There has been a multitude of experiments, on humans and other animals, demonstrating that conditioning works. If when you touch a specific odd shaped object, you get a mild electric shock, it will become difficult for you to touch that object even when you are fully consciously aware that the shocking circuit is disconnected, and you will experience aversion to touching that object (i.e. you will act as if picking up that object had extra cost compared to other objects, even though you are fully aware you won't be shocked). This is repeatable scientific finding with broad ramifications. (and it is stable over a multitude of positive and negative reinforcements).
Regarding whenever people act to 'maximize utility', that is trivially falsified by any experiment where people demonstrably make a wrong choice (e.g. don't switch in monty hall). People do not act as to 'maximize utility', and that's why people need training to better achieve their goals. What you listed is not 'alternative hypotheses', it's normative statements about what people should do under particular moral philosophies.
I don't think his objection was that conditioning isn't a real thing that's really real, but that it's not a basis for a fully-descriptive theory of psychological behaviour.
That said, I don't think you were suggesting it was in the first place.
The "What is Rationality?" page on the new CFAR website contains an illuminating story about Intel:
I presume Andy and Gordon had considered intervening at many different levels of action: in middle management, in projects, in products, in details, etc. They had probably implemented some of these plans, too. But the problem with Intel — it was in the wrong market! — was so deep that the place to intervene was at a very low level, the foundations of the entire company. It's possible that in this situation, no change they could have made at higher levels of action would have made that big of a difference compared to changing the company's market and mission.
In 1997, system analyst Donella Meadows wrote Places to Intervene in a System, in which she outlined twelve leverage points at which one could intervene in a system. Different levels of action, she claimed, would have effects of different magnitudes.
This got me thinking about levels of action and self-improvement. "I want to improve myself: where should I intervene in my own system next?"
My bet is that if the next greatest leverage point you can push on is something like neurofeedback, then you're pretty damn self-optimized already.
In fact, I suspect almost nobody is that self-optimized. We do things like neurofeedback because (1) we don't think enough about choosing the highest-leverage self-interventions, (2) in any case, we don't know how to figure out which interventions would be higher leverage for ourselves, (3) even if there are higher-leverage interventions to be had, we might not successfully carry them through, but neurofeedback or whatever happens to be fun and engaging for us, and (3) sometimes, you gotta stop analyzing your situation and just do some stuff that looks like it might help.
Anyway, how can one figure out what the next highest-leverage self-interventions are for oneself? Maybe I just haven't yet found the right keywords, but I don't think there's been much research on this topic.
Intuitively, it seems like hacking one's motivational system is among the highest leverage interventions one can make, because high motivation allows on to carry through with lots of other interventions, and without sufficient motivation one can't follow through with many interventions.
But if you've got a crippling emotional or physical condition, I suppose you've got to take care of that first — at least well enough to embark on the project of hacking your motivation system.
Or, if you're in a crippling environment like North Korea or Nigeria or Detroit, then perhaps the highest level intervention for you is to get up and move someplace better. Only then will you be able to fix your emotions or hack your motivational system or whatever.
Maybe there's something of a system to this that hasn't been discovered, or maybe there's no system at all because humans are too complex. I'm still in brainstorm mode on this topic.