Strongly downvoted. It sounds like the end result here was good, but I feel extremely uncomfortable with the manipulative undertones and lack of agency given to your friend throughout all this. Did she consent to any of this before you started the project, and did you explain to her how you intend to change her motivation system around cooking before trying this? This is an extremely important detail which I didn’t see mentioned—I think you should only try to fix other people’s lives if they explicitly ask you to.
As far as I can tell, those comments say “she was enthusiastic about learning how to cook”, not “she was enthusiastic for me manipulating her into being intrinsically excited about cooking”. I think there’s a very important difference
Are you suggesting that she wouldn’t have been excited without manipulation?
Given that she was apparently enthusiastic “every step in the way”, I read the post as saying that just the first step of having a picnic together in the park and lsusr telling her that home-cooked meals are cheaper than TV meals was enough to get her to want to cook. If something as minor as that would have been enough to make her excited about it, then that doesn’t feel like it qualifies as manipulation to me.
I can’t cook either and I’ve also had people offer me tasty food and mention that I could live more cheaply and tastily if I learned cook, and I wouldn’t call that an act of manipulation! Especially since that alone hasn’t been enough to get me particularly enthusiastic about the idea; if it was enough to persuade her, then she must have been very close to being excited about it already.
I think we’re talking past each other. For me, the key point is that lsusr took actions designed to manipulate her emotions and intuitive reactions to things, and clearly did this systematically towards a clear end goal. I call this manipulation, and think that for applying manipulation to be ethical, the person needs to consent to the manipulation, not just to the end goal of learning how to cook. Everything lsusr has said indicated that she consented to wanting to learn how to cook, not to being manipulated like this.
For example, say I’m dating a girl, we’re both excited about each other, and want to feel more excited about each other. Even if I know all of this, I would consider it deeply unethical to use operant conditioning to get her to fall more deeply for me.
I saw a comment from lsusr that he sent this post to the friend, and she feels fine with it, which makes me feel better about this whole thing. But I stand by the general principle of “don’t manipulate friends without their explicit and knowing consent”
I guess a difference here is that where you see “manipulation”, I see “good pedagogy”.
A friend was once trying to teach / encourage me to cook. One of the things she told me to do was to put on some music that I liked as I was doing it, so as to make it feel more enjoyable. I don’t know whether she thought about it in those terms, but in making that suggestion she was trying to use conditioning on me—associating the act of cooking with pleasant music. I never thought that this suggestion was manipulation or something that she should have asked my consent for, I just felt that it was her being thoughtful and trying to make my experience as pleasant as possible.
The article strongly gives the impression that the thing Brittany was excited about acquiring was not just the abstract skill of knowing how to cook, but also the habit of actually cooking regularly (“Brittany wanted tasty food and not to be sick all the time”). And if you want to acquire a habit, then the way that we acquire habits is through conditioning; there isn’t any other way. The only question is whether you know enough to help someone (or yourself) to acquire it in a way that’s fast and pleasant or slow and less pleasant.
If we strip away cold-sounding terms like “operant conditioning” and look what lsusr actually did, we get things like “I never, at any point, implied that Brittany might be deficient because she didn’t know how to cook”. The opposite to this would have been… making her feel bad for no reason. I assume that lsusr wouldn’t have wanted to make his friend feel bad for no reason anyway, so asking for her consent on this particular point would feel like it amounts to something like “are you okay with me being nice to you while we do this, just as I’d try to be nice to you anyway”.
Similar to “I didn’t start by bringing Brittany to the store, then teach her to cook and have her eat at the end. I started by feeding her, then I taught her to cook and only at the end did I bring her to the grocery store”. If someone wants to learn to cook, then you have to choose some point in the chain to start them out from. If you happen to know that starting out from the end results is both the fastest way to teach and the choice that will produce the most pleasant experience to them, do you need to ask for their consent to choose this point rather than a point that produces a worse experience? I guess it wouldn’t hurt to ask for consent, but certainly if I’ve already told someone that I want them to help me get into a particular habit, then I actively hope that they do everything they can to make the process as pleasant and effective to me as possible!
I guess the intuition that I’m trying to express here is that there’s no difference, in this case, between “applying conditioning” and “trying to make sure that your friend has a pleasant time and comes to enjoy the activity that they’ve expressed wanting to do”. The things that we find enjoyable and pleasant to do become habitual to us, and behaviorism is (in part) just the science of figuring out what it is that causes things to become enjoyable and pleasant to us. If you hadn’t read anything about behaviorism, but were just motivated by a desire to be nice to your friend and tried to figure out how to have them have an enjoyable time as they tried out cooking, you could still arrive at exactly the same behaviors. So asking for consent on that ends up being basically the same as “do you consent to me trying to be nice to you, rather than me not being nice to you”.
