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Esar comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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I've noticed in pilates classes with one specific teacher you get positive feedback in one specific situation - when you're having trouble, and have just barely managed something basic. This leads to the association that whenever you get positive comments you know you're doing badly.
Yeah, there's kind of a perceptual/patternmatching arms race going on there -- if you're too blatant about it, or the intended recipient of the reinforcement is just that perceptive, then they're reading the script too and it won't have the intended result. It could backfire (as in your example; semantically-positive reinforcement becomes pragmatically-negative), or send undesirable information ("you wouldn't have put it that way unless something were up, and that gives me a clue"), or open you to counter social-engineering scripts if the part knows what they're doing.
In my case I'm not terribly perceptive, but there's a lot of repetition of the same situation to give you a clue.
If that's the case (and it seems like it is), then reinforcing yourself is going to be almost impossible, because you will by definition know the reinforcement script.
Reinforcing effort only in combination with poor performance wasn't the intent. Pick a better criterion that you can reinforce with honest self-praise. You do need to start off with low enough standards so you can reward improvement from your initial level though.