에피소드 1: John E.R. Staddon

But then I shift all my effort to actually making a school for dog trainers and teach them more on a personal level instead of just writing a book, which is not out of the question. But that's how originally we got introduced. I approached you because I really – there were so many things that hit home of the way you view things and the openness you have to talk about what science and what facts really do and how it happens instead of having a certain agenda, which probably we will end up talking about. But without any further delay, John, welcome. And again, very, very happy to have you as my first person on my podcast. Well, congratulations, Ivan. I'm delighted to be here. I'm somewhat overwhelmed by your introduction. I'm very, very happy that you've read my books and enjoyed them. And I'm just really happy to be here. Good, good. Yeah, especially – I wouldn't think it's a – you know, sometimes I would say there is different levels of dog trainers. And there is people that really starve and are really hungry for the knowledge and the information that they can find in everything that you write and everything that you teach. Normally, as I said in the introduction, when people ask me where I learn and what I – and they expect me to point to another dog trainer. But in my 40 years of doing this in a very high, serious level, I have learned that any dog trainer has some practical hands-on skills that are invaluable. But ultimately, even if they learn from another dog trainer, they're learning something that's probably already explained why and how it works by people like yourself that do all these experiments and the laboratory research. Especially like you've done so much with pigeons and rats and there he is. What is his name? It's a boy or a girl? This is a pseudo dog. It's a mutt. Of course. Nice one. It's a mutt. Mostly papillon, I think. Beautiful. Beautiful. But she's been pestering me, so I figured I had to bring her up. Of course. It's a dog shell. We have to have the dogs, right? It's appropriate, right? That's right. That's right. Where do we start? We can talk as much as we want to. Of course, we're not going to be able to cover everything that I want. And I'm sure that I will miss something. And later on, I'll be like, oh, how could I miss this? But hopefully everybody that listens is going to enjoy the conversation. I guess, yeah, before we get more into learning and the experiments, and like I have a lot of questions. But I just very recently stumbled upon the last book that you did, The Scientific Method. And how science works, fails to work, and pretends to work.

It's just the title is immediately, it's like, I need to read this. Because as dog trainers, we very often seem to be put down as, okay, no, these are the dog trainers. And they don't possibly have that kind of intelligence or need to search for knowledge to really understand what goes on. And I'm sure in all aspects, like we watch all TV and we listen to news. And there is always the famous, well, science says, or the latest research points to this. And everything starts like this. And it's almost to convince you not to question it. And am I correct? You're absolutely right. I mean, you could replace the word science with gospel, and the meaning would be the same. And as useful, I mean, there is no single science. I mean, people keep asking questions about this COVID business. Yeah. I mean, it's uncertain. The whole thing is totally uncertain. But you never see anybody come onto the screen and say, well, I'm a scientist and I actually don't know. I mean, nobody says I don't know. And that would be so refreshing if people did. But I have an old friend that I've known for years, and he used to be an expert witness. You know, in court cases, he's an engineer. And I learned from him that the main thing you need to be an expert witness or to be on television is to be decisive. You know, you have to come across as a knower, whether you really do or not, you know. And you're right. That's one of the problems with science right now. Yes. And it seems like it's instead of, and again, I'm speaking from my dog training experience and how much I know. But instead of starting to keep those people that present the papers and the research a little bit more in check, to me it sounds like there are certain areas where you're pretty much, if you have a PhD and you write anything and you cite the right people behind, this will get published. That's my feeling. And you're not really delivering nothing new even. I mean, I should send you a paper. I just reviewed a book called, what's it called? Science, it's called Science Fictions. Science Fictions by a British chap called Richie, Christopher Richie, I think. Science Fiction. And it's about the problems with modern science, which are huge, absolutely huge. You know probably about the so-called replication crisis, do you know about that? Yes. Yes. But you should tell a little bit about it for the audience. Essence of science, and science existed before statistics, and it's debatable whether statistics has been good for science or not.