The way a similar point was expressed in Don’t Shoot the Dog, IIRC, was that we have no choice of whether our actions condition other people or not. Everything that we do conditions other people to like various things either more or less; the question is only whether we let our effects be random and outside our control, or whether we learn enough to try to make our effects beneficial. Once you’ve learned how to effectively teach someone habit, and they ask you to teach it to them, you don’t really have a choice of “not using conditioning” anymore; you know that all of your choices cause some degree of conditioning, and you only have the choice of whether to do it well or poorly.
All of this feels different to me than going on a date and using operant conditioning to make someone fall in love with you faster. (Setting aside the way in which things like dressing up nicely or being good in conversation also involve an element of conditioning the other.) If someone consents to go on a date with you, they haven’t consented to you teaching them a habit, they have just consented to spending an evening trying out whether they happen to like you or not. There are certainly manipulative tricks that one could employ there, that would have an effect of clouding their ability to form an accurate judgment, and that would be wrong. But I don’t see anything like that happening here: Brittany had already made the judgment that there was an end result she wanted, and lsusr was just doing his best to help her reach that end result.
I agree that the distinction between someone explicitly asking to be taught a habit and someone going on a date is important. And I agree that the line between operant conditioning and just not being a dick or otherwise being a good teacher seems a bit blurry.
The remaining thing I feel uncomfortable about is the intentionality here. Lsusr clearly knew what they were doing, and were working towards a long-term plan re shaping Brittany’s motivation system. I think this is quite different from just teaching a friend to the best of your ability, or taking pains to avoid actively being a dick
I think this is quite different from just teaching a friend to the best of your ability
Could you elaborate on this? I agree that if we were talking about teaching a skill in the abstract, it would be different, but I’m not sure where the difference is if we’re teaching a habit? Since to me learning a habit is reshaping your motivational system.
Strongly downvoted. It sounds like the end result here was good, but I feel extremely uncomfortable with the manipulative undertones and lack of agency given to your friend throughout all this. Did she consent to any of this before you started the project, and did you explain to her how you intend to change her motivation system around cooking before trying this? This is an extremely important detail which I didn’t see mentioned—I think you should only try to fix other people’s lives if they explicitly ask you to.
Didn’t lsusr already answer this in the positive [1, 2]?
Update: There is a third comment quoting Brittany herself.
As far as I can tell, those comments say “she was enthusiastic about learning how to cook”, not “she was enthusiastic for me manipulating her into being intrinsically excited about cooking”. I think there’s a very important difference
Are you suggesting that she wouldn’t have been excited without manipulation?
Given that she was apparently enthusiastic “every step in the way”, I read the post as saying that just the first step of having a picnic together in the park and lsusr telling her that home-cooked meals are cheaper than TV meals was enough to get her to want to cook. If something as minor as that would have been enough to make her excited about it, then that doesn’t feel like it qualifies as manipulation to me.
I can’t cook either and I’ve also had people offer me tasty food and mention that I could live more cheaply and tastily if I learned cook, and I wouldn’t call that an act of manipulation! Especially since that alone hasn’t been enough to get me particularly enthusiastic about the idea; if it was enough to persuade her, then she must have been very close to being excited about it already.
I think we’re talking past each other. For me, the key point is that lsusr took actions designed to manipulate her emotions and intuitive reactions to things, and clearly did this systematically towards a clear end goal. I call this manipulation, and think that for applying manipulation to be ethical, the person needs to consent to the manipulation, not just to the end goal of learning how to cook. Everything lsusr has said indicated that she consented to wanting to learn how to cook, not to being manipulated like this.
For example, say I’m dating a girl, we’re both excited about each other, and want to feel more excited about each other. Even if I know all of this, I would consider it deeply unethical to use operant conditioning to get her to fall more deeply for me.
I saw a comment from lsusr that he sent this post to the friend, and she feels fine with it, which makes me feel better about this whole thing. But I stand by the general principle of “don’t manipulate friends without their explicit and knowing consent”
We seem to be, yes. :)
I guess a difference here is that where you see “manipulation”, I see “good pedagogy”.
