Inference and Repertoire
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Skinner's influence was swept away by sophisticated theories of language acquisition and by the cognitive revolution in psychology. ↩︎
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I'm not discounting the ideas of Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists, just their certitude. More annoying, their followers are more strident than the founders. ↩︎
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My preferred sources for these ideas are Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Heinz Von Forester, G. Spencer-Brown, Gordon Pask, Karl Pribram, George Miller, Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead, Paul Watzlawick, Norbert Wiener, Kenneth Craik, Kurt Gödel, and Douglas Hofstadter. ↩︎
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Meier is best known for the Civilization series, but he has designed or supervised the design of many games. ↩︎
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I got this idea from the great computer scientist, Alan Kay, who called the personal computer a fantasy amplifier and the spreadsheet a fantasy world. ↩︎
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That Carroll was pointing out that the living can’t be controlled comes from Gregory Bateson. ↩︎
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The most tired example of a circular explanation is old aphorism, [he did it because] boys will be boys. ↩︎
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I don’t think my mother meant harm. I think she lacked the confidence she could hurt my feelings. And I can’t know that she accurately conveyed the thoughts of my father. ↩︎
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Many would rightly state that the closer you are to someone, the more you are motivated to project your story onto them. That just furthers my point about the minefields of inference. ↩︎
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That was written months ago. She knows hundreds of words now and has started to use short sentences. By the time I finish this article, she'll be writing the sequel to Moby Dick (but it will be about a friendly dolphin). ↩︎
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From Wikipedia: “The Chronicle of Higher Education* reported that helicopter parents continued advocating for their adult children at the graduate school level as well, such as advocating for their adult child's admission to law school or business school. ↩︎
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From Being to Doing Humberto R Maturana & Bernhard Pörksen ↩︎
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The quote by the late tennis star was referenced by the computer scientist and journalist, John Naughton. ↩︎
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The Law of Requisite Complexity is both a technical and general concept originated by the psychiatrist and pioneer in cybernetics, W. Ross. Ashby. While cybernetics is commonly associated with computers, it's the study of organic systems (ecosystems are cybernetic), as well as machines that are controlled through feedback mechanisms. I discussed cybernetic systems earlier here. ↩︎
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At the time, every professional player but Connors used a wooden racket (King abandoned the T-2000), which were better at controlling the ball as it hit the strings. (The lone exception was Arthur Ashe who was testing a new type of racket made from aluminum, carbon, and fiberglass.) ↩︎
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Miyagi began his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. When Daniel finally objected, Miyagi showed that the painting motions were karate blocks, now part of Daniel's muscle memory. ↩︎
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Traditional training uses kata forms to teach muscle memory, but kata training would have killed the drama and made for just another instruction video. ↩︎
Inference, Repertoire, Acceptance
This replaces the last two essays. While Skinner's Folly is much the same, Part 1, Inference is mostly new.
Thanks to Joan and Adam for their help.
The essay is for Denise, because she complains that my writing does not include enough sports examples.
Part 1, Inference
…the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, a bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
—G. Spencer-Brown, from the Laws of Form
B.F. Skinner's behaviorism is now an over-the-hill band playing oldies at state fairs, but in the sixties, his theories climbed to the top of the charts of academic psychology.1 In place of personality theories, such as those from Freud and Jung where inner drives explain behavior, Skinner believed that all human behavior was shaped by reinforcement from behavioral conditioning. Influences were external, not internal.
Skinner's premise and that of the behavioralists that preceded him, that we can't see inside the mind of another, can't be denied. Theories of personality are, (as I keep insisting) just stories, maybe closer to just-so stories, Rudyard Kipling's famous fictional explanations for how characteristics of specific animals came to be. In theories of human behavior, the stories are in the mind of the theorists, not of their subjects. Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists were writing "dear diary" and calling their entries, science.2
We can't see inside the mind of another, because if you look inside a brain, you see neurons and connections among the neurons, but the complexity of how that translates to human thought is elusive, and despite future strides in understanding, will always be elusive because of the paradox that the (scientist's) mind is studying the (subject's) mind, with all the limitations inherent in cognitive filters (neurological plus psychological filters equals cognition).3
The scientific study of how we think is akin to Zeno's Paradox of Motion, which is explained simply: no matter how fast you run, each moment you can get only halfway closer to the finish line, and no matter how close that gets you to the finish line, each moment you can still get only halfway closer to the finish line, and so on.
