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Will_Newsome comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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Bit of a tangent, but if you ever run across someone for whom this doesn't seem to work, check the hypothesis that they don't parse praise as a positive reinforcer. I don't know how common this is, but I actually have to make a conscious effort to keep it from acting as a mild punishment in most cases when it's applied to me. (Ditto M&Ms in the given context, I expect. Attention Bad.)
Furthermore at least one person I know (er, myself) picks up on any sort of test-like or game-like or we're-judging-you-so-you-better-not-screw-up-like context and starts acting in extremely confusing/uninformative/atypical/misleading ways so as not to be seen as the kind of person who is easily manipulable (there are probably other motivations involved too). Any incentive structure I'm put under thus has to somehow take this into account, even e.g. the LessWrong karma system. Explicitly manipulative socially mediated praise/M&Ms would strike my brain as outright evil and would stand some chance of being inverted entirely. That said I don't get the impression this sort of defense mechanism is very common.
Excellent insight. Downvoted.
So you are saying that, to change your mode of behavior, all one has to do is create a judging context? That would actually make you very easy to manipulate..
I experience this as common, but I suspect it's because of a small number of exceptionally vocal "manipulation is evil!" types in my life, rather than a larger number of typically vocal ones.