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Esar comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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I don't think I would be suspicious of him, as long as I agreed with the behaviours he was trying to reinforce. (I don't know for sure–my reactions are based only on a thought experiment.) I think I would be grateful, both that he cared enough about me to put that much time and effort in, and that he considered me emotionally mature enough to tell me honestly what he was doing.
However, I do think that being aware of his deliberate reinforcement might make it less effective. Being reinforced for Behaviour A would feel less like "wow, the world likes it when I do A, I should do it more!" and more like "Person X wants me to do A", which is a bit less motivating.
Really? So say I tell you that all those times that I smiled at you and asked how you were doing were part of a long term plan to change the way you behave. The next day I smile and ask you how you're doing. Has my confession done nothing to change the way you think about my question?
I'm saying that things like smiles and friendly, concerned questions have a certain importance for us that is directly undermined by their being used for for the purposes of changing our behavior. I don't think using them this way is always bad, but it seems to me that people who generally treat people this way are people we tend not to like once we discover the nature of their kindness.
Like I said, thoughts experiments about "how would I feel if X happened" are not always accurate. However, when I try to simulate that situation in my head, I find that although I would probably think about his smile and question differently (and be more likely to respond with a joke along the lines of "trying to reinforce me again, huh?") I don't think I would like him less.
Anyway, I think I regularly use smiles and "how are you doing?" to change the way people behave...namely, to get strangers, i.e. coworkers at a new job, to start liking me more.
Well, I guess I'll tap out then. I'm not sure how to voice my position at this point.
Your position is that you have a certain emotional response to knowing someone is trying to modify your behaviour. My position is that I have a different emotional response. I can imagine myself having an emotional response like yours...I just don't. (Conversely, I can imagine someone experiencing jealousy in the context of a relationship, but romantic jealousy isn't something I really experience personally.) I don't think that makes either of us wrong.
Well, my position is that doing things like asking how someone is doing so as to reinforce behavior rather than because you want to know the answer is ethically bad. I used the example of the friend to try to motivate and explain that position, but at some point if you are totally fine with that sort of behavior, I don't have very much to argue with. I think you're wrong to be fine with that, but I also don't think I can mount a convimcing argument to that effect. So you've pretty much reached the bottom of my thoughts on the matter, such as they are.
I'm curious about whether your reasons for considering this kind of behaviour "unethical" are consequentialist (i.e. a world where people do X is going to be worse overall than a world where no one does X) or deontological (there are certain behaviours, like lying or stealing, that are just bad no matter what world they take place in, and using social cues to manipulate other people is a behaviour that falls into that class.)
Ah, I'm not a consequentialist or a deontologist, but I do think this is a case where intentions are parcticularly important. Doing this kind of reinforcement training to someone without their knowledge is characteristically disrespectful if you just do it to help them, but it may also be the right thing to do in some cases (I'm toning down my claim a bit). Doing it with the result that they are harmed is vicious (that is, an expression or manifestation of a vice) regardless of your intentions. So that puts me somewhere in the middle.
I wouldn't necessarily say that. Doing it when you know they don't (or would not) want you to is disrespectful.
This definitely seems false. It is the expected result, given information that you have (or should be expected to have) that can indicate viciousness, not actual results. For example, I could reward my children such that they never Jaywalk (still not quite sure what this is) and only cross the road at official crossings. Then one of my children gets hit by a car waiting at a crossing when they would have been fine crossing the street earlier. I haven't been vicious. My kid has been unlucky.
It the general case it is never the result that determines whether your decision was the right decision to make in the circumstance. It is the information available at the time. (The actual result can be used as a proxy by those with insufficient access to your information at the time or when differing incentives would otherwise encourage corruption with 'plausible deniability').
On the unlucky kid: fair enough. But using positive reinforcement to make someone violent or cowardly, even if you think you're benefiting them, is vicious. Thats the sort of case I was thinking about.
I disagree with you about the actual vs. expected result, but thats a bigger discussion.
Can you express your personal ethics explicitly and clarify where it comes from?
I'd be happy to try. Do you want a brief account specific to this topic, or something more general?
If you could trace your ethics backward from "it's unethical when people consciously use punishment/reward system to modify my behavior to their liking" to some basic ideas that you hold inviolate and cannot further trace to anything deeper, I'd appreciate it.
I think there are basically two aspects to our ethical lives: the biological and habituated arrangement of our emotions and our rationality. Our lives involve two corresponding phases. As children, we (and our teachers, parents, etc.) aim at developing the right kinds of emotional responses, and as adults we aim at doing good things. Becoming an adult means having an intellectual grasp of ethics, and being able (if one is raised well) to think thought one's actions.
When you use positive reinforcement training, you treat someone as if they were in the childhood phase of their development, even if the behavioral modification is fairly superficial. This isn't necessarily evil or anything, but it's often disrespectful if it stands in place of appealing to someone's ethical rationality. I guess an analogue would be using dark arts tactics to convince someone to have the right opinions about something. Its disrespectful because it ignores or holds in contempt their ability to reason for themselves.