Increasingly unrelated to the OP… you could certainly introduce a quality measure to your son’s potty training, if you wanted. For example, you could differentially reward for latency, or for predictable schedules, or for whistling more tunefully while sitting on the toilet, or whatever quality standards you wished to impose.
There still wouldn’t be any particular relationship to regression to the mean, though.
That’s a good point. Reinforcement is pretty narrowly focused on the individual. By contrast, regression to the mean makes a lot more sense if there is a population of data (the rate of goals allowed by other goalkeepers this season or by the specified goalkeeper in prior seasons—but my example is rapidly going to become less useful because of endpoint issues—there’s no way to allow fewer than zero goals per season).
Increasingly unrelated to the OP… you could certainly introduce a quality measure to your son’s potty training, if you wanted. For example, you could differentially reward for latency, or for predictable schedules, or for whistling more tunefully while sitting on the toilet, or whatever quality standards you wished to impose.
There still wouldn’t be any particular relationship to regression to the mean, though.
That’s a good point. Reinforcement is pretty narrowly focused on the individual. By contrast, regression to the mean makes a lot more sense if there is a population of data (the rate of goals allowed by other goalkeepers this season or by the specified goalkeeper in prior seasons—but my example is rapidly going to become less useful because of endpoint issues—there’s no way to allow fewer than zero goals per season).