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amatic | 9 months ago

> Not seeing the revolution here. Most of the ideas here have been seen before. Did I miss something?

The reviewer is a psychologist, with some interesting opinions and criticisms of psychology. My impression is that applying control theory to study human behavior should be the revolutionary thing, for psychology.

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Animats|9 months ago

This is not new ground. See Cybernetics: Or Control_and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) by Norbert Wiener. Wiener wrote a popular version, "The Human Use of Human Beings".[2] There's a whole history of cybernetics as a field. This Wikipedia article has a good summary.[3] The beginnings of neural network work came from cybernetics. As with much of philosophy, areas in which someone got results split off to become fields of their own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

amatic|9 months ago

> This is not new ground. See Cybernetics

Control theory and cybernetics were supposed to transform psychology in a much more dramatic and all-encompassing way, as argued by W.T. Powers, for example[1]. In modern psychology, the concept of negative feedback control is treated like a metaphore, a vague connection between machines and living things (with the possible exception of the field of motor control) . If psychology would take the concept seriously, then most research methods in the field would need to be changed. Less null-hypothesis testing, more experiments applying disturbances to selected variables to see if they are controlled by a participant or not. That is the meaning I'm getting from the call to revolution.

[1] https://www.iapct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Powers1978....