT explanation of that?
I'm not entirely sure which correlation studies you're talking about here; most psych studies I read are done in an RCT type design and so use p-values rather than r-values; they can easily end up with p < .001 if they get a large sample and a good hypothesis. Some social psych studies work off of correlations (eg correlation between being observer-rated attractiveness and observer-rated competence at a skill); correlations are "lamentably low" in social psychology because high level processes (like opinion formation, social interaction, etc.) have a lot of noise. Are there any PCT studies of these sorts of processes (not simple motor coordination problems) that have any higher correlation than standard models do? Any with even the same level of correlation?
What's the difference between control theory and stimulus-response in a context? For example, if we use a simplified version of hunger in which the hormone leptin is produced in response to hunger and the hormone ghrelin is produced in response to satiety, we can explain this in two ways: the body is trying to PCT itself to the perfect balance of leptin and ghrelin, or in the context of the stimulus leptin the response of eating is rewarded and in the context of the stimulus ghrelin the response of eating is punished. Are these the same theory, or are there experiments that would distinguish between them? Do you know of any?
Does PCT still need reinforcement learning to explain why animals use some strategies and not others to achieve equilibrium? For example, when a rat in a Skinner box is hungry (ie its satiety variable has deviated in the direction of hunger), and then it presses a lever and gets a food pellet and its satiety variable goes back to its reference range, would PCTists explain that as getting rewarded for pressing the lever and expect it to press the lever again next time it's hungry?
Rats don't always choose drugs over everything else
Summary: An experimenter thought drug addiction in rats might be linked to being kept in distressing conditions, made a Rat Park to test the idea, and found that the rats in the enriched Rat Park environment ignored the morphine on offer.
EDIT: apparently the study had methodological issues and hasn't been replicated, making the results somewhat suspect, as pointed out by Yvain below
I hate to admit I get science knowledge from Reddit, but the past few times this was posted there it was ripped apart by (people who claimed to be) professionals in the field - riddled with metholodogical errors, inconsistently replicated, et cetera. The fact that even its proponents admit the study was rejected by most journals doesn't speak well of it.
I think it's very plausible that situation contributes to addiction; we know that people in terrible situations have higher discount rates than others and so tend to short-term thinking that promotes that kind of behavior, and certainly they have fewer reasons to try to live life as a non-addict. But I think the idea that morphine is no longer interesting and you can't become addicted when you live a stimulating life is wishful thinking.
Damn. Oh well, noted and edited in to the original comment.
Well, like I said, all I have to go on is stuff people said on Reddit and one failed replication study I was able to find somewhere by a grad student of the guy who did the original research. The original research is certainly interesting and relevant and does speak to the problems with a very reductionist model.
This actually gets to the same problem I'm having looking up stuff on perceptual control theory, which is that I expect a controversial theory to be something where there are lots of passionate arguments on both sides, but on both PCT and Rat Park, when I've tried to look them up I get a bunch of passionate people arguing that they're great, and then a few scoffs from more mainstream people saying "That stuff? Nah." without explaining themselves. I don't know whether it's because of Evil Set-In-Their-Ways Mainstream refusing to acknowledge the new ideas, or whether they're just so completely missing the point that people think it's not worth their while to respond. It's a serious problem and I wish that "skeptics" would start addressing this kind of thing instead of debunking ghosts for the ten zillionth time.