A friend was once trying to teach / encourage me to cook. One of the things she told me to do was to put on some music that I liked as I was doing it, so as to make it feel more enjoyable. I don’t know whether she thought about it in those terms, but in making that suggestion she was trying to use conditioning on me—associating the act of cooking with pleasant music. I never thought that this suggestion was manipulation or something that she should have asked my consent for, I just felt that it was her being thoughtful and trying to make my experience as pleasant as possible.
The article strongly gives the impression that the thing Brittany was excited about acquiring was not just the abstract skill of knowing how to cook, but also the habit of actually cooking regularly (“Brittany wanted tasty food and not to be sick all the time”). And if you want to acquire a habit, then the way that we acquire habits is through conditioning; there isn’t any other way. The only question is whether you know enough to help someone (or yourself) to acquire it in a way that’s fast and pleasant or slow and less pleasant.
If we strip away cold-sounding terms like “operant conditioning” and look what lsusr actually did, we get things like “I never, at any point, implied that Brittany might be deficient because she didn’t know how to cook”. The opposite to this would have been… making her feel bad for no reason. I assume that lsusr wouldn’t have wanted to make his friend feel bad for no reason anyway, so asking for her consent on this particular point would feel like it amounts to something like “are you okay with me being nice to you while we do this, just as I’d try to be nice to you anyway”.
Similar to “I didn’t start by bringing Brittany to the store, then teach her to cook and have her eat at the end. I started by feeding her, then I taught her to cook and only at the end did I bring her to the grocery store”. If someone wants to learn to cook, then you have to choose some point in the chain to start them out from. If you happen to know that starting out from the end results is both the fastest way to teach and the choice that will produce the most pleasant experience to them, do you need to ask for their consent to choose this point rather than a point that produces a worse experience? I guess it wouldn’t hurt to ask for consent, but certainly if I’ve already told someone that I want them to help me get into a particular habit, then I actively hope that they do everything they can to make the process as pleasant and effective to me as possible!
I guess the intuition that I’m trying to express here is that there’s no difference, in this case, between “applying conditioning” and “trying to make sure that your friend has a pleasant time and comes to enjoy the activity that they’ve expressed wanting to do”. The things that we find enjoyable and pleasant to do become habitual to us, and behaviorism is (in part) just the science of figuring out what it is that causes things to become enjoyable and pleasant to us. If you hadn’t read anything about behaviorism, but were just motivated by a desire to be nice to your friend and tried to figure out how to have them have an enjoyable time as they tried out cooking, you could still arrive at exactly the same behaviors. So asking for consent on that ends up being basically the same as “do you consent to me trying to be nice to you, rather than me not being nice to you”.
The way a similar point was expressed in Don’t Shoot the Dog, IIRC, was that we have no choice of whether our actions condition other people or not. Everything that we do conditions other people to like various things either more or less; the question is only whether we let our effects be random and outside our control, or whether we learn enough to try to make our effects beneficial. Once you’ve learned how to effectively teach someone habit, and they ask you to teach it to them, you don’t really have a choice of “not using conditioning” anymore; you know that all of your choices cause some degree of conditioning, and you only have the choice of whether to do it well or poorly.
All of this feels different to me than going on a date and using operant conditioning to make someone fall in love with you faster. (Setting aside the way in which things like dressing up nicely or being good in conversation also involve an element of conditioning the other.) If someone consents to go on a date with you, they haven’t consented to you teaching them a habit, they have just consented to spending an evening trying out whether they happen to like you or not. There are certainly manipulative tricks that one could employ there, that would have an effect of clouding their ability to form an accurate judgment, and that would be wrong. But I don’t see anything like that happening here: Brittany had already made the judgment that there was an end result she wanted, and lsusr was just doing his best to help her reach that end result.
Thanks for the detailed follow-up!
I agree that the distinction between someone explicitly asking to be taught a habit and someone going on a date is important. And I agree that the line between operant conditioning and just not being a dick or otherwise being a good teacher seems a bit blurry.
The remaining thing I feel uncomfortable about is the intentionality here. Lsusr clearly knew what they were doing, and were working towards a long-term plan re shaping Brittany’s motivation system. I think this is quite different from just teaching a friend to the best of your ability, or taking pains to avoid actively being a dick
Glad that we’re coming closer to agreement. :)
Could you elaborate on this? I agree that if we were talking about teaching a skill in the abstract, it would be different, but I’m not sure where the difference is if we’re teaching a habit? Since to me learning a habit is reshaping your motivational system.