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drethelin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The most immediately useful thing I learned from Critch is that the human mind is sophisticated enough that it can give itself chocolates without chocolate. If you get good at noticing your thoughts you can give yourself reinforcement entirely in the confines of your brains, eg by thinking "smiley face!" or something whenever you notice yourself thinking about getting some exercise.
Wow. If that works thats genuinely an incredibly powerful technique.
Has there been any empirical testing comparing that to controls or to external rewards?
Unless I missed something, the little I had to read about Critch's unpublished work on hedonic awareness seemed to be a rephrasing of Skinner's Operant Conditioning/Reinforcement theory?
As for the use of imagined positive reinforcer, that seems very similar to covert positive reinforcement (part of covert conditioning) which should be easy to find scientific tests on if you have access to libraries.
The only difference here is that the behavior itself is not imagined. I'm inclined to believe that the situations are similar enough that the tests on covert positive reinforcement could be applied. The perception of the behavior itself being real may have some effect on our perception of the imagined reinforcer, but there's not enough reason to believe it would majorly change the effect of the imagined reinforcer on average.
The only difference between actual rewards and imaginary rewards is that the former isn't imaginary?
The reply was about how drethelin's situation where a real situation/behaviour is repeatedly associated with imagined reward, is very similar to covert positive reinforcement where one imagines even the situation/behaviour itself. I'm confused on the relevance of mentioning the original comparison between actual/imagined reward in the context?
We have a situation where there are scientific/empirical tests performed on 'a real behaviour with real positive reinforcement' and 'an imagined behaviour with imagined positive reinforcement' that seems to support each other.
In fact covert conditioning does have the requirement that the patient imagine the situation sufficiently vividly. There's no reason to believe that if the patient imagine (or perceive) the situation too vividly (or too real) it would somehow affect them less.
Whoops, I misread that last line as "The only difference here is that the reward itself is not imagined." Thanks for catching that.
Yw and thanks for the clarification. No more confusion then. :)
I only have anecdata, though Critch might know. It's the kind of thing that I imagine is hard to run tests on due to problems with compliance