From Wikipedia:
The paradox of neurobiology is that even as we get closer to understanding neurobiology, because a mind is studying the mind, we’ll never get to the finish line. Your neural and psychological cognitive filters don’t get suspended when you receive your research grant. No matter how much science jargon you sprinkle over your thoughts, you can never think or observe outside your story.
This essay attempts to convey that inferences about others are harmful, and the way to get beyond harmful inferences is to expand our behavioral repertoire.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
Sid Meier, a famous computer game designer,4 once explained that, because of his development experience, when he plays a computer game, he can't help but see the algorithms—the underlying software processes that create the action. Experts in a domain can envision the below-the-surface complexity of how determinants form the system in action. When doctors press a stethoscope to your chest, they can translate your heartbeat to the status of your cardiovascular system. Domain experts don't have Superman's x-ray vision, but they make do with training and experience.
A computer game, as Sid Meier might explain, is assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data. An animation layer acts as public relations for the hidden software processes. With either a game controller or a keyboard and mouse, the game player interacts with the animation layer, and if the player isn’t the all-knowing Sid Meier, the player suspends disbelief to regard the continuous animated updates as a simulated world.
The corporate strategist, costumed in dull business attire rather than the gamer’s hoodie, uses the spreadsheet—which is also assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data—to engage in imaginary play similar to that of the gamer. But unlike game players, corporate strategists interact with their imaginary worlds directly by modifying the data and formulas. These strategists call their spreadsheets "projections" to make them sound businesslike and rational, but they’re just stories, with numbers as the characters and the formulas to define the relationships among the characters. A possible plot might be, “What if we buy another company to incorporate their product or their intellectual property?” Or, “What if we reduce the price of our widget to expand our potential market?” The spreadsheet and game are distinct approaches to a similar goal: to play in a fantasy world without the risks found in the concrete world.5
The spreadsheet creates a simulation that you directly manipulate (by changing data and formulas in the cells) to look at possible outcomes. The game, in contrast, is a pre-made simulation that you indirectly manipulate via the interface to experiment with possible outcomes that are implicit in the design of the data and formulas.
In short, with a spreadsheet, you explore and experiment by changing the parts from within the skin of the virtual world. In a game, you explore and experiment by changing the whole from outside the skin of the virtual world.
The parts and wholes of spreadsheets and games belong to abstraction, but it works similarly in the concrete world. An engineer designs the parts of a car, and then the parts are assembled to test how the whole performs on the road. A football coach selects, conditions, and trains players, plugs them into defined positions, and tests how the whole performs on game days.
Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
— Lewis Carrol, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Without even a hand wave, I made the job of the auto engineer and of the coach sound the same, but that's only accurate from the descriptive distance that ignores the complexity of living creatures.
Much of the auto engineer's task is to keep as much rubber on the road as possible under all circumstances while keeping, for example, a 225-pound passenger comfortable and safe. To that engineer, it doesn't matter if that passenger is Tom Brady or Tom Brady's cousin, but the coach knows the difference. The engineer designs and fits parts together from a technical specification, and after the prototype passes its on-the-road tests, the engineer's work is reduced to fixing glitches discovered when the car is driven by the masses. Those cars already on the road won't be affected if the engineer has a salary dispute with the company. The coach, on the other hand, designs the team, but the parts are from the living where the difference between Tom Brady and Tom Brady's cousin are seven Super Bowl championships.
Unlike car parts, living individuals have their own agenda, and equally physically-gifted athletes have motivations that don't always coincide with that of their coach. There are athletes who outperform their physical attributes, such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who dominated the NBA in the 1980s, and there are forgettable athletes—I forgot their names already—who underperform their physical attributes. Psychology matters.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen wanted to play a game of croquet, but every "part" of the game, including the balls, wickets, and mallets were living creatures with minds of their own, and the game dissolved into pandemonium.6 The frustrated Red Queen finally yelled, "Off with their heads." I'm sure many coaches suppress a similar sentiment.
