I'll take you up on that wager. Not that I think (mild) corporal punishment is necessarily bad, just that all punishment is misdirected. Punishment suppresses behaviour. Reinforcement strengthens behaviour. When you're suppressing, you're often likely to suppress the wrong behaviour. The classic example is if you punish a child for not doing their homework, they'll try to avoid coming to class. They might even develop more severe behavioural problems so you stop minding the homework. Reinforcement is targetted at a specific behaviour, and is therefore more effective.
I've heard that argument. D'you buy it? It seems weird to me. The logic is that children can misinterpret punishment, but if so, why wouldn't they equally misinterpret reward?
My take: sometimes you want to get someone to do something, i.e. there is a small set of things you do want them to do. Then, reward will work because it's tightly targeted and easy to understand. Punishment won't because it can't guide the person into that small set. Conversely, if you want to stop someone doing something, i.e. there is a small set of things you don't want them to do, then reward won't work and punishment will.
The argument is that there is an inherent asymmetry. To get a reward for doing A, you must do A, but there are many ways to avoid getting punished for doing B.
As for your common-sense argument, You should think environment and equilibrium (a variant of Lucas Critique). For basic cognitive functions, such as priming, common sense should be the same throughout history. But which strategy is best depends on the environment and on other choices that the players make. Whether corporal punishment is a good idea depends on the social environment. So medieval common sense may not be the best guide.
Interesting. FWIW, I don't agree that bodybuilders get good feedback. If you could actually see the muscle growth immediately after working out, they'd get it right.
Going back to your examples, I think on second thought that they don't make your case. The results on parenting are not wrong. fixing the parents (education, wealth, personality), different behaviours within the reasonable range for such parents probably doesn't have much variance to make a substantial difference. On average, children make people unhappy. It's not that the counterintuitive results are wrong. It's just that people were not careful enough drawing conclusions from these results.
I'll take you up on that wager. Not that I think (mild) corporal punishment is necessarily bad, just that all punishment is misdirected. Punishment suppresses behaviour. Reinforcement strengthens behaviour. When you're suppressing, you're often likely to suppress the wrong behaviour. The classic example is if you punish a child for not doing their homework, they'll try to avoid coming to class. They might even develop more severe behavioural problems so you stop minding the homework. Reinforcement is targetted at a specific behaviour, and is therefore more effective.
I've heard that argument. D'you buy it? It seems weird to me. The logic is that children can misinterpret punishment, but if so, why wouldn't they equally misinterpret reward?
My take: sometimes you want to get someone to do something, i.e. there is a small set of things you do want them to do. Then, reward will work because it's tightly targeted and easy to understand. Punishment won't because it can't guide the person into that small set. Conversely, if you want to stop someone doing something, i.e. there is a small set of things you don't want them to do, then reward won't work and punishment will.
The argument is that there is an inherent asymmetry. To get a reward for doing A, you must do A, but there are many ways to avoid getting punished for doing B.
As for your common-sense argument, You should think environment and equilibrium (a variant of Lucas Critique). For basic cognitive functions, such as priming, common sense should be the same throughout history. But which strategy is best depends on the environment and on other choices that the players make. Whether corporal punishment is a good idea depends on the social environment. So medieval common sense may not be the best guide.
I think common sense depends on the environment too.
And common sense today in WEIRD countries is that corporal punishment is bad, whereas your other examples are still counterintuitive.
Reminds me slightly of this from Scott Alexander: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders
Interesting. FWIW, I don't agree that bodybuilders get good feedback. If you could actually see the muscle growth immediately after working out, they'd get it right.
Going back to your examples, I think on second thought that they don't make your case. The results on parenting are not wrong. fixing the parents (education, wealth, personality), different behaviours within the reasonable range for such parents probably doesn't have much variance to make a substantial difference. On average, children make people unhappy. It's not that the counterintuitive results are wrong. It's just that people were not careful enough drawing conclusions from these results.