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MixedNuts comments on Notes on Psychopathy - Less Wrong
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Questions for both you and Tenoke:
How do you reward/reinforce desired behaviors in cases when the desired behavior is normal rather than exceptional? If I give my child a reward every time they're not hitting their sibling, isn't this isomorphic to taking away their expected reward every time they do hit their sibling (a punishment)? Worse, if I only started this "reward basic lack of misbehavior" scheme when I noticed that a child was prone to misbehavior, isn't that just going to be perceived as "[I/my sibling] got a new nearly-continuous reward for misbehaving enough to trigger parental notice"?
Then, since it's significantly harder to apply reinforcements than punishments to badly-behaved children, wouldn't we expect to see a strong correlation between reinforcement and good results (or between punishment and bad results) regardless of how effective each was at changing behavior?
You could reward at random time intervals if the behavior persists during the interval (for persistent behaviors like not hitting), or after a random number of repetitions of the behavior (for discrete behaviors). I'm not actually sure why random reinforcement works better than systematic, but I expect the effect to apply here.
The problem of what to reward is harder, but maybe you could make a list of every absolute demand and stick to that? Parents always drop some of their nice-to-haves because otherwise the kid can't do anything right so you're better off letting them draw on the wallpaper if that means they'll stop sticking forks into plugs. (Also the Chaos Legion demands that you ask "Is that actually bad?" when a kid does something unexpected but not so obviously bad you didn't think of it.)