IUBio

On 'Hunger'

Mr. Smith smith at on-ramp.nl
Thu Dec 23 02:50:57 EST 2004


David Longley <David at longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>Yes Ken, many of us do get it - but do you know where *you* got it from? 
>(cf. Herrick and Sherrington, personally, I got it from my supervisor 
>Crow). It appears to me that sometime in your past you have, perhaps 
>unknown to yourself, just "discovered" some of the basics of behavioural 
>science. You are talking about the reinforcement of rates of emitted 
>classes of behaviours, but you still haven't grasped that there's over 
>seven decades of empirical research work on what the contingencies are 
>which shape "approach" and "withdrawal" behaviours (i.e. both 
>phylogenetically selected operant behaviours and ontogenetically 
>shaped/conditioned operant behaviours), not to mention the extensive 
>work which continues to be done to explicate the molecular and 
>quantitative genetics/physiology.
>
>This spans nearly all of the life sciences, and believe it or not, you 
>are skating over all of that with vague generalities.
>
>You're not entirely* on the wrong track (which is the problem), but you 
>are missing the perspective which you need in order to say anything 
>that's useful or tangible. The devil is, as usual, in the fine 
>*details*, so my best advice to you (again) is that you try to look into 
>some of the detailed work on the monoamines and the direction of 
>behaviour (DA 5-HT and NA) and how, over the past 30 years or so, this 
>has finally started to pay useful dividends (largely as a result of work 
>in behaviour genetics).
>
>As it is, you're not saying anything new or useful (and I mean to be 
>helpfully provocative/critical). You're expressing the basics (which go 
>back decades even before even I was born - see website ;-) and in a 
>rather "florid" manner too (perhaps out of frustration and just a little 
>psychosis <g> (which shouldn't worry you too much as there's a lot more 
>about than most folk appreciate!). The risk here is that you will, 
>despite your good intentions, just deter others who don't know much 
>about any of this, from looking more carefully into the work which 
>*does* go into the details, and which *is* useful (e.g. dopamine 
>receptors, ADHD, expanded triplet repeats etc...).
>
>There is considerable variation within behaviour.....and what matters 
>*is* the details (and the discipline).



 Given that since your post above Ken has responded to this thread,
but only to his own postings therein it seems that he's completely
oblivious to your voice of reason as he busily goes about making sure
that *most* of the posts to this forum are Ken talking to himself as
he gibberizes various terms used by professionals and generates sundry
affective neologisms. Given his devotion to that task over many years,
I don't think I've ever seen one forum so dominated and affected by
one individual for so long than this forum has been by Ken. 

 Why can't Ken even present his theory in a coherent outline/report?
It seems like apart from lots of surface noise, there's really nothing
there. Whenever I've seen anyone debate him, he always falls back on
it being the other person's responsibility to search through his n
thousand posts to find the answer -- a classic wild-goose chase. 

 I've observed that there is a subclass of fringe theorists who, upon
close examination, don't merely lack something true, but they actually
lack a theory; what they have instead is empty TALK about their theory
wherein they promise about all the problems their theory will solve
like a sales pitch without a product. I don't know if that perfectly
describes Ken, but I think it does to some noteworthy degree.

Mr. Smith



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