Neither the view from inside (studying the parts of the nervous system) nor the view from the outside (observing and experimenting with behavior) expose the determinants of human behavior. No one has lived inside another’s mind. And yet, when academics do research in human behavior, which depends on cognitive interpretation, they neglect the level of inference that's required to call the results, “conclusions.” Worse: both amateur psychologists (sports pundits and fans) and behavioral scientists with fancy degrees use circular explanations to stretch inferences with the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger.7 Brady won seven Super Bowls because of his "will to win." Does that mean on the days he lost three Super Bowls he left his will to win in his other pants? Or more sciency, during his winning Super Bowl games, could scientists have located the will-to-win in a Brady brain MRI?
Inference as influence
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. —Mike Tyson
When I faced a counseling situation that was particularly difficult (for me), I would often create a pre-session elaborate plan for an intervention. That was an interesting exercise but proved to be only that. I would abandon my plan within minutes of the beginning of a session. My clients were authors of their stories. They were not characters in mine.
After my father died, my mother made an offhand remark that divulged that I fell far below their (career) expectations for me. That wasn't news, as they left similar hints throughout my adulthood. I wasn't offended because their motivations for my work differed from mine. But I was offended when she attributed my "failures" to a personality flaw.8 While I'm not short of personality flaws (in fact, I have a personality-flaw subscription), I believe my parents were 180 degrees off in their inference about why I didn’t meet their expectations. If you can be that far off about those you've known all your life, how accurate can you be about anyone else?9
You can't understand someone until you walk a mile in his shoes
—Unknown
Unknown? I wouldn't want to be known for the above aphorism either. It doesn’t work in the concrete because it's unlikely that you’ll wear the same size shoe, but more to its intention, it doesn’t work as a metaphor because all experience is unique to the person. We treat others as characters in our stories because our only reference point is our own minds.
I’ve learned from my daughter and from her infant daughter the influence of subtle interactions with a child. Our daughter has been persistent in nurturing the autonomy of her little one from day one—to do only the absolute minimum of coercion necessary for her daughter’s health and safety. Watching our daughter in just how she changes a diaper or puts Nova in her stroller is a model in patience and non-coercion.
Inference as an affront
Our little granddaughter knows only a few words,10 so when she attempts to convey something beyond those words or her made-up sign language, we play guess-what-she’s-telling-us. Harmless most of the time, but that guessing may contribute to a habit of making inferences about her thought processes–inferences we have no way of checking. But our inferences don't really stem from our granddaughter's undeveloped language faculty. My parents had access to a language-developed me for all but the first couple of years of my life and their (negative) inferences about me went undisturbed.
I’ve begun to wonder whether the inferences we make about our granddaughter can create unspoken expectations? And whether these unspoken expectations may in the future contribute to her being torn between our desires for her and her desires for herself?
When my brother and I were little, my parents would ask what we wished to be when we grew up. At the time, if we were to answer honestly, we would have both said we wished to play for our favorite sports teams, the Chicago Bears or the Chicago Cubs. Instead, we both answered, “doctor.”
Inference and tribalism
Inference about others—which started with, are they friend or foe?—must have predated all relationships for any species to have survived. In ancient times, when a stranger or wild animal might have been a threat, our habit of inference helped keep us alive. Now the habit of inference is a chief contributor to tribalism in the form of racism, religious wars, and other identity-grounded conflicts. When threatened emotionally, our behavior gets funneled towards the well-known fight-or-flight response that can turn into a war of words with strangers over the Internet or even with a loved one in your home.
I can’t solve pernicious tribalism, but I can aspire to better personal behavior. I can become more observant of how my inferences can affect my relationships, and especially, how inferences can affect my grandchildren.
To quote myself from my essay on privacy and democracy:
Bria Bloom (our daughter) recently posted an essay with a description of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point, you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite the daughter's protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own, that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.
Our progeny, and to a lesser but still significant extent, all those over whom we have a period of authority or influence, will not be (mal)formed by an incident or two, but incidents, as described above, can describe a behavioral pattern of authority figures who are loving and well-meaning but disregard the developing autonomy of their charge.
This is not meant as a criticism, but as an observation of how we well-meaning parents and other life mentors don’t know when to back the hell off. Our two adult children are many-years independent in all important ways, and I still nag, and (I'm sure) they still roll their eyes metaphorically or actually. Ideally, we go from caring for our children’s every need to backing away in just the right increments so they can live without our care. Backing away doesn’t mean not caring, it means recognizing of the maturity of your dependent or no-longer dependent.
