That surely is a factor, but since it militates in favor of doing any experiment, I'm not sure it's worth including. I don't have any good basis for estimating how much value other people capture. If I tried to, cooking up some Fermi estimate based on, say, site traffic & how roughly a dozen people have started melatonin based on my essay, then with just a slight cooking of numbers, I could justify practically any experiment!

Thus, excluding it is a conservative assumption, especially if anyone else contemplating similar experiments wouldn't necessarily write it up and publicize it like I do.

I thought being a LessWronger meant you no longer thought in terms of free will. That it's a naive theory of human behavior, somewhat like naive physics.

Autonomy and philosophical free will are different things. Philosophical free will is the question "well, if physical laws govern how my body acts, and my brain is a component of my body, then don't physical laws govern what choices I make?", to which the answer is mu. One does not need volition on the level of atoms to have volition on the level of people- and volition on the level of people is autonomy.

(You will note that LW is very interested in techniques to increase one's will, take more control over one's goals, and so on. Those would be senseless goals for a fatalist.)

You're already being manipulated this way by your environment whether or not you realize it.

Well, I'm claiming that this kind of manipulation is often, even characteristically, unethical. Since my environment is not capable of being ethical or unethical (that would be a category mistake, I think) then that's not relevant to my claim.

I agree with you that your autonomy is threatened by the manipulations of others. But threats only sometimes turn into harm- distinguishing between manipulations you agree with and disagree with is a valuable skill.

Indeed, there's a general point that needs to be made about human interaction, and another about status, but first a recommendation: try to view as many of your actions as manipulations as possible. This will help separate out the things that, on reflection, you want to do and the things that, on reflection, you don't want to do. For example:

if a friend told me that he spent a lot of our time together thinking through ways to positively reinforce some of my behaviors, even to my benefit, I would become very suspicious of him. I would feel that I'd been treated as a child or a dog. His behavior would seem to me to be manipulative and dishonest,

Emphasis mine. The reaction- of calling his behavior manipulative and dishonest- feels like it punishes manipulation, which you might want to do to protect your autonomy. But it actually punishes honesty, because the trigger was your friend telling you! Now, if your friend wants to change you, they'll need to try to do it subtly. Your reaction has manipulated your friend without his explicit consent- and probably not in the direction you wanted it to.

So, the general point: human social interaction is an incredibly thorny field, in part because there are rarely ways to learn or teach it without externalities. Parents, for example, tell their children to share- not because sharing is an objective moral principle, but because it minimizes conflict. As well, some aspects of human social interaction are zero sum games- in which people who are skilled at interaction will lose if others get better at interaction, and thus discourage discussions that raise general social interaction skills.

The status interpretation: generally, manipulation increases the status of the manipulator and decreases the status of the manipulated. Resistance to manipulation could then be a status-preserving move, and interest in manipulation could be a status-increases move. What articles like this try to do is lower the status effects of manipulation (in both directions)- Luke proudly recounts the time Eliezer manipulated him so that he could better manipulate Eliezer. If being molded like this is seen more positively, then resistance to being molded (by others in the community) will decrease, and the community will work better and be happier. As well, I suspect that people are much more comfortable with manipulations if they know how to do them themselves- if positive reinforcement is a tool used by creepy Others, it's much easier to dislike than if it's the way you got your roommate to finally stop annoying you.

But treating human beings, especially adults, like animals is characteristically unethical.

It seems to me like the flow is in the reverse direction: many unethical manipulations involve treating adults like animals. But people who skillfully use positive reinforcement are both more pleasant to be around and more effective- which seems like something ethical systems should point you towards, not away from.

I find the idea of endorsing manipulative behavior if and only if I remain unaware of the fact that it's manipulative behavior deeply troubling.

It strikes me as similar to saying that hurting people is OK as long as I don't know I'm hurting them. No, it isn't. If hurting people is not OK, then it follows that I ought not hurt people, and learning to recognize when I'm hurting people is part of that, and I ought to learn to recognize it. The behavior doesn't suddenly become "not OK" the moment I learn to recognize it... it never was OK, and now I know it and can improve.

Conversely, if hurting people is OK, then it's OK whether I know I'm doing it or not.

The same goes for manipulating people. Whether I know I'm doing it or not isn't the determiner of whether I'm doing good or ill.

To my mind, the determiner of whether I'm doing good or ill is whether, when I'm done doing it, we're all better off or worse off.