But the essence of science, if you have a phenomenon that you're going to write about, the essence of science is that it be repeatable. You can do it again. People who read your paper can do it again, and so on. And when it was simple things like chemistry, it was pretty easy. Everybody knew what potassium was. Everybody had the same element potassium. If you showed property X, somebody else could show property X, and so on. And medicine, much the same thing was true. There's a wonderful, wonderful book, The Father of Experimental Medicine, Claude Bernard, written in the 1850s or something like that. It's actually on my website. If you want to read an English translation of it. But it's a marvelous book, and he had a wonderful theme or dogma. I guess it would be how to call it a dogma. He said, no exceptions. No exceptions. If you are going to talk about a phenomenon, it has to be demonstrable every time. Well, now flip forward 100 years to the invention of statistics, which was the first steps in statistics were made by a very brilliant man, Francis Galton, who was, I think, his half cousin or something of Charles Darwin. So he had, quote, good genes, I guess. Anyway, he was a brilliant guy, and he did all sorts of interesting work. But he started the idea of statistics, as we know it today. I mean, there are other people earlier who've done simpler versions of it and so on. But his successor, or one of his successes, was a man called R.A. Fisher, Ronald Aylmer Fisher. And he worked in a horticultural unit in England. And he invented what's come to be known as the Null Hypothesis Testing System. Null Hypothesis Statistical Test, NHST. And the idea of that, which now has become almost a model for all science, even though it was a niche product in its day, and it should have remained a niche product. I don't want to give a long lecture on this. But the idea is, if you're studying something that can't be repeated in the individual. I'll give you an example and a counterexample. Suppose you want to study visual acuity, how well people can see different things and so on. I reported in this article, when I was a graduate student, I did an experiment on visual acuity when the letters were black on white or white on black. Okay, you can do that with one person. You go back and forth and back and forth. And you don't need statistics. You just need to look at your data and look at the result. And you can repeat it with one or two others to make sure the person you were studying is not a oddball. But that's it. That's basic science. That's what science is all about.

But if you want to study something like learning or reading, how do you teach kids to read? Okay, you've got method A and method B. Well, you obviously can't compare them with the same kid. You train him on method A and now he's ahead of the kid who just started on method B. So you have to compare groups. And that's become the standard method. You have one group that learns by method A, one group that learns by method B. And there are two major, major issues raised by that. One is, are the two groups really equivalent? That's why there's a lot of stuff about randomized control. And you have to pick this randomly. You don't have a dog that gets in the way all the time. So you've got to make sure the groups are the same. But the second, and this is the big problem, is having concluded that method A is better than method B, you say, well, that's how people learn. No, it's not how people learn. That's how groups learn. That is how groups learn. And to get from the group back to the individual is really very, very important and very difficult. I'll give one more example. There's a field called behavior like an onyx, but some of you may have heard of it. The idea is that people follow incentives and so on. And the father, one of the fathers of this field, or two of them actually, are a couple of guys called Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a couple of very, very bright Israeli guys. And they did experiments asking people to choose between different bets. Now, in none of those experiments did 100% of the people go one way or the other. But sometimes they've got a statistically significant number of people that went one way or the other. But the conclusions that came out of it were people are risk averse, or people show confirmation bias or something like that. But not everybody did. And they did not do the experiments, as Claude Bernal would have suggested, to find out what made the difference. Why do some people go this way and some people go that way? To find the really invariant, constant thing about human nature, which is what they were after. In fact, what they were doing was public polling, opinion polling. Yes, yes, yes. Like surveys. This is a very common way of making a poll and a survey, and all of a sudden going through the right channels, and it becomes... Truth of human behavior becomes human behavior. This is the very nature is to be risk averse, or whatever it might be. But it's as if you did a survey found that 70% of the people voted Democrat, and 30% voted, well, whatever, Republicans say, ah, human nature is Democratic. Really? Nobody would believe that, you know?

