It’s an interesting point. OTOH, your first two counterpoints are clearly true; there’s immense “noise” in natural environments; no two situations come close to repeating, so doing the right thing once doesn’t remotely ensure doing it again. But the trend was in the right direction, so your point stands at a reduced strength.
Negative tweaks definitely wither away the positive behavior; overwriting behavior is the nature of networks, although how strongly this applies is a variable. I don’t know how experiments have shown this to occur; it’s always going to be specific to overlap in circumstances.
Your final counterpoint almost certainly isn’t true in human biology/learning. There’s a zero point on the scale, which is no net change in dopamine release. That happens when results match the expected outcome. Dopamine directly drives learning, although in somewhat complex ways in different brain regions. The basal ganglia system appears to perform RL much like many ML systems, while the cortex appears to do something related but of learning more about whatever happened just before dopamine release, but not learning to perform a specific action as such.
But it’s also definitely true that death is much worse than any single positive event (for humans), since you can’t be sure of raising a child to adulthood just by having sex once. The most important thing is to stay in the game.
So both are factors.
But observe the effect of potential sex on adolescent males, and I think we’ll see that the risk of death isn’t all that much stronger an influence ;)
It’s an interesting point. OTOH, your first two counterpoints are clearly true; there’s immense “noise” in natural environments; no two situations come close to repeating, so doing the right thing once doesn’t remotely ensure doing it again. But the trend was in the right direction, so your point stands at a reduced strength.
Negative tweaks definitely wither away the positive behavior; overwriting behavior is the nature of networks, although how strongly this applies is a variable. I don’t know how experiments have shown this to occur; it’s always going to be specific to overlap in circumstances.
Your final counterpoint almost certainly isn’t true in human biology/learning. There’s a zero point on the scale, which is no net change in dopamine release. That happens when results match the expected outcome. Dopamine directly drives learning, although in somewhat complex ways in different brain regions. The basal ganglia system appears to perform RL much like many ML systems, while the cortex appears to do something related but of learning more about whatever happened just before dopamine release, but not learning to perform a specific action as such.
But it’s also definitely true that death is much worse than any single positive event (for humans), since you can’t be sure of raising a child to adulthood just by having sex once. The most important thing is to stay in the game.
So both are factors.
But observe the effect of potential sex on adolescent males, and I think we’ll see that the risk of death isn’t all that much stronger an influence ;)