In one of the tribal cultures she studied, the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, witnesses a young child learning to close a door. She concludes that in this culture, children are given the minimum of assistance to achieve a task. Contrast that with today’s helicopter parents who never let go.11
The neurobiologist, Humberto Maturana describes an example of how we can nurture confidence:
One winter day, my little five-year-old grandson came to visit me. Due to his very poor vision, he has to wear thick glasses. That day, he was also packed in many clothes to keep him warm. While playing in the garden, he slipped into the deep part of my pool. He went under but was pushed to the surface again because a lot of air had collected in his clothes. He desperately grabbed the pool edge and started to scream for help. I ran to the edge of the pool, pulled him out, and said to him: “Congratulations – you have saved yourself!”
When his sister came to see me in the evening he ran up to her – and told her, beaming with joy and swollen with pride: “I fell in the pool, and I saved myself!” He did not feel guilty, he had developed no fear of the water, and he had not lost his self-confidence.
And you do not react according to your fear or anger, but according to your perception and positive appreciation of the particular situation of the child.12
Bria Bloom, from whom I've learned to be more sensitive to how habitual treatment of children conditions them for a lifetime in unintended ways as well as intended ways, has shown me that it's never too early to consider the subtle influences of personal and institutional childcare (by childcare, I mean all the means of raising children), no matter how well-intentioned.
Part 2, Repertoire
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
—Arthur Ashe13
Repertoire in competition
… the "law of requisite complexity", … holds that, to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts.14
In 1967, Wilson introduced the first metal tennis racket, the T-2000, and with it, Billie Jean King won the U.S. Open Women's title without dropping a set. But the T-2000 was like taming a lion, difficult to control, and Jimmy Connors became the only player to tame it over time. With that racket, Conners was among a handful of players who dominated men’s professional tennis in the mid-70s. Of average size, (five feet, ten inches, and 160 pounds), Conners made the ball explode off the metal head. Conners’s mastery of the T-2000 encouraged him to entrust it as the hammer, where every opponent is just a nail. (I apologize for the hammer cliché, but it fits.)15
In Conners’ era, three of the big four tournaments (All England at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open) were still played on grass, the fastest tennis surface. Unlike other top players of the time, who when playing on grass hit a big serve and raced to the net to volley (hit the ball before it bounced), Conners usually stayed back and relied on his powerful flat ground strokes that darted low over the net.
In 1974, Conners dominated his finals opponent, Ken Rosewell, at the two most prestigious tennis tournaments, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Rosewell was known for his perfect backhand slice, a ball hit with the racket moving downward and under the ball, which would skid on the hard surface on his opponent’s side of the net, rather than a topspin stroke hit upwards on the ball, which bounced high and deep. The Rosewell slice that troubled other players was an easy pitch for Conners to bash deep on his opponent’s side.
The following year, in the Wimbledon finals, Connors was a huge betting favorite over the older veteran Arthur Ashe, but Ashe beat Connors easily. Rather than futilely attempting to match Connors power game, Ashe used Judo as a strategy, using Connors’s aggression against him with geometry as a tactic.
Whereas Rosewell hit his slices deep, Ashe hit shallow slices that landed on the other side closer to the net and in the middle of the court. While Rosewell's deep hits allowed Conners to wind up and bash the return deep, Ashe's shallow slices meant Conners had to hit up to make the ball clear the net, but with Connor’s powerful swing, the ball would sail past the back line. Or, if Conner’s didn't hit it upwards, the ball wouldn't clear the net. Geometry was Ashe’s friend.
In sports, the best players don't always win if they have weaknesses that can be exploited and a limited ability to change behavior that isn't working. Conners and his unique racket formed a partnership that had carried him to dominance as long as his environment (his opponent) was static. In sports, in work, in any skill, and even in relationships, an extraordinary competence works until it doesn't. And then what?