But it's the same kind of argument. Yes. I'm sorry. No, no. This is absolutely exactly what we need to talk about. This is very, very informative and very helpful for us as a dog training society to understand this a little bit on a deeper level. And I even want to add, and maybe you elaborate a little more to that, because there is so many other components on top of what you are saying, and I think, you know, who is funding the research? Well, I go on about that at some length, and this chap, Richie, is very, very good on that, too. I mean, funding, the whole funding system needs to be examined. I mean, it's not so much that it's corrupt, it's that it's the wrong kind of incentives. I mean, I shut down my research lab more than 10 years ago, and the reason wasn't that I got bored with research. The reason was I was sick of spending almost 50% of my time writing grant proposals. I mean, that's crazy that you write. And second of all, that problem arose, I think, because these grants are very short-term. In other words, if you apply for a grant, you're lucky to get one that lasts longer than three years, all right? So you have your three-year grant. You have to reapply when after two years. Show progress, right? Science doesn't work like that. Science doesn't work like that. And the best example I know, or counter-example I know, is Charles Darwin. He's one of my absolute heroes. And Wallace, what's his name? I'm blocking out. Russell Wallace's first name. Anyway, Wallace was another evolutionary guy. Darwin, in 1938, two years after he returned from collecting stuff, he was on a ship. The Beagle went around the world under rather heroic conditions. And he just collected stuff for five years, all right? For five years. That was his data collection. Two years after that, he had an idea. Well, if this all begins to make sense in terms of something I will call natural selection, all right? So the next 20 years, 1838 to, you know, 58, he worked on proving, testing his idea, okay? So this whole thing took him 25, 27 years, all right? That was the way science should be done, and it was done, and it could be done because Darwin didn't need a grant. He was independently wealthy. He had a lot of money from his rich father. Okay, along comes Alfred Russell Wallace, young guy, wonderful guy too, by the way. He sends Darwin, and you probably know some of this story. He sends Darwin from his sickbed in Indonesia, a little manuscript he'd written with the idea of, you know, ring the bell, natural selection. Darwin gets, and of course, he's pretty shocked. I mean, even in those days, priority was very important.

I mean, Newton argued with Leibniz. I mean, you know, there was a lot of controversy about priorities from the beginning of science. So poor old Darwin's looking at this. Oh, God, you know, I shall be completely smashed, he says. So he didn't know what to do. Well, he was a very, very honorable man. So what he did was he showed the letter that he got from Wallace to some of his senior colleagues, and said, what shall I do about this? And they said, well, why don't you write up something? Well, give a little talk on both of you, which is what they did. In 1858, in the Linnaean Society, a little paper, joint sort of joint papers were delivered by Darwin and Wallace. Okay. All very fair. I mean, what else could, what else could they, or should they have done? Well, now you read books, say, oh, Darwin was scooped by Wallace, but he suppressed it, you know? I mean, Darwin gets criticism for this. I mean, because now, being first is all that matters. Being first, never mind how much work you've done to be sure of this idea that you're promoting. If you're first, I mean, it's quite, quite extraordinary. Really quite, quite extraordinary. But it's promoted by this granting incentive system. You've got to keep pumping stuff out, you know, in order to keep getting your grants and all that. I mean, it's a complicated thing. I'm just giving one little corner of it. Yes, yes. I think it's been going on a long time. I remember when I was still working in the lab, we used to joke about something called the LPU. The LPU is based on the BTU. Now, the BTU is the British Thermal Unit. It's a scientific unit. The LPU is the least publishable unit. The smallest thing you could get into print. Some people would publish on that basis. Well, I mean, Darwin did not. And even Russell Wallace did not either. At least he had a 20 or 30 page paper and thought about it for some time. But that's, the pressures are all wrong, is what I'm saying. Yes. Science has to allow for failure, failure, failure, failure. If you read the history of any great scientific discovery, you'll see that this poor scientist, whoever he was, tried a lot of stuff that didn't work. You don't get paid off for that in the modern system. You know? I don't know how to solve it. I mean, yeah, that's a thing. But anyway, I'll pass it on to you. I think it will eventually. Hopefully, hopefully it, it changes because if, if they're just, just the, the, the regular person starts to understand that there is something that just doesn't make sense anymore of how things are done. I hope. But human, the human capacity for irrationality is, I would say, almost limitless. Right. Right. Just look at all this political stuff

