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Comment by apt-apt-apt-apt | Hacker News Reader

As an evolutionary cousin of a rat, the half-second delay after firing my weapon and the response would make me want to eat my whiskers.

This would completely kill any potential reward (and replace it with the opposite, frustration) you're trying to train me with, please fix immediately.

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Lol you are correct! At least training them becomes smoother the faster you administer reward. Learning happens at different timescales in the brain, and immediate feedback (about <300 ms) yields the most reliable neural updates.

One of the most important traits of intelligence is understanding and appreciating delayed reward.

I saw a gambler win the jackpot. He was really excited and started gathering up all the chips he'd won. Why he was so excited to win a bunch of plastic chips, I'll never know. What's so great about plastic chips? Why was his brain so excited when all he was doing was gathering plastic chips? ...

A half-second delay doesn't mean your brain can't learn to make the precursor feel good.

The colorful plastic chips work well enough to trick our dumb monkey brains, just like red notification bubbles.

You missed the point. The chips are exchanged for money shortly after. The brain knows this.

Similar to the rat knowing the sugar comes very shortly after the task.

I think that’s the same idea behind clicker training for dogs. There’s a delay in giving them the actual treat, but the instantaneous click sound lets them now they did the thing that results in a treat

pavlov conditioning

not pavlov conditioning -- in Skinner's three term contingency, the stimulus context acquires meaning/significance related to the consequences of a response. a neutral or even negative stimulus (context) can become it's own reward through this process. this conditioned stimulus explains most animal and human experience. Humans are especially prone to constructing meaning based on the primal.

Think of the senses: sound becomes talking, music, etc. food become cuisine, obesity, and anorexia. eyes becomes art, movies, etc. desire becomes porn, s@m, etc.

meaning is constructed, socially constructed, or what skinner call "learning." His masterwork, long forgotten, is the "generic nature of stimulus and response." Generic as it open to near total manipulation

skinner was the man

Yep. And money is just another kind of chip. What's so great about money?

It gets exchanged for hamburgers

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