(Note: if you do wish to have an intelligent discussion on the topic, you may reach me via the old thread. I’m pre-committing not to reply to you in this one, where you can indulge your obvious desire to score points off an audience, vs. actually discussing anything.)
Thanks for the poisoned well, but I don’t intend to abuse the last word. I think more highly of you now than I did when we had our prior altercation, but it remains true that I’ve seen zero experimental evidence for PCT in a cognitive context, and that Marken’s paper is an absolute mathematical sham. There may be valid aspects to PCT, but it hasn’t yet justified its use as a cognitive theory, and I feel that it’s important to note this whenever it comes up on Less Wrong.
(Incidentally, the reason I trailed off in that thread is because I’d done something that in retrospect was poor form: I’d written up a full critique of the Marken paper before I asked you whether you thought it constituted experimental evidence, and I was frustrated that you didn’t walk into the trap. If we both agree that the paper is pseudoscience, though, there’s nothing left to add.)
P.S. I don’t doubt that you’ve had success working with people through a PCT framework, but I suspect that it’s a placebo effect: a sufficiently fuzzy framework gives you room to justify your (usually correct) unconscious intuitions about what’s going on, and grants it the gravitas of a deep-sounding theory. (You might do just as well if you were a Freudian.) That’s one reason why I discount anecdotal evidence of that form.
Thanks for the poisoned well, but I don’t intend to abuse the last word. I think more highly of you now than I did when we had our prior altercation, but it remains true that I’ve seen zero experimental evidence for PCT in a cognitive context, and that Marken’s paper is an absolute mathematical sham. There may be valid aspects to PCT, but it hasn’t yet justified its use as a cognitive theory, and I feel that it’s important to note this whenever it comes up on Less Wrong.
(Incidentally, the reason I trailed off in that thread is because I’d done something that in retrospect was poor form: I’d written up a full critique of the Marken paper before I asked you whether you thought it constituted experimental evidence, and I was frustrated that you didn’t walk into the trap. If we both agree that the paper is pseudoscience, though, there’s nothing left to add.)
P.S. I don’t doubt that you’ve had success working with people through a PCT framework, but I suspect that it’s a placebo effect: a sufficiently fuzzy framework gives you room to justify your (usually correct) unconscious intuitions about what’s going on, and grants it the gravitas of a deep-sounding theory. (You might do just as well if you were a Freudian.) That’s one reason why I discount anecdotal evidence of that form.