that's going on now. Yes. I think that phenomenon of, like, what, what is politically correct? There's almost like a, like key words, not even phrases, key words, that if you put them in somehow and they may not make sense, but those words are in there, you have, you, you, you have a ticket. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. I think that's the way it is. Listen, you're a dog guy. Let me pick your brain. Let's go. I've got this dog here. And like a lot of little dogs, she barks at anything novel. She barks at anything novel. That's it. Anything. Yeah. I think novelty is the main thing, but also I think a strange person speaking outside the window, you know, the doorbell. There is some surprise element to it, for sure. Yeah. I think any kind of surprise. And I'm curious as how you would cure this with minimal labor on my part. So, so. It must be a common problem, right? Right. So it's a, it's a good, if, if you, you know, the, the, the best thing is to try to collect some history and, and, and see how much we have to explore the, the, the genetics predisposition to it. And then the, what the environment creates and understand that dogs bark because it's, they're, they're programmed to, to react and announce. It's instinctive. I mean, exactly. So it's not, you know, would say an operant. We will get there. We will. Yeah. We're definitely getting there. But so, so with the, there is, in dog trainers, there is a lot of different branches of dog training and there is a certain type of dog trainer that is very eager to, oh, I can do this. I can stop him or I can make him without ever questioning why it's happening. And should you really completely suppress it or not allow it? Because it, it has a purpose. It's, it's a, in, in the whole dog's evolution, evolution, this was a very meaningful thing that all of a sudden is a nuisance when the doorbell rings at home. But actually it has a dramatic purpose in, in nature. Correct? Yeah. Evolutionary. I, I, I have not totally succeeded in eliminating this, this one. this is a, so I think the, the one thing is, but yeah, to allow the dog, because even if, if you, let's say you're so strict and you're like, no, you, I will never let you back on the, the doorbell. that will, that will be almost like a torture emotionally to a dog, even if he understands it. Right. So we have to let it be, but then there is a point that say, okay, you told me you barked twice. I heard you. Someone's there. Now we are good. So, at this point we have, what, I mean, I, I almost feel like, I, I have no, even right to talk about this, but, you know, we got to introduce some kind of differential reinforcer, some, some,

some kind of program to where we have to guide it into, okay, that happened. Now let's see what else we can do to where, the, and what I think, at least in dog training, when, somebody uses differential reinforcers, reinforcer programming, it, it's, it becomes a problematic thing because, we are not just trying to change the dog from here to here, but we are completely fighting against the whole desire of why this was happening. And instead of maintaining, oh, I can satisfy that desire, but you're just going to do something more, um, um, acceptable, acceptable, instead of completely take you on a different ride. and this is a common problem with dog training, um, to where we, we definitely can look into stopping a behavior, but still find something that comes close to satisfying that desire for that, what that behavior happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I agree. I mean, I, I would never punish this guy for, for barking, but what, what seems to suppress it, is comfort. You know, if she's like, oh, poor thing, she'll stop, you know, I mean, because it's a, in a way, again, the different dogs will do it for different reasons. And so a different up dogs are different. So when we, when we are barking as an alarm, Hey, Hey, Hey, yeah, something's going on. Yeah. If you act, do calming things. Yes. And that situation, I can see how calming is, uh, Oh, okay. Finally, somebody on my side recognize that. Yeah. You've got to look at the animal state, not just the behavior and so on and so on. Anyway. Yes, very true. And, and, and, but this is a, a really good topic when we talk, uh, in dog training, because most often than not dog trainers are super, super quick to, okay, we can stop this, or we can make him do this. completely disregarding why it's happening, completely disregarding the, the genetic makeup, the, and just because we know a little bit about how reinforcement and punishment works, it's unfair to go against the animal's nature, because ultimately, uh, um, I, I think the animal will, will begin to suffer one way. There's going to be some emotional, uh, you know, it's not going to be a happy animal at that point, because it, it basically cannot do what it's born to be. Yeah. Right. That's right. That's right. No, I agree. I agree. So to some extent, some barking is perfectly fine. as far as I'm concerned, of course, there is dogs that they will, speaking of which I have one in the house, that he, he can completely just lay down and go, woof, woof. This one will go back in her sleep. Woof. But, yes, I mean, it's, it's a way of expression. It's a way, I mean, obviously, extremely social beings, dogs, and they have to, they have to, oh, I'm first,

