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TimS comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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That story doesn't trouble you at all?
For most people, there's lots of low hanging fruit from trying to recognize when they are reinforcing and punishing behaviors of others. Also, positive reinforcement is more effective at changing behavior than positive punishment.
But that doesn't mean that we should embrace conditioning-type behavior-modification wholesale. I'm highly doubtful that conditioning responses are entirely justifiable by decision-theoretic reasons. And "not justifiable by decision theoretic reasons" is a reasonable definition of non-rational. Which implies that relying on those types of processes to change others behaviors might be unethical.
Does it trouble me at all? I suppose. Not a huge amount, but some. Had Esar said "Doing this to people without their consent is troubling" rather than "never do this to other people without their explicit consent" I likely wouldn't have objected.
My response to the rest of this would mostly be repeating myself, so I'll point to here instead.
More generally, "conditioning-type behavior-modification" isn't some kind of special category of activity that is clearly separable from ordinary behavior. We modify one another's behavior through conditioning all the time. You did it just now when you replied to my comment. Declaring it unethical across the board seems about as useful as saying "never kill a living thing."