[amatic]

> Not seeing the revolution here. Most of the ideas here have been seen before. Did I miss something?

The reviewer is a psychologist, with some interesting opinions and criticisms of psychology. My impression is that applying control theory to study human behavior should be the revolutionary thing, for psychology.

[Animats]

This is not new ground. See Cybernetics: Or Control_and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) by Norbert Wiener. Wiener wrote a popular version, "The Human Use of Human Beings".[2] There's a whole history of cybernetics as a field. This Wikipedia article has a good summary.[3] The beginnings of neural network work came from cybernetics. As with much of philosophy, areas in which someone got results split off to become fields of their own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

[amatic]

> This is not new ground. See Cybernetics

Control theory and cybernetics were supposed to transform psychology in a much more dramatic and all-encompassing way, as argued by W.T. Powers, for example[1]. In modern psychology, the concept of negative feedback control is treated like a metaphore, a vague connection between machines and living things (with the possible exception of the field of motor control) . If psychology would take the concept seriously, then most research methods in the field would need to be changed. Less null-hypothesis testing, more experiments applying disturbances to selected variables to see if they are controlled by a participant or not. That is the meaning I'm getting from the call to revolution.

[1] https://www.iapct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Powers1978....

[Animats]

Ah. The linked paper goes into that in more detail.

This was a hot idea right after WWII because servomechanisms were finally working. In movies of early WWII naval gunnery, you see people turning cranks to get two arrows on a a dial to match. By late WWII, that's become automatic. Anti-aircraft guns are hitting the target more of the time. Early war air gunner training.[1] Late war air gunner training - the computer does the hard part.[2] Never before had that much mechanized feedback smarts been applied to tough real-world problems.

This sort of thing generated early AI enthusiasm. Machines can think! AGI Real Soon Now! Hence the "cybernetics" movement. That lasted about a decade. They needed another nine orders of magnitude of compute power. Psychology picked up on this concept, but didn't do much with it.

Looks like it's coming around again.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWYqu1Il9Ps

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJExsIp4yO8

[MarkusQ]

<snark>It has been described as such every time it's tried.</snark>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Cybernetics