I heard at first, hey, everybody. I mean, in, in his world, this is a big deal. Right. So, I, I kind of curious to, to talk, have you talked to us a little bit about, you know, like your, experimental research with, with, like, especially, you know, you spend a lot of times on, on reward and reinforcers. Yeah. And if you can, just, this can be a very, very interesting, pretty much anything you say on this topic, it will be super interesting to us. Dr. Einar. Yeah, well, for, you know, non-scientific audience, I'm not sure how super interesting it will be, but, I can tell you a little bit about my history. Yes. I, I, was a terrible student as an undergraduate, because I was more interested in writing, movie reviews. And, actually, I always wanted to do biology, but the, British educational system was then, and I suspect still is quite rigid. If you want to do biology in college, you have to have taken what's called an A-level, biology exam in high school. My high school did not have a biology program, it was quite small. It's a grammar school. So, so I couldn't do biology. So, that was gone. And, via, a sort of devious course, I wound up in, in psychology. and then, eventually, I wound up at Harvard, in, in graduate school. And, what attracted me there, was the experimental method. I mean, I, had been brought up with this, an HST method, you know, the null hypothesis, statistical test method. And, even as an undergraduate, I thought, there's something, there's something wrong with this, you know, I, I want to study individual organisms. And, here, they're giving me these groups. You know, it just didn't seem right. And, I didn't know, that there was any alternative at that time. But, when I wound up at Harvard, I found, well, lo and behold, here's this method, where you can study individual, in that case, pigeons. They were, the, uh, animal of choice at the time. You can study them, one at a time, repeat your experiments, get really, really good data, and so on. And, there were a lot of, sort of, technical problems that were appealing. I mean, I arrived just after the time when, first, and Skinner had published this massive, rather disorganized book called, Schedules of Reinforcement, which is full of these graphs, or cumulative records of, animals' behavior, in real time, and so on. Now, it's only one dimension of their behavior, it's pecking on a key, basically. But, still, it was very, very orderly, and it looked like a promising way to go. And so, I became interested in timing behavior, how animals tell time, which is very technical, and quite remote from the, um, from the dog problem, although one of the solutions was offered by dogs many, many years later. Um,

