Agents vs Dogs, Cherries vs Cyanide
I was just reading that article about ABA that @autter-pop shared, and I watched one of the videos it linked to, and I left a comment on the video outlining some problems I saw with the parents’ actions. However, the video was old, and there were a bunch of pro-ABA parents in the comment section, so I imagine few people will actually read my argument. And commenting on youtube videos is about as useful as trying to sweep the dust off a dirt road. So I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.
Firstly, I think it’s fundamentally disrespectful to use behavioristic techniques on humans. I was trying to determine why I didn’t feel disrespected by all the structures in my life that reward me for some actions and punish me for others. And then I realized: those are incentives. Incentives are created to persuade a rational agent to pursue a non-preferred outcome by pairing it with a preferred outcome, or to avoid a preferred outcome through a link to a non-preferred one; fundamentally, they assume that the recipient is thinking, planning, and trying to achieve some goals. Reinforcements, by contrast, treat the recipient as a piece of animate meat, an automaton that responds only to what its senses are perceiving and what conditioning has been applied. Reinforcements are for dogs and possibly to teach babies to avoid electrical outlets; any human old enough to think and remember is old enough to deserve the respect of receiving incentives instead.
Secondly, to the people who try to argue that behavioristic phenomena are inherent in life and essential to child development, I respond that intentions matter and degree matters. A cherry contains traces of cyanide, and yet no one tries to argue that because you can feed your children cherries, you should be able to feed them pure sodium cyanide. A layer 2 DDoS attack against a website only involves ordinary internet packets, and yet their number and the intent to take down a website makes them malicious. For similar reasons, unintentionally smiling more around a person if they’re nicer to you when you do that doesn’t imply abuse has occurred, but 40-hour-a-week dog training for children in hopes that they can be molded into new people is unacceptable.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. (I hope I used that meme correctly)