We've all been Jimmy Connors, sharing the court with Arthur Ashe. It could be as teacher, therapist, engineer, negotiator, lawyer, coach, plumber, gardener, or even Bill Murray's character in Caddyshack who takes on and loses to the golf-course gophers. Some who practice these vocations carry a tool box, and some just whack everything with a hammer. The hammer might work most of the time. Connors beat all the other players who carried only a hammer because he had a better hammer. But as much as a wide repertoire matters in the confines of finite rules and boundaries of a game, it matters far more when dealing with challenges of infinite complexity.
Repertoire and submissiveness
There is no evolutionary scenario, where children sitting in chairs for five or more hours a day, much of that time, being talked at, is an obvious learning environment. Children who can't adapt are labeled and drugged—punished for not submitting. While those children are sometimes reported as happier because they can now focus at school, that's easily explained by Stockholm Syndrome, where identifying with your abuser occurs. Why would children not act pleased when those who truly care for them, parents, teachers, and school counselors are pleased.
While learning to parent is sprinkled with cultural guidance and pressure, most learn from their own experience as children. They raise their offspring either the way they were raised or the way they wish they were raised. (The fortunate are the few where the two ways are the same.) No one is to blame; everyone involved—educators, doctors, school counselors, and parents want what's best for the child. But all the generational lessons stem from the culture that's influenced by governmental and commercial institutions where submissiveness is learned. Again, I point to my Privacy — an essential habit of democracy.
Repertoire in relationships
As with Jimmy Conners’s match with Arthur Ashe, a lack of repertoire can lead to an inability to deal with what's currently in front of us, no matter how successful we've been with a strategy in the past. Conners, like all competitive athletes, was not isolated from his mistakes. But counselors and teachers can be ineffective without affecting their careers by blaming their clients and students.
Side Box:*I conflate teaching and counseling, first, because I believe they're both forms of helping individuals expand their behavioral and life-skills repertoire so they'll have more choices in life, and second, because along with marriage and child-rearing, they're the most intense relationships from which I've had personal experience to learn.
A more respectful and effective path for counselors and instructors is to view working with clients and students as a game, but not a game we can beat, but a game that teaches how to play it. We make our moves and see how the game responds. Rather than attempting to impose our will, we learn from trial and error and change our strategy. To learn to play a game is to widen your repertoire—acquire skills, such as when (apology for another tennis analogy) Björn Borg learned the serve-and-volley skill necessary at the time to win on grass, and won five consecutive Wimbledons.
Sports give us concrete examples, but there are more complex examples in interpersonal interactions.
To quote from myself from Coupling:
Sometimes I don’t sleep well. If my wife says you’ve been grumpy all morning, whether I have or have not been grumpy, I’ll usually become grumpy in response to her spoken observation. If, on the other hand, she says, sorry you didn’t sleep well, I’m likely to say, “I’m okay,” and feel okay. She didn’t make me behave one way or the other. She accessed something within my repertoire. If I were a more even-tempered person, perhaps I wouldn’t have responded with grumpiness, no matter what she said. If she were conscious and desirous of accessing my more pleasant response, she’d have gone with the “sorry you didn’t sleep well.” All behavior stems from one entity accessing a behavior of another entity within that entity’s repertoire.
As I explain further in Coupling, your ability to access a behavior within the repertoire of another depends on your behavioral repertoire. And broadening your interpersonal repertoire is the key to interacting with others with grace.
Good Will Hunting, a film about an angry and resentful genius, Will Hunting, is an illustration of how three people who entered Hunting's life were able to form a relationship with him that expanded his behavioral repertoire: the distinguished math professor who discovered the genius of an MIT janitor, a determined clinical psychologist, and a new girlfriend who fended off Hunting's anger and cynicism until Hunting allowed himself to trust. It was the behavioral repertoire of the three that accessed Hunting's narrow but present behavioral repertoire. Because Hunting had one close friend since childhood, he had some capacity to learn to trust others.
Part 3, Acceptance
Acceptance in action
You can’t read the code you have to do experiments on the system
—John Carmack (graphics programmer for the legendary game, Doom, and often considered the greatest programmer)
Carmack was referring to computer software that has evolved to be so complex that, unlike, for instance, with a James Joyce novel, no one can even pretend to understand the source.
Me:
Compare the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum
ChatGPT: Comparing the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum is like comparing a library to a broom. ChatGPT, as an AI language model, is designed for understanding and generating human-like text across a wide range of topics. It can comprehend language, generate responses, answer questions, and even engage in conversations on various subjects.
