A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
B. F. SKINNERThe way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.
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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
B. F. SKINNER