[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

[∄ uǝʃƃ]

Sorry for being vague.  In the weight/scale example, the intervention would be something like "I'm not going to eat today because the scale said I'm heavier than yesterday."  That type of conflation of instant measures with trends will likely lead to a similar over-intervention in the other direction, "I get to have desert today because the scale said I way 2 lbs less than yesterday."  It's also the type of conflation that confuses people into thinking "weather" and "climate" are the same thing.

Even in your example, we might notice that even though there are N licenses doled out, the deer population continues to rise.  It would be over-intervention to simply issue more licenses.  Perhaps the people getting the licenses are mostly an aging population who don't hunt much anymore but have some semi-automated approach to getting a license?  Proper intervention would require us to figure out the actual relation between licenses issued and population.  And such relations need not be linear.  In fact, I'd argue that most relations like that are nonlinear.  Which means that those experiments (changing one variable at a time) are not only NOT the best experiments, but that they have mislead us completely.  Such linear thinking has prevented us from taking into account the "externalities" of any given policy, causes us to mis-headline any given scientific publication, etc.

On 09/17/2018 07:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I don't think your example is over-intervention, it is under-intervention.   If they step on the scale every day, don't like what they see, and walk or run 10 miles every day (whatever speed they can manage) they will almost certainly see a fitness change.    Of course, it will be better if they don't use a crude indicator like visible chubbiness but switch to another set of indicators like resting heart rate, blood pressure, or average speed.
> 
> Usually the best experiments involve changing one variable at a time in a non-ambiguous way.   And there are plenty of `standard practices' that in neglect push things to the edge.  There are some parts of the country where there are enough hunting licenses issued to almost wipe-out all of the yearling deer.   So, the idea of "let's make a little change and see what happens over time" is kind of silly because there is a huge intervention made every season for completely artificial reasons (political pressure from a hunting lobby).    
> 
> In my example, it could be that there are population-level reasons why some individuals prefer the same sex, and if these individuals were removed, they would rebound for other reasons besides one of genetic predisposition (that was hypothetically selected for).   Likewise, if the redneck/hillbilly population were attenuated, that new people would move out to rural areas and drop their urban sensibilities.   Perhaps as frequency of diverse interaction is reduced, a tribal pattern resumes, at least within a generation of isolation.

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∄ uǝʃƃ