[FRIAM] Dear Long Suffering Colleagues

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Here, once again, is the infamous Sober article.   I know.  Half of you want
to throw me off FRIAM for being so ignorant as to give my time to it, while
the other half want to throw me off FRIAM for being so ignorant as to find
fault with it.  I confess that both of these could be true.  

 

It all revolves the consequences of "screening off" and it's possible
relations to the claims of behaviorism.  

 

First I want to point out what I have now come to believe are devastating
typos, typos which those of you who have already read the text for me might
not have noticed because you knew what the passages SHOULD say, and so read
right over what they actually said   For me, with my very limited gasp of
probability inference, was completely knocked flat by them and only quite
recently come to believe that they are typos.

For example, if a stimulus S raises the probability of inner state I, 
and I raises the probability of response R, then S raises the probability R,
provided 

that I screens-off S from I. Screening-off means that 

 

 

Pr(R at t1 | I at t2 ) = Pr(R at t1 | I at t2 & S at t1 ). 

 

 

Note that the two passages contradict one another.    I would simply
disregard the first passage  if it weren't repeated in the  document's
abstract: 

 

 

E1 and E2, each causally contribute to a behavior, B.  In this case,
postulating

 an inner state, I, that is caused by both E1 and E2, and which causes I,
affects 

one's predictions concerning the relationship between environment and
behavior. 




 

 

Notice also, that this exposition in the abstract contemplates a causal
collision, where the burden of the article concerns causal forks.

 

I have struggled to come up with a verbal account of "screening off" which
is acceptable to either of my critiques.   Here is another, 

 

Screening off means, where A==>B==>C, A has no effect on C other than its
effect  via B

 

Could somebody settle the typo issue for me. 

 

I will stop for now. 

 

n

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

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