Comment by gress
10 years ago
The purpose is to point out that people sharing information about how they think about things is a valid a way of influencing behavior. You are simply wrong to dismiss that.
I agree that humans influencing each other through talking about how they think about things is a hard phenomenon to reduce to the kind of science that you are advocating, but that is a limitation of your preferred methods, and it's inappropriate to dismiss phenomena just because you don't have a good way to understand them.
> "The purpose is to point out that people sharing information about how they think about things is a valid a way of influencing behavior. You are simply wrong to dismiss that."
I agree that people sharing information about how they think about things may INFLUENCE behavior. In your previous comment you used the term "cause." These are very different words, especially when we are talking about science. It's not clear what you think I dismissed.
> "inappropriate to dismiss phenomena just because you don't have a good way to understand them."
I never suggested that we dismiss phenomena. If you read my original comment, I agreed with the authors general premise but I offered an alternative explanation: "This phenomenon is better described by the concept of immediacy of reinforcement. As one decreases the delay to reinforcement, the strength of behavior maintained by that reinforcer increases."
Thus, I'm not sure what your point is.
In that same paragraph you quote from, you dismissed the author's reasoning about thinking processes. You didn't simply 'offer an alternative'.
You are incorrect. I did not dismiss the author's reasoning. I said: "We could not confirm or disconfirm this as truth, say in the context of an experiment." The author isn't running an experiment, he's just talking about how he feels when he does things quickly. So what's your point?
My point in the original comment about the concept of immediacy of reinforcement is that it is a broader, evidence-based concept that encompasses what the author described. I thought HN users might get value from such an explanation as they could apply it to more aspects of their lives than just "doing things quickly." It seems as though your purpose is to argue with me over things I didn't say or ideas I don't hold, which isn't productive or meaningful to the HN community.
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