On the other hand, a robot vacuum, while it may possess some level of automation and sensor-based navigation, is primarily designed for a specific task: cleaning floors. It operates based on predefined algorithms and sensor inputs to navigate and clean spaces efficiently.
In terms of cognitive abilities and versatility, ChatGPT far surpasses a robot vacuum. ChatGPT can understand complex language structures, learn from vast amounts of textual data, and generate contextually relevant responses. It can engage in meaningful interactions and adapt its responses based on the input it receives.
While a robot vacuum may excel in its specific task of cleaning floors autonomously, its intelligence is limited to that domain. It lacks the cognitive flexibility and broad knowledge base of ChatGPT, which can handle a much wider range of tasks and interactions.
Me:
Compare ChatGPT to human intelligence
ChatGPT:
Comparing ChatGPT to human intelligence is like comparing a tool to a mind. ChatGPT is a sophisticated language model designed to understand and generate human-like text based on patterns in data it was trained on. It can process and generate responses to text input, answer questions, provide information, and engage in conversations on a wide range of topics.
However, ChatGPT's intelligence is fundamentally different from human intelligence. While it can mimic human-like responses and understand language to a certain extent, it lacks true consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, and the ability to understand context in the same way humans do. ChatGPT operates based on statistical patterns and algorithms, without subjective experiences or understanding of the world.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, is incredibly complex and multifaceted. It involves not only linguistic abilities but also sensory perception, emotions, creativity, problem-solving, social interaction, and many other cognitive skills. Humans have consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to understand abstract concepts and moral reasoning.
In summary, while ChatGPT can simulate aspects of human-like intelligence in its language processing capabilities, it falls far short of the rich and nuanced intelligence exhibited by humans.
Let me translate the above without ChatGPT’s self-serving smugness:
ChatGPT is smart, that is, smart enough to gloss over that, like a robot vacuum, it may excel in its specific task to examine and reconstitute the text it robo-vacuumed from the Internet and excrete answers that may or may not be true.
The best programmer, John Carmack, admits that the software he creates is so complex even he can’t understand it. He can only poke at it to get a reaction. But the software he creates is not nearly as complex as ChatGPT. And ChatGPT software is not nearly as complex as a human being. Why do cognitive psychologists, neurologists, educators, and politicians think that you can know how an individual child learns, a child with her own genetic makeup and developmental experiences? Should we not do experiments on the system, the system being the mind of an individual child. And, given, what I stated above about the limits to a mind studying a mind, should we not remain humble regarding the results of the experiments?
When Arthur Ashe played Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, he did an experiment. Hypothesis: Connors wins with one dominant tennis skill, his powerful groundstrokes. I can’t compete with his groundstrokes, but if I can neutralize his main weapon, he has nothing to fall back on.
To beat Conners, Ashe needed both his hypothesis to be correct and to have the skills to exploit Connors’ weakness. His hypothesis proved correct and Ashe did have the skill to make his experiment work. If his hypothesis proved incorrect, Ashe needn’t have been locked into a failed plan, he could have attempted alternate experiments, as many as necessary.
Flipping the switch
From Louise Penny's novel, The Brutal Telling:
Agent Morin had changed. His loose-limbed awkward body contorted perfectly for the violin, as though created and designed for this purpose. To play. To produce this music. His eyes were closed and he looked the way Gamache felt. Filled with joy. Rapture even. Such was the power of this music. This instrument. And watching his agent the Chief Inspector suddenly realized what Morin reminded him of. A musical note. The large head and the thin body. He was a walking note, awaiting an instrument. And this was it. The violin might be a masterpiece, but Agent Paul Morin certainly was. After a minute he stopped and the music faded, absorbed by the logs, the books, the tapestries. The people. “That was beautiful,” said Superintendent Brunel. He handed the violin to her. “It’s called ‘Colm Quigley.’ My favorite.” As soon as the violin left his hand he went back to being the gangly, awkward young man. Though never again totally that for the people who had heard him play. “Merci,”
Before Louise Penny (the author excerpted, above) became a best-selling author, she was a radio and TV journalist. She had no training in writing fiction. Her college degree was in media journalism.
