Thread by @PsychScientists

Many coaches advocate for picking and choosing methods from a variety of theoretical camps, on the premise that which is best ‘depends’ on the player, the coach, etc and you want the biggest toolkit you can get.

I think this is an error, which I will now attempt to defend

First, let’s set the scene. VERY roughly, there are two approaches in coaching. Traditional coaching is very cognitive, all about the coach as a source of knowledge. Then there’s the plucky ecological upstarts who focus on training skilled engagement over knowledge #ymmv

Lots of traditional coaches want to be able to use anything that works in their sessions, regardless of what theory motivates the training idea. They consider this the right move; why commit to some theory that rules things out and might be wrong?

Ecological types tend not to approve of this, and stick to using ecological methods (and sometimes explicitly going after traditional methods). This has become a key point of contention on social media; is mixing and matching a feature or a bug?

Eco types don’t approve because, as a rule, becoming an eco type entails an explicit rejection of more cognitive models. This is because we aren’t the default way people talk about this stuff and you have to switch. Trad types never have to switch & so don’t come so feisty

This rejection of traditional approaches and its methods is only justified if adopting an eco approach requires it. Maybe they’re just two different ways of thinking that can live side by side?

But they aren’t. The representational and ecological approaches are two incompatible understandings of what kind of physical system could be a perceiving-acting system. They split right at the ontological base, where we set up what we think the rules are

This was the essence of the Turvey eg al 1981 defence of the ecological approach against Fodor & Pylyshyn, and I did my best to translate this from the Turvey to the English in my interface theory paper psyarxiv.com/zbkqd/

So this is why picking and choosing coaching methods that come from both camps is an incoherent idea for an eco psych type - coming to endorse the eco approach entails understanding the IP approach is not just wrong, but radically different

But is this something a coach need worry about? Surely it’s just nerds like me that care, and in practice it all just kind of comes out in the wash, so long as what you are doing is working? It’s this I want to reject as wrong by describing the benefits or picking a side here

Because of the evidence in favour of it, I am firmly committed to developing ecological answers to all questions about behaviour. I may end up wrong, though, or it might not go all the way up - won’t cutting myself from representations, etc hurt my science?

Lots of embodied cognition people think so. Andy Clark famously has a paper on ‘representation hungry problems’ perception can’t obviously solve which is endorsed by many people.

Clark’s just a coward though. I think he ducked out when the going got tough (aka interesting)

Sabrina and I decided to nail our colours to the ecological mast and see how far we could go into rep-hungry territory. Net result has been solid first drafts of ecological approaches to language and brains that bring them within range of the eco approach to explain

Clark looked at those problems and abandoned what we think are the unavoidable radical implications of embodiment to the comfort of representations that just do all the work for you. Everyone doing this missed the chance to work out what Sabrina and I have and went ‘it depends’

No progress came from ‘it depends’, only more uncrossable stumbling blocks. If sometimes ‘it depends’ requires information and sometimes representations, how and when can we switch between these two incompatible systems? etc

Picking your ground for evidence based reasons and hanging onto it even when the going gets tough is how you make progress and come up with genuinely new insights without the problems that come from throwing up your hands

This works in coaching too. Say you design a constrained game to teach something people think demands specific instruction, and it doesn’t work the way you intend. You could give up, or try again

Only if you commit will you grit your teeth while its not working and keep trying to make it work. And then, if you manage to help players self organise a behaviour people thought demanded specific instruction, you have learned something new and important that others can build on

(And if it NEVER works, you’ve learned something important too!)

So look. I get that picking a side and ruling out some ways of doing things is a big step. What if you’re wrong? You’d be screwing your players over, and no coach wants that. But...

...if you pick a side based on good evidence and hold onto the principles through the tough times, you will learn new things, make progress, AND know why those things are happening. With pick’n’mix, any problems are anyone’s guess...

...because you’ve given up control of what you’re doing by ignoring the reasons why different theories think you should do different things. That’s rubbish science, and psych is paying the price in the form of a replication crisis. I submit its rubbish coaching too
/end