Good dog?

The greatest challenge in understanding the role of randomness in life is that although the basic principles of randomness arise from everyday logic, many of the consequences that follow from those principles prove counterintuitive.... In the mid 1960s, [Daniel] Kahneman, then a junior psychology professor at Hebrew University, agreed to perform a rather unexciting chore: lecturing to a group of Israeli air force flight instructors on the conventional wisdom of behavior modification and its application to the psychology of flight training. Kahneman drove home the point that rewarding positive behavior works but punishing mistakes does not. One of his students interrupted, voicing an opinion that would lead Kahneman to an epiphany and guide his research for decades.

( regression toward the mean )

The issue of regression to the mean is interesting in itself, and it's the motive for Mlodinow's anecdote, but I'd like to focus on the claim of behavioral psychology, that rewarding good behavior works but punishing bad behavior doesn't. Is this true? If so, what do I do with this principle? How do I apply it? On my mind today is that, as I've often said in a punitive tone of voice, music critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. And my assumption is that I'm not really going to have many sustained intellectual conversations unless I and people like me teach others how to do it. More immediately, I'm wondering if there's a way to have an impact on the gross dysfunctional behavior that sinks a lot of music discourse - a current example is the stupid commentary at Jezebel and Autostraddle about Taylor Swift, which Alex O. and Erika do a good job of taking apart. Basically, Autostraddle and Jezebel project a virgin-whore dichotomy onto Taylor that Taylor's actual words and behavior don't support at all, then excoriate Taylor for perpetuating the virgin-whore dichotomy. But the real dysfunction in criticism isn't the making of a false inference on the basis of too-little evidence and being too thoughtless to look for further evidence or to notice what contradicts the inference - who doesn't do that at some point (and to be honest I only skimmed the Autostraddle piece myself)? - but rather what comes after, the inability of the overall conversation to take care of this, the many voices being unable to make up for the limitations of the single voice.

( Further reflections )