but I just became very interested in these technical issues. But, at the same time, there was a very dominant philosophy in the Harvard lab, and it was, um, the label for it is radical behaviorism, right? I was a behaviorist, so I was perfectly happy to accept that we can't see into people's souls, still less into the souls of dogs. We had to just look at what they do, what they say. So, I was totally committed to that, and I think that even now by people who don't call themselves behaviorists, I think the view that all we really have to go by as scientists is what people do. So, I was, I bought into the behaviorist thing, but I did not buy into Skinner's view of it. I, it's incredibly sort of naive, almost, view that he had. You didn't know to, you didn't need to say anything about what went on inside the organism's head. You could just look at the baby. And I, I received some reinforcement for that. This is very boring for you guys. No, not at all. Like you have no idea how interesting this specific conversation is. What, um, reinforced me, if you like, in that view was a work I did at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in their computer lab. I took lectures from a guy called John McCarthy, who was a total hundred percent nerd guy, mathematician, basically John McCarthy. He invented something called the Lisp language, which is deals with predicate calculus. I mean, it couldn't be more abstract, but out of this came a very simple view of what's called finite state machines. And the, the, the, the, the, the view is really arises from Alan Turing, who was the founder of a lot of computer science, in a, a catchy little paper, a paper called thoughts on the Entscheidungsproblem. That was his paper. Anyway, the idea was that you could understand a historical system in terms of stimuli responses and states. And the state describes how stimuli produce responses. And it's a very, very simple idea. When you think about it, self-evident, right? So what they were telling us, what they, what they told me in any event, that Skinner's idea of dispensing with the idea of internal state was simply wrong. You can't do that. On the other hand, you don't need to be a physiologist either. You don't need to go into the head to find out what the state is, because in this computer system, an internal state is defined by histories, the history of, uh, stimulation and, uh, responses that, that this system has made. I'm not being very coherent in describing it now. And there are papers on this, I just sort of, I just, uh, uh, edited one. I mean, there are lots of papers on this, but the basic idea is very, very, very simple. A state for the organism is defined by,

uh, by the, the class of stimuli and the class of responses that co-occur. Any, any one of these stimuli will produce any one of these responses. Okay. And that's actually a Skinner idea. But the point is the state changes. It's not always the same. It depends on history and complicated ways and so on and so on. Anyway, the bottom line is, uh, I, I didn't buy Skinner's philosophy, but I thought his method was fantastic. The experimental method was great. On the other hand, as I've gotten older and what were more interesting, I'm just on, not pigeons, but dog, not yet human beings, they're much too complicated. Um, um, I realized that, uh, you've got to know more than that. And I've written about this in a Darwinian context, right? Because, the behavior of the individual is not too different from the behavior of, of a species. The animal does various things. Some of them lead to good results. Some of them lead to bad results. Uh, they're cued in certain complicated ways, but, it is just like natural selection. The animal tries to think the good ones, inclined to repeat and so on. And Skinner was very good on that part of it. Yeah, selection. It were, reinforcement, strengthens behavior, selects and so on. What he wasn't so good on was where does that behavior come from? Where does that behavior come from? If an animal, uh, in Skinner's terms, has an operant level, that is, it's certain tenders to do different things. Um, what, what determines that operant level? Is it just random? You know, is it just random? of course, it's not random at all. It's not random at all. And that was, uh, an early discovery we made when we tried to repeat our key experiments, Skinner's, found, uh, what, what's, what's he even interested in? What happens here? And I should say, why, why it's happening? I mean, did, did he have interest or it was really just, let's look at the behavior? Yeah, I mean, uh, Skinner was not interested. I mean, well, he, Skinner was a complicated guy. I don't want to get into a lot of stuff. People probably, many people now hardly know who Skinner was, but, um, he was a complicated guy because it, in one context, he was perfectly willing to talk about, uh, behavioral tendencies, if you like, that we can't observe. He was perfectly happy to talk about that, um, in the context of what he called verbal behavior, speech. Wow. He was perfectly happy to talk about that, but not in connection with animal behavior, which is why, I don't know. I really don't know why he didn't extend that. And in the, again, in the context of human behavior, he was, um, he, he was happy to talk about private events, you know, what's a private event, but it's just like an external event.

