“The effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency” (2002)

Half the heads, having been praised were successful again. That's implying that praise was 50% effective.

Half the tails, having been scolded, were suddenly successful. That's implying that scolding was 50% effective.

How is scolding more effective than praising?

Wouldn't that indicate that indeed no praise + lots of scolding is the best approach?

It's like saying that just because I was able to parallel park successfully this time in one maneuver without hitting the curb or either of the cars in front or behind me that I have some sort of increased chance of not being successful the next time. That seems kind of absurd, doesn't it?

Anyway, the tendency of the article pushes negative reinforcement, not just anecdotally, but also as a continuous prevailing message, instead of alternating with degrees of praise even if only on occassion. There are at least three things wrong with that on a behavioral level: a. resentment as an inversion of stockholm syndrome b. learned helplessness, and c. simple fatigue.

In other words, people will hate your idea of leadership, conclude that you can never be pleased, and realize that they'll be worked to death on a treadmill of demands, if they don't jump ship sooner or later.

Then also what magnitude of praise or negative feedback elicits best results?

Essentially this could down to finding out the optimal training schedule for humans. (Like for neural nets or classifiers.) And this is similar to adversarial training. You have to consider both the trainee and the trainer (discriminator).

Not a golfer, I see.

If you establish a norm that everybody gets yelled at, even the better performers, then getting yelled at comes to just mean "pay attention" or "you need to focus more on this." Otherwise getting yelled at means, "You are not living up to the standards of the group, and we resent you for it. You should worry about what's going to happen to you here, if you're even allowed to remain."

Language acquisition presents what is perhaps the easiest falsification of your claim. Children don't learn verbal communication so well because of a system of instruction inescapably based on rewards and punishment from an instructor who can teach the lessons that the child wishes to learn (or thinks they should learn). They learn so well because their brain essentially builds them a nice filter chain based on the sounds they hear at an early age range (thus language exposure is an important factor in later language learning).

We hoist praise and blame onto that process mainly because most parents have decades- (or sometimes centuries-) old concepts of learning that aren't based on modern research. Still, I'd much prefer they err on the side of too much praise rather than risk abusing their children. We have plenty of research that tells us the clear risks when that happens.

> In certain circumstances, especially where (b) is less true, then praise and blame get upgraded to reward and punishment.

The example above is a case where (b) is less true. Infants don't desire to build a language filter based on the sounds they are hearing. It happens involuntarily. But your system would actually guide a parent in the wrong direction-- escalating praise/blame to reward/punishment in a situation where neither are warranted.

> For example, in a computer game you're learning optimally if your win:lose ratio is somewhere around 80:20. I would guess this applies to our relationships too.

For that to be testable, your character in the game would have to stay dead once it gets killed. Or at least its injuries would need to follow it everywhere. Like a friend tries to show you a new move and hands you the controller, then the game says, "Hey, you're that guy with the broken leg," and doesn't allow you to do the move.

I think the win:lose ratio would change significantly in that case.

I think neither is correct. I think this is a tactical decision that needs to be made in the moment based on time and energy.

Which is to say, it is neither correct nor incorrect to slowly, agonizingly, peel off a band-aid. This can be a successful strategy. Sometimes, however, you just need to rip it off and get on with your life ...

(three kids)

That raises the question, has the medical research community picked up on this? I would expect a burgeoning movement to correct this in medical trials.

Ask yourself why do they do double-blind experiments. I had read that depending on the illness, a non-active treatment (sugar pill) given to the control group improved their reported condition by significant and substantial margins over a population that did not get the fake treatment.

Let's say that you repeat something over and over again with the same individuals, with random Gaussian outcomes on each trial. What will happen is that an individual who is at the extreme on one trial (positive or negative) will be more likely to be in the middle on the next trial, because the extreme deviations are extremely unlikely, and the middle deviations are relatively likely. So the really good person on one trial is likely to look worse on a subsequent trial, and the really bad person is likely to look better.

If you praise the person who did well on the initial trial, then, you will see good outcome -> praise -> worse outcome. If you punish the person who did poorly, you will see poor outcome -> punish -> better outcome. But this is spurious, because the good -> worse transitions and bad -> better transitions would have happened regardless of whether you praised or punished.

I think the thought experiment is imperfect for various reasons but does illustrate an important potential source of bias pretty well.

Is doing well on one maneover mostly signal (the pilot skill level) or noise (random chance).

In the book Nate talks about his own career as a poker player, and how there's so much chance involved that he still didn't really know if he was a good player or not after doing it for a couple of years, that's how hard it is to tease the signal from the noise. Would beating himself up about every lost hand and celebrating every win be worthwile, or would it just distract him from the real task of slightly beating the odds and grinding out a profit at the margin.

The point is praise is better. Not futile. Easy to misread reversion to the mean as the consequence of praise / punishment.

As an example, 'regression to the mean' ensures that it seems like blaming works better than praising.

It shows that when there is a gaussian distribution of performance, then exceptionally good performance will, purely based on statistics, be followed by a decrease in performance, and exceptionally bad performance will be followed by better performance.

The point is that this effect will usually be much stronger than the effects of feedback, and if you naively analyse what kind of feedback works better, it will lead you to the wrong conclusion because praise is given for exceptionally good performance while scolding is given for exceptionally bad performance.

His thesis is that praise, in real-world situations, has a positive effect, and punishment has a negative effect, but on extremely short timeframes random effects dominate, leading to the reasonable empirical belief that praise is ineffective compared to punishment.

while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning

The claim is that it does make a difference; being nice is better. It's easy to misread reversion to the mean as the result of praise / punishment.