Penny met her husband-to-be in her late-thirties and expressed that she'd like to try writing a novel. Her fiancé supported Penny to quit media journalism and give the novel a try.
Penny's enormous latent talent was a good bet to remain latent. She spent five years failing to write an historical novel and even lied to her husband about her (lack of) progress. It wasn’t until she gave up on the historical novel and took up writing the kind of novels she loved to read that she succeeded.
The excerpt above about agent Morin is an example of how the chief detective and hero of Penny's novels, Gamache, plucks nondescript figures who later become major contributors to his crime-solving team. Penny creates characters who, like her, go on to thrive when the inferences of doubters, which even once included herself, are suppressed.
What if I flipped the anecdote regarding the match between Ashe and Conners upside down. What if Ashe was coaching Conners, in an attempt to perturbate growth in Conners's game? Ashe, as with the fictional Gamache would exploit, in a good way, the proclivities—what we call strengths—of his student? Conners obvious strength was his dedication, You don’t rise to his level without it. As his mentor, Ashe would suggest Conners learn to serve and volley on the hard tennis surfaces that reward that strategy. He would encourage Conners to add finesse to his power game. That is, Ashe would work with Conners to expand the repertoire of his tennis tool set.
Though pouring knowledge into students is still a mainstay of modern schooling, it should be obvious it doesn't work. To learn, you must reach from your current level understanding, your scaffold. If a mentor is going to help, it's going to be to help students find their scaffold. Less obvious but just as true, one student's scaffold isn't necessarily every student's scaffold. Mr. Miyagi might have been successful with many of his students teaching muscle memory with his "wax-on, wax-off" gambit,16 17 but what if Daniel did not learn from that and got an F for his failure with Miyagi's movie-famous scaffold? This happens all the time in school, and young people are blamed and shamed (with grades) for their inability to mesh with their instructor's mindset.
You can't change another, you can change only yourself. Arthur Ashe could not change Jimmy Connors. Ashe had no control over Connors's behavior. Ashe could only use his own repertoire—in this case, a repertoire in strategy rather than in athletic tennis skills—to expose Connors’s lack of both a broader strategic or athletic repertoire.
And how you can change yourself comes from your repertoire. You can only run through your repertoire to see if another's repertoire responds in kind with yours. And accepting that you can't change another is not just the root of acceptance, it’s the meaning.
Acceptance of children
The Child is father of the Man
—William Wordsworth
I discussed repertoire in sports competition with Connors and Ashe, and in coupling, with how Joan's different responses to my grumpiness brought out different responses from me. I discussed how the subtle and unsubtle behavior of authorities, individually and in institutions, shape children in ways we regret, such as their submissiveness to those who peddle superficial qualities of attractiveness and peer approval.
The most obvious thing I can say is that people vary and children are people. And yet, we in authority treat children as if they're identical. The important business of childhood is learning—learning to be a good citizen, a (if desired) good mate and provider of child nurturance, a good friend and neighbor, and to learn to be equipped for a vocation suited to one’s skill and wellbeing. Ideally, young people will grow to balance their needs with the needs of those with whom they have an emotional bond along with the needs of their culture. I submit that the key to all of the above is acceptance—acceptance by others to the young person, and the young person learn acceptance of others.
What does acceptance look like? We no longer assume we know what goes inside another. We can’t change another, we can change only ourself. We accept our responsibility to model what we expect from our children (practice what we preach). We park our psychological and cognitive theories outside and if they get towed, maybe it's for the better. We do away with educational approaches that are past their pull dates.
I’m going to add one more level of acceptance that’s maybe hardest to accept: aside from issues of health and safety, we allow our children to be ten percent more stubborn than we are as their parents. If you’re too strict, you’re liable to turn your children into sneaks, and without practice at self-discipline, your children might be rudderless when they leave the nest.
Acceptance of children isn't just about acceptance of children. The lack of encouragement and acceptance to develop our way of being in the world contributes to our eventual vulnerability to pernicious bots on social media, websites devoted to conspiracy theories, authoritarian politicians, and all the ills we blame on outside forces.
If you have any influence on children, directly or indirectly, and I submit that includes nearly everyone, and if you're dissatisfied in the direction of our current culture, maybe reconsider the decision to stay the course.