Is it really an external event? We can measure, can we measure these private events? No, we can't, you know, so it was a big self-contradictory and he had passionate advocates. He still does. He has, he has huge following. And I mean, that's kind of what I was saying, especially in the dog training world, it's, even if, as you say, some people, of course, know the name, but don't know exactly what he brought up and, and what he's famous and what he's controversial about. But for certain, um, dog trainers know about him, but there is, there is a, a huge following that, um, even, even today, it's, it's shown that, certain things, it's, you know, you cannot just reinforce or suppress behavior and not look at why that behavior happens. It just, it's so wrong. It's so, it's a, it's a, I mean, one thing to remember, one thing to remember, you, maybe can tell these people, is when you give, present a stimulus of value, food, electric shock, some other kind of punishment, that changes the repertoire of the animal, right there, that changes the repertoire of the animal. and if, if you're trying to reinforce a behavior, let's say with food, uh, that really, really is from the, let's say a social repertoire. It's not really a food related behavior. You give food to reinforce it. It doesn't reinforce it. It generates a bunch of competing behaviors. Not every, not every behavior, now reinforcers are not like money. You know, economists think of money, it reinforces everything. It's all the same. That's rubbish, of course, but it's also rubbish, even with the dog, that food can reinforce everything. A lot of dogs behave as a social repertoire. It comes from a different place and so on. And you have to have some kind of intuitive understanding of it. If you could really be able to work with the animal. At least that's my, I mean, you do much more dogs than I do, but, uh, that's my, that's definitely my feeling. And you're like taking the individual's aptitude, like the individual's IQ, uh, um, and, and ability to, to, to learn faster or learn more. Um, it also seems like it's not always taken, under consideration at the time of Skinner's times. Um, the other thing that I, well, let me stop, because I'm be sure. You're saying, saying, that, well, like, let's say, we're not willing to come to grips with the fact that not all dogs are equally smart. So, it's a, it's a, interesting, this is the, the truth when we strip it all down, that, that's what comes down to. But, in, in a conversation, trainers will say, no, of course, individuality and, and the breed and all this matters. trainers, but, the moment they start training, we, dog trainers will become completely preoccupied of, okay,

I need to do my reinforcement schedule. I need to, I, I just focus on how I'm going to make that behavior. And, not even, put any context in, why do you need that behavior, and give some purpose for that behavior to the, to the animal. It's, it's a, cut out, superficial, to where everything else becomes disregarded. And I, I somehow think that this comes from, somewhere down the road from, what Skinner was doing. I'm not sure. I think that's right. I mean, Skinner was not interested at all in individual differences. And in fact, his point was, look at, because these three species, he has a famous slide in one of his papers, something I reproduced it in when I just wrote, where he has a monkey, a human, and a pigeon, I think, or monkey, a rat, and a pigeon, I can't, three species, showing the same thing. I mean, so for him, it was really important that they all were the same. And I'll send you some of these things. But, funnily enough, by pure coincidence, I just came in contact with a woman in, in, England, who has published a paper a couple of years ago on dog intelligence. Do you know this? Her name is Carden. Rosalind Carden, no, Arden, Rosalind Arden. I can send you. Yeah, definitely. We will search that. Yes. she actually published a paper, um, where she and another guy studied a whole bunch of dogs, and came up with, with a, uh, result that she argued is like G, you know, no G human, general human intelligence called G is, they're invented by a statistician way back when, and so on. And she thinks she, this is a way to show something similar in dogs. Now, they were not different species. They were all border collies. So her idea was to give them a variety of tests, look at the correlations, you know, across the individuals and say, aha, some have more of G than another. And this is just like the human cases. It's an oddball kind of thing. I don't know if she's still doing this kind of work. I mean, this paper is three or four or five years old, but I thought it was just a cat, almost funny that. Yes. You can do IQ research and dogs probably, probably not on humans anymore. It's been, become too human, too, too politically sensitive. Yes. This is a problem with actually political sensitivity. Ivan, I have to go. Okay. Shortly. So. Okay. I'm happy to talk to you again if you'd like. Yes. I, I just want to ask you just two, two, two, two more questions. Cause it's very interesting for me. Like, like when we talk about Skinner, most of the dog trainers don't, don't really understand where and why the, the whole resistance and, and meets and misunderstanding around punishment comes from, and what we are dealing with right now. I can give you a quickie on that one.

