This is a bonus episode in which Annie reads aloud the preface to Walden Two, BF Skinner's 1948 novel about a utopian community that he imagines could be closely engineered based on what we know about behavioral science, and cooperatively governed based on principles rooted in positive reinforcement. The book was called "fascism without tears" when it was published and also compared to a plan for a dog obedience school for humans. Three decades after writing it, Skinner wrote Walden Two Revisited, which reflected on how society still hadn't done enough to harness the power of non-coercive, non-punitive control in order to better people's lives. Forty-five years hence, has anything really changed? Maybe dog training can help us better understand what Skinner had in mind...

Notes: 

Clubhouse Reading Group on Walden Two: 4/1 at 3PM ET. Need a Clubhouse Invite? Text 917-414-2625

Annie imitates a dial up modem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B8KPvp9eew

Buy Walden Two: https://amzn.to/3cKdGL8

3 minute summary of Walden Two, by the Prosocial Progress Foundation 

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

This is a bonus episode. Woo woo woo wee aw wee aw wee aw!  That’s my bonus episode cheer. It happens to also sound a lot like a car alarm. I also do impressions of dial up modems, true story.  Look in show notes. Anyway, I have decided to give myself permission as this podcast’s editor and producer to do the occasional episode that is really only tangentially related to dog training. It’s not specifically related to solving dog training problems, but that touches in my mind on dog training in a larger context.  And that these episodes may sometimes simply be me reading things that I have found thought-provoking in this arena.

Last week, I read the 1913 essay, um by John B. Watson psychology as the behaviorist views it.  Which kind of pits the then just burgeoning world of behavioral psychology, behavior analysis, against cognitive psychology kind of as if it were pitting science or a theory of evolution against creationism.  And today I read it and see a lot of similarities between the world of science based, positive reinforcement rooted dog training, and the world of dog training that has to do with myth and energy and misunderstood concepts like dominance.

Today I wanted to read the 1976 forward written by BF Skinner for his 1948 novel, Walden Two.  Which I first read about 10 years ago. And it really, it really affected me. It was sort of the first time that I realized that I had, I had just graduated KPA at that point that I had kind of learned how to use this technology of this field of sciences, field of behavioral science to train dogs.  But really the same basic bits and pieces could be used to do things way outside of helping people get their dogs to not pee and poop in the house.

And actually, Walden Two, which is, it’s not a book to be read because it’s like fine writing. It’s a book written by a scientist to communicate ideas. And when it came out it was, it was likened to the idea of creating a dog obedience school for humans.  And was also called fascism without tears. And it, I mean, I guess there is fascism in his suggestions for how a utopia could be, but also communism, and also a kind of socio libertarianism.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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