To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B. F. SKINNERA vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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.
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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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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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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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