It's such a big topic and it's very confusing. And, and we all, I mean, in today's society, it's drilled into everybody. Forget dog trainer, everybody's drain brain that punishment has an incredible amount of side effects. And you should pretty much never resort to it because we have positive reinforcement. And, and it's just such a, like, it's not even on the service level of thinking, but it's so popular. I just want something. Yes. Skinner. I've written about this. You may have read some of the Skinner. Skinner didn't argue the moral case. He was, he wasn't arguing that the punishment is bad, it's cruel or whatever. No, he was saying it's ineffective. It doesn't work. Yeah. The science, the science, right? Up there. Right? Up there. But of course, it's nonsense. It's absolutely nonsense. It's very, very effective under certain circumstances. But, the fact that Skinner argued that scientifically punishment was ineffective linked up with a kind of, I don't know, a societal resistance to any kind of a versus of control. It's wrong. It's morally wrong. Oh, no, it's not, we don't have to worry about it. It's ineffective. So, it, it, it reinforced the pre-existence. It's not a resisting bias. That's my take. That's my take on punishment. And the ineffectiveness, because, I mean, I also, I don't know how much he, when he was doing the research on punishment, how much he already had concluded in his head and he tried to backtrack and, and make the study fit his conclusion? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, he, he didn't do much experiment on punishment, but his, his students and colleagues did. Um, a guy called Murray Sidman did, um, um, the punishments incredibly effective. I mean, I, I, you know, uh, viewers probably don't know about it, but there's something called, uh, uh, Sidman avoidance schedule, where the animal is, let's see, uh, shot for, um, yeah, I, I know that experiment. And then it's just, it's a very, it's a clever schedule. The animal is shocked, uh, if he doesn't do something. So you get these shocks, but if you, if you press the lever in time, you don't get the shocks, but you can just turn off the shock after a while. And it's done. I mean, that much more stable than most kinds of positive reinforcement. I mean, if you stop giving animal food, he's going to quit. No matter how clever the schedule is and so on. So it's all nonsense. That doesn't work in general, but, uh, the other, the other question, of course, is what, uh, under what conditions is it appropriate? And that requires a lot of thought. Absolutely. Absolutely. But making it to the point where, uh, I think at the moment, what goes on, and, and I, I would speak for society, not even just dog training, but I think, uh,

I mean, punishment happens. It's around us. And, and the natural environment, of course, are programmed to understand and respond and apply it. And respond is very important. We are, we are programmed. It's not our option. And, and to say that we, we try to eliminate it completely. It's crazy. What happens is people do it. And instead of finding, becoming as efficient as we are now, how much we know about positive reinforcement strategies, if we actually put the time into punishment, instead of having people do the wrong things behind the scene, and, and do it very wrong way, but they still feel that they have to, because the truth of the matter is positive reinforcement, reinforcement does not replace us. sometimes when you say, no, this is not a good idea. You cannot. and, and so people have to, but they don't have the education and nobody dares to even talk about it. Yeah. It's just becoming a big problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. it's horrible. I, it, and, and, and nevermind dogs, I think the same thing is true in public education. Correct. I mean, there have been terrible effects there. I have a good friend who's started several charter schools because of his dissatisfaction with the way these things were done. So we ought to talk more later about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't want to hold you any further. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is one of my big moments in my life. It's my pleasure to meet you, Ivan. I'm really, really happy that we got together. I'm a little incoherent today. Thank you. But maybe with practice, it'll get better. Absolutely. I wouldn't mind doing this again with you. Thank you, John, so much. Okay. Good to see you. Take care. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Very, very special moment for me, as I said in the beginning, one of the geniuses, in my opinion, as far as psychology, learning. I know that a lot of you are so into this stuff, so I hope you appreciate it. As I said early on, at the dog training school, the school for dog trainers, I should say, we definitely, he's a cornerstone, like one of, not one, the most influential person, that my dog trainer school, is based on his knowledge, and his work. So, I hope you enjoyed it. That's the first one. There's going to be more to come. Just as good. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Thank you.