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Of all the zany plans that came from the fertile minds on each side of World War II, few seem as out there as a plan to use birds to pilot bombs to their targets. And yet such a plan was not only actively developed, it came from the fertile mind of one of the 20th century's most brilliant psychologists, and very nearly resulted in a fieldable weapon that would let fly the birds of war.
[...] By the 1940s, B.F. Skinner had spent years studying operant conditioning on a variety of model organisms, using dozens of instruments of his own devising to quantify behavior. With war raging around the globe, Skinner pondered the devastation caused by bombing campaigns, which relied on massive quantities of bombs to make up for the lack of precision in the aiming. He wondered if there would be any way to guide a bomb or missile to its target, and hit upon the idea of using one of the stars of his operant conditioning boxes — pigeons. Easily trained and with excellent eyesight, pigeons might make a workable guidance system for ordnance.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/11/hacking-when-it-counts-pigeon-guided-missiles/
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @09:34AM (5 children)
Skinner was a really good scientist, he studied psychology with a focus on reproducibile phenomena. Unfortunately, then the "cognitive revolution" occured. NHST was adopted with its focus on "significant differences" and now psychology is in the state we all enjoy today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @11:03AM (3 children)
BF Skinner was a Fascist.
Practicing clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine calls him a control freak. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [brucelevine.net]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @11:32AM
Are you implying that made him a bad scientist? Also that link was to a wierd rant. He obviously identified that the cigarrete was not a token the patient valued, and instead gave the patient the reward of "winning" against the staff... I stopped reading there.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:41PM
I call you a quite a lot of things. Does that make them true or should we consider possible bias?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:48PM
A psychologist disagreeing with another psychologist's methods? I am genuinely worried about the fabric of the universe surviving this paradox of hard science!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 13 2018, @12:27AM
> he studied psychology with a focus on reproducible phenomena
What a coincidence, I studied the empty set too.
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