An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I’ve been chewing on, that I haven’t written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat “reward” as fundamental and then use phrases like “intrinsic reward” to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But “reward” is not the fundamental one, it’s built on fruit.
The difference:
if you don’t get caught, you don’t get punished
a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.
An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I’ve been chewing on, that I haven’t written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat “reward” as fundamental and then use phrases like “intrinsic reward” to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But “reward” is not the fundamental one, it’s built on fruit.
The difference:
if you don’t get caught, you don’t get punished
a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.