Replying to LO20774
Dear LO'ers, dear Jon
To react immediately to your last sentence: I am doing reasonably well. I
know it could always be better, but I am not unsatisfied.
I thank you greatly for your wise and very, very informative contribution.
A nice feeling of hapiness flew through my veins. Because you made it so
clear that positive reinforcement does have much better and predictable
effects in the long run, then punishment.
The contribution was so vividly written, that some thoughts came into my
mind. When I read the effect of rewarding with food, I thought of the
modern cowshed here in the Netherlands. At present the shed is
computerised. Cows have a leather necklace with a identity chip. According
to quantity and quality of the individual milk production, the automatic
food supply is programmed accordingly. So when the cow puts her head in
the feeding bucket, the chip tells the computer if and how much food will
be delivered. Some cows in the open shed don't receive food, because they
just had some, others may get the food. The first ones are looking
jealously to their colleague who is feeded. It is a nice scenary, worth to
observe for a while. One tends to project all sorts of human feelings and
emotions into these animals.
Other thoughts are more in the political scene. I don't like to start here
a political discussion. The examples are just ment to be illustrations of
positive and negative reinforcements. Here in The Netherlands, we have a
philosophy on treatment of the drug problems (canabis, heroine, XTC,
etc.), which is probably known as rather 'liberal'. Although it takes
quite some energy, it will presumably generate better results in the
future, than the hard line punishment that is propagated in so much other
countries. There is also another issue: coping with the traffic jams and
the nearly complete congestion of the highways in the Netherlands. The
dynamics and flows of economy are in a hard time at present. The
government is seriously thinking of punishing the highway users by
so-called pay-driving. One should pay rather high amounts of money when
using the highway during peak hours (morning and evening). Either the
punishment is not hard enough and thus the behaviour will not change, or
it is hard, but then a lot of unpredictable behaviour will be the results
(serious problems will occur elsewhere).
And so, many examples could be given. I just like to add only a minor
remark to your contribution, Jon. I think that the 4:1 ration says not
only something for the behavioural sciences, but also something of thought
generation (the mind). My impression is that generally it is four times
easier to think in negative solutions, than in positive solutions of
complicated problems (such as the drug addicts and the traffic jams). One
of the major challanges is to learn people and organisations to think in
positive and optimistic directions.
Thank you again,
dr. Leo D. Minnigh
minnigh@library.tudelft.nl
Library Technical University Delft
PO BOX 98, 2600 MG Delft, The Netherlands
Tel.: 31 15 2782226
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Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.
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--Leo Minnigh <L.D.Minnigh@library.tudelft.nl>
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