There is a topic I have in mind that could potentially require writing a rather large amount, and I don't want to do that unless there is some interest, rather than suddenly dumping a massive essay on LW without any prior context. The topic is control theory (the engineering discipline, not anything else those words might suggest). Living organisms are, I say (following Bill Powers, who I've mentioned before) built of control systems, and any study of people that does not take that into account is unlikely to progress very far. Among the things I might write about are these:

• Purposes and intentions are the set-points of control systems. This is not a metaphor or an analogy.

• Perceptions do not determine actions; instead, actions determine perceptions. (If that seems either unexceptionable or obscure, try substituting "stimulus" for "perception" and "response" for "action".)

• Control systems do not, in general, work by predicting what action will produce the intended perception. They need not make any predictions at all, nor contain any model of their environment. They require neither utility measures, nor Bayesian or any other form of inference. There are methods of designing control systems that use these concepts but they are not inherent to the nature of control.

• Inner conflict is, literally, a conflict between control systems that are trying to hold the same variable in two different states.

• How control systems behave is not intuitively obvious, until one has studied control systems.

This is the only approach to the study of human nature I have encountered that does not appear to me to mistake what it looks like from the inside for the underlying mechanism.

What say you all? Vote this up or down if you want, but comments will be more useful to me.