[FRIAM] Dear Long Suffering Colleagues

Sun Dec 26 14:02:15 EST 2021

As repeatedly hammered in the excellent book "Beyond Versus", Sober is
conflating two things:

1) A does not cause C except through B. (A-> B -> C with no other arrows)

2) In this data set, knowledge of B lets us predict C exactly as well as we
can predict it with combined knowledge of B & knowledge of A.

For the first one,  time matters a lot (assuming standard forward-casualty
views), and for the latter it doesn't matter in the slightest. As Glen
points out,  it could easily be bidirectional.

Also, to Sober's point: YES,  if internal mental states existed in a
Cartesian manner,  AND we somehow had perfect knowledge of them,  THEN they
would be higly useful for predicting behavior.  But we can all see that
isn't actually a good arguement for believing in them... right? All the
math in the world wouldn't change that.... right?

But ALSO,  don't forget the crucial point behaviorist-Nick should be
making... let's say someone punches you,  and you kick them back.  Let's
say I happen to be brain scanning when you get punched,  and I detect a
signal in your brain that perfectly predicts you will kick back.  That
signal,  is part of the process by which the other guys punch caused your
kick. The signal is contained in "you kicked back"; it is a component part
of it.  That "you kicked" entails all of that stuff,  not just the muscle
contractions in your leg,  which could be caused by knee-tap reflexes,
external electrical stimulation,  or other causes completely unrelated to
the internal process entailed in "you kicked".

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 4:42 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Instead of "if A is true then B is true" think "if I know the value of A
> then I know something about the value of B".  For instance A = age and B =
> income.
>
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:03 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think you mean by a "fork" what we call a "common cause".  When two
>> variables are correlated it may be that they have a common cause.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Sober’s word, not mine.  Yours is the meaning he seems to give it.  The
>> whole article concerns how a causal “fork” breathes life into hypothetical
>> “inner” variables.  The abstract concerns how a causal collision breathes
>> life into  hypothetical “inner” variables.  You and glen agree that order
>> is NOT important, so now I am going to have a rethink.  Does it make any
>> sense to distinguish between logical and temporal order?  So B is true,
>> given A, speaks to logical order.   A CAUSES B speaks to temporal order,
>> unless we have given up on the requirement that the Cause A cannot occur
>> after A itself.
>>
>>
>>
>> N
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick Thompson
>>
>> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Monday, December 20, 2021 12:02 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Dear Long Suffering Colleagues
>>
>>
>>
>> I think you mean by a "fork" what we call a "common cause".  When two
>> variables are correlated it may be that they have a common cause.
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 8:17 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I don't understand your criticism. What do you think is "cocked up"? [⛧]
>>
>> I'll take a swipe at what might be the problem: The concluding paragraph
>> seems to make the point that forks *are* (reversed) collisions and
>> collisions are (reversed) forks. The key may lie in some preemptive
>> registration of words like "prediction". If you stick to words like
>> "relation" and "correlation" and toss out all the mechanistic/causal
>> language, it might be clearer how forks are collisions and vice versa. The
>> only difference is the *direction* of inference.
>>
>> But to be clear, despite my guess above, I'm asking a question. What do
>> you think is wrong, here?
>>
>> [⛧] For my own convenience, here's the link to the article I *think*
>> we're talking about:
>> methodological behaviorism, causal chains, and causal forks
>> https://behavior.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/BPv45_SOBER.pdf
>>
>> On 12/19/21 10:08 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>> > */Yes!  Right!  Thankyou! /*
>> >
>> > That is now obvious to you because you know that stuff.  But for three
>> weeks it has been driving me crazy.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Now for the second point.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> 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.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > This is from the abstract of the article.  Not only do we see the same
>> slip-up with respect to I (I IS after all, the inner state), but we see
>> also that the abstract entertains an article about causal convergence
>> (“collision”), not causal forks.  Yet every where else, in the title, or in
>> the body, the article seems to be talking about forks.  Even with my weak
>> knowledge of formal logic and probability, I can see that that would make a
>> huge difference.  Can you confirm also that that is a cockup, so I don’t
>> spend another month trying to make it make sense?
>>
>> --
>> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
>> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>>
>>
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