Week 8 Care Lab: Signal Conflict Lab

Practising Week 7 — weighing a human cat's current message against an established preference and their recent behaviour when the three do not agree

28 April 2027

Before your Care Lab#

Released Mon 19 Apr 2027 · due Wed 28 Apr 2027, 08:30, ahead of the earliest timetabled group.

Use one conflict episode from your designated human cat in which the current message, an established preference, and recent behaviour do not point the same way. Write a reasoned account of how you weighed the three. Say plainly which piece of evidence you gave more weight to and why, what remains genuinely uncertain even after weighing everything, and what new evidence — specifically, not generically — would change your answer.

Do not resolve the uncertainty just to make the write-up feel finished. A case with a clean, confident answer is usually a case that has quietly dropped one of the three sources rather than actually weighed it.

In the Care Lab#

In your timetabled group, compare your reasoning, especially where people weighed the same evidence differently. Disagreement here is not a sign someone did the exercise wrong — it is a sign the case was genuinely difficult, which is the point. Trace what would happen to your human cat if your read is wrong: what does a response built on the current message get wrong if the established preference was actually the better guide, and the reverse?

Afterwards#

This is the skill Care Is Not Obedience, this week’s lecture, asks you to extend one step further: once you have honestly weighed conflicting evidence, the answer that evidence points to will not always be agreement. Know Your Cat will keep handing you cases shaped like this one for the rest of the semester — the reasoning you practised here, not a tidier answer, is what it is actually asking you to show.