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Created: 2nd July 1999 | |
| Mice |
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| As I write this I am 50 years and 1 day old. Yesterday I was very drunk. I erased a perfectly sensible article about Superstitious mice, added one called 'F**k' and generally screwed about on these pages. So now I'm trying to clean up some of the mess. I did write a piece called 'Grow Fins' which I am quite happy with, though. Go take a peek real soon.
Anyway the point about superstitious mice is this:
B.F.Skinner and his Behaviourist colleagues used to observe mice learning behaviour from the consequences of their actions. Reward (food) when they do something right and punishment (electric shock) when they do something wrong. Thus they would learn the desired behaviour. This is how animals on TV and in circuses are trained to act in such fetching ways. Occasionally a mouse would scratch a whisker or perform some other irrelevant action and associate this with the desired behaviour. Skinner called these creaures superstitious.
My point was that people make the same kind of mistakes attributing cause and effect and this is the reason for a lot of stupid behaviour. If we could just be a little bit more scientific in our reasoning we would be happier, more liberated people.
Now I've had another idea, also based on some psychological research, about Helpless Dogs. |
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| | | RESEARCHER DATA
| |  | Name:
Researcher 47158
Last posted: Jul 31, 1999
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47158
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