Comment by gress
10 years ago
It's a blog post - an opinion piece - not a scientific paper.
Do you go around criticizing all opinions that refer to people's thought processes as 'flawed because it doesn't provide means for prediction and control of behavior'?
I understand that this is just a blog post. This post provided me an opportunity to spread the word about behavior analysis. If the author is advocating for behavior change (i.e., "doing things faster"), then we should speak in terms that have grounding in a science of behavior. That doesn't mean you have to conduct an experiment, but base your argument in science. If I were to make claims about how a particular piece of software worked or some law of physics that were untestable, I think people would have something critical to say (especially in HN comments). Why should we treat human behavior differently?
Are you saying that talking about what goes on in the mind is unscientific and should not be done?
"What goes on in the mind" is behavior. It can be studied scientifically but one can run into the "private event" problem. That is, what goes on in the mind is a private event only observable to the subject. In many psychological experiments, what goes on in the mind is inferred from observable behavior. This is problematic.
In behavior analysis all behavior is considered the subject matter, including private events. So the answer to your question is: No, I'm not saying that.
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