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As the article suggests, Skinner was a very rational person and often made the mistake of expecting the rest of the world to be just the same. He once said that

As the article suggests, Skinner was a very rational person and often made the mistake of expecting the rest of the world to be just the same. He once said that if you come across something interesting, stop everything and study it. It's good advice. Earning a Ph.D. in this area, I was always frustrated that - as utterly brilliant as Skinner was (e.g. he wrote a dozen books, including best-sellers, in the middle of the night after a short rest) - he always overlooked an obvious fact: people saw themselves as special from other animals, and would not accept any theory or technology that treated them as something less. While 'operant principles' could explain everything from the emotional lives of people to the conditioning of neural networks, Skinner's approach was, once again, too rational to survive in the public sphere.

avgcorrection 5y ago
> As the article suggests, Skinner was a very rational person In an audio recording he dismissed Chomsky’s critique of his work. He said that he hadn’t read it. He then went on to agree with people who had had read and disagreed with the critique... but how could he agree with them if he hadn’t read the critique.
- richardatlarge 5y ago
  Not sure. Skinner was at Harvard and Chomsky was at MIT. But Skinner was much more established in his respective field at that time, which is why Skinner made the mistake of ignoring the review. Skinner didn't believe Chomsky, or linguists generally, understood Verbal Behavior, which further encouraged him to ignore the review. At the end of the day, you can't have a real debate between two views unless both views are properly understood. Useful reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223959896_Skinner_and_Chomsky_30_Years_Later_Or_The_Return_of_the_Repressed https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223959896_Skinner_a...
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    > Not sure. […] But Skinner was much more established in his respective field at that time, which is why Skinner made the mistake of ignoring the review. But that’s not the point. Say you haven’t read X: 1. It is rational to say “I haven’t read X so I can’t comment on it” 2. It is less rational (or dishonest) to say “I haven’t read X but I agree with these other people who have read it and dislike it!”
tsimionescu 5y ago
But Skinner's ideas have been proven to be entirely limited to simplistic training. His most ambitious idea - that all complex behaviors are acquired through these simplistic reward mechanisms - is well known to be wrong now, a hopelessly limited understanding of the problem space. As far as I know, he never engaged with the obvious arguments against his work - particularly the poverty of the stimulus argument. I don't believe he was a particularly rational individual - he was simply convinced of his simplistic model, and didn't want to see all the ways it didn't succeed in predicting all animal behavior. It's not that humans are special, by the way. There are human behaviors that can be trained with behaviorist approaches. There are also animal behaviors that are obviously not trained in similar ways. For a good example of the latter, look at how long it takes quadruped animals to learn to walk - many do it within seconds or minutes after birth. Deer are leaping over obstacles hours after birth. That's not operant conditioning.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  “Rational” in this context seems to mean “prone to reductive and simple explanations”.[1] But I have never heard of a scientific endeavor where people found out that things were more simple than they first hypothesized. [1] And to be contrasted with those idiots who think that humans are “special” since they think that simple theories are not sufficient... or you know, maybe that organisms in general are complex machines or whatever you want to call it and that, yes, there are differences between a maggot, a bird and a human.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    > "All models are wrong, but some are useful."... It is usually considered to be applicable to not only statistical models, *but to scientific models generally*. The aphorism recognizes that statistical or scientific models always fall short of the complexities of reality but can still be of use. Emphasis mine. Human behavior is not physics. Even in that domain though, Newtonian physics is still useful - we just happen to know its limits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
  - 5y ago

avgcorrection 5y ago

> As the article suggests, Skinner was a very rational person In an audio recording he dismissed Chomsky’s critique of his work. He said that he hadn’t read it. He then went on to agree with people who had had read and disagreed with the critique... but how could he agree with them if he hadn’t read the critique.

richardatlarge 5y ago
Not sure. Skinner was at Harvard and Chomsky was at MIT. But Skinner was much more established in his respective field at that time, which is why Skinner made the mistake of ignoring the review. Skinner didn't believe Chomsky, or linguists generally, understood Verbal Behavior, which further encouraged him to ignore the review. At the end of the day, you can't have a real debate between two views unless both views are properly understood. Useful reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223959896_Skinner_and_Chomsky_30_Years_Later_Or_The_Return_of_the_Repressed https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223959896_Skinner_a...
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > Not sure. […] But Skinner was much more established in his respective field at that time, which is why Skinner made the mistake of ignoring the review. But that’s not the point. Say you haven’t read X: 1. It is rational to say “I haven’t read X so I can’t comment on it” 2. It is less rational (or dishonest) to say “I haven’t read X but I agree with these other people who have read it and dislike it!”

tsimionescu 5y ago

But Skinner's ideas have been proven to be entirely limited to simplistic training. His most ambitious idea - that all complex behaviors are acquired through these simplistic reward mechanisms - is well known to be wrong now, a hopelessly limited understanding of the problem space. As far as I know, he never engaged with the obvious arguments against his work - particularly the poverty of the stimulus argument. I don't believe he was a particularly rational individual - he was simply convinced of his simplistic model, and didn't want to see all the ways it didn't succeed in predicting all animal behavior. It's not that humans are special, by the way. There are human behaviors that can be trained with behaviorist approaches. There are also animal behaviors that are obviously not trained in similar ways. For a good example of the latter, look at how long it takes quadruped animals to learn to walk - many do it within seconds or minutes after birth. Deer are leaping over obstacles hours after birth. That's not operant conditioning.

avgcorrection 5y ago
“Rational” in this context seems to mean “prone to reductive and simple explanations”.[1] But I have never heard of a scientific endeavor where people found out that things were more simple than they first hypothesized. [1] And to be contrasted with those idiots who think that humans are “special” since they think that simple theories are not sufficient... or you know, maybe that organisms in general are complex machines or whatever you want to call it and that, yes, there are differences between a maggot, a bird and a human.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  > "All models are wrong, but some are useful."... It is usually considered to be applicable to not only statistical models, *but to scientific models generally*. The aphorism recognizes that statistical or scientific models always fall short of the complexities of reality but can still be of use. Emphasis mine. Human behavior is not physics. Even in that domain though, Newtonian physics is still useful - we just happen to know its limits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
- 5y ago