If you model a human as an RL agent, then a lot of the work is being done by a very carefully constructed reward function. You can tell since humans do a lot of stuff that an RL agent basically wouldn’t do (like “die for a cause”). You can bake an awful lot into a carefully constructed reward function—for example, you can reward the agent whenever it takes actions that are optimal according to some arbitrary decision theory X—so it’s probably possible to describe a human as an RL agent but it doesn’t seem like a useful description.
At any rate, once the reward function is doing a lot of the optimization, the arguments in this post don’t really apply. Certainly an RL agent can have a heuristic like vindictiveness if you just change the reward function.
If you model a human as an RL agent, then a lot of the work is being done by a very carefully constructed reward function. You can tell since humans do a lot of stuff that an RL agent basically wouldn’t do (like “die for a cause”). You can bake an awful lot into a carefully constructed reward function—for example, you can reward the agent whenever it takes actions that are optimal according to some arbitrary decision theory X—so it’s probably possible to describe a human as an RL agent but it doesn’t seem like a useful description.
At any rate, once the reward function is doing a lot of the optimization, the arguments in this post don’t really apply. Certainly an RL agent can have a heuristic like vindictiveness if you just change the reward function.
That makes sense, thank you.