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Michael_Howell comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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That's a fair point: I may have been treating a conditional like a bi-conditional. I think my sense of the matter is this: if a friend told me that he spent a lot of our time together thinking through ways to positively reinforce some of my behaviors, even to my benefit, I would become very suspicious of him. I would feel that I'd been treated as a child or a dog. His behavior would seem to me to be manipulative and dishonest, and I think I would feel this way even if I agreed that the results of his actions were on the whole good and good for me.
Do you think this sort of reaction on my part would be misguided? Or am I on to something?
I think it's misguided personally. You're already being manipulated this way by your environment whether or not you realize it.
Well, I'm claiming that this kind of manipulation is often, even characteristically, unethical. Since my environment is not capable of being ethical or unethical (that would be a category mistake, I think) then that's not relevant to my claim.
I was referring though to the case of your friend using reinforcement to alter your behavior in a way that would benefit you. I just have a hard time seeing someone trying to help you as an unethical behavior.
It does depend on whose definition of 'help' they're using.
Good point. Do you think it would be ethical if they were helping to fulfill your preferences?
Usually, yes, though there are several qualifications and corner cases.
Agreed, there probably are.
That's fair. I should tone down my point and say that doing this sort of thing is disrespectful, not evil or anything. Its the sort of thing parents and teachers do with kids. With your peers, unsolicited reinforcement training is seen as disrespectful because it stands in leau of just explaing to the person what you think they should be doing.
In my experience, telling other people how I think they should behave is also often seen as disrespectful.
Often it is, we agree. But it's the 'telling' there that's the problem. A respectful way to modify someone's behavior is to convince them to do something different (which may mean convincing them to subject themselves to positive reinforcement training). The difference is often whether we appeal to someone's rationality, or take a run at their emotions.
I agree that there are respectful ways to convince me to do something different, thereby respectfully modifying my behavior.
Many of those ways involve appealing to my rationality.
Many of those ways involve appealing to my emotions.
There are also disrespectful ways to convince me to do something different.
Many of those ways involve appealing to my rationality.
Many of those ways involve appealing to my emotions.
So, by 'appealing to someone's rationality' I mean, at least, arguing honestly. Perhaps I should have specified that. Do you still think there are such examples?
Do I think there are disrespectful ways to convince me to do something different that involve arguing honestly? Sure. Do you not?
Well this runs into the problem of giving unsolicited advice. Most people don't respond well to that. I think it's probably difficult for most rationalists to remember this since we are probably more open to that.
Not really. Rationalists are just open to different advice. There's lots of advice rationalists will reject out of hand. (Some of which is actually bad advice, and some of which is not.)
Everyone believes themselves to be open-minded; the catch is that we're all open to what we're open to, and not open to what we're not.
This feels like an equivocating-shades-of-grey argument, of the form 'nobody is perfectly receptive to good arguments, and perfectly unswayed by bad ones, therefore, everyone is equally bad at it.' Which is, of course, unjustified. In truth, if rationalists are not at least somewhat more swayed by good arguments than bad ones (as compared to the general population), we're doing something wrong.
It amuses me how readily my brain offered "I am not neither open-minded!" as a response to that.
Well I agree that none of us is completely rational when it comes to accepting advice. But don't you think rationalists are at least better at that than most people?
But your environment includes people, dude.
This shouldn't be a puzzle. Reinforcement happens, consciously or subconsciously. Why in the name of FSM would you choose to relinquish the power to actually control what would otherwise happen just subconsciously?
How is that not on the face of it a paragon, a prototype of optimization? Isn't that optimizing is, more or less-consciously changing what is otherwise unconscious?