Caltrops - Rants - Re: Pain as _A

Forum Overview :: Rants

by TAFKAM 01/27/2003, 12:04pm PST

Cyrris wrote:

Historically, pain has been the ultimate teacher to those who know how to learn. Take a rat for example (Sorry V). If you present a rat with a new color of food pellet that happens to be poisoned, the rat will eat it, get poisoned, get well, and never touch a food pellet of that color again. Take a human child. Child sees hot stove, child touches hot stove, child screams his/her head off, child never intentionally touches hot stove again. This all assumes that the creatures in question actually learn from their mistakes.

Grade 7 science class:

There are two ways of teaching: Positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Pain, and what you list above, is positive reinforcement. Both are equally important and equally as effective. As V mentions below, to focus on one is to miss the entire equation.

Negative reinforcement: Hit a child when they misbehave - Logic: Child associates undesirable activity with pain, and theoretically avoids it.
Positive reinforcement: Reward a child when they behave - Logic: Child associates desirable activity with reward, and theoretically repeats the behaviour.

NegativeReinforcement()=true != PositiveReinforcement()=false;

Cyrris wrote:

Unfortunately, people (especially those between the ages of 14 and somewhere in the 20's) refuse to learn sometimes. Its the whole "I'm fucking invincible" attitude they take on untill the universe says "Here, catch! Oops, was that too large for you to handle? Here's an even larger problem". Trying to teach someone "if you do this, it will hurt" just doesn't fucking work. The best I've seen done is "Here is WHY you hurt. Remember that, if you survive." You can't save an individual from their pain, especially if they've inflicted it upon themselves, but you can help them learn from it. And if they can't/won't learn from the mistakes they survive, pray that Natural Selection doesn't notice them.

Just an itty bitty piece of wisdom from someone just old enough to begin looking back and say "What the fuck was I thinking?"

-Cyrris

Anyone > 15 is capable of retrospective analysis, they just aren't that efficient at it. As age++, the lessons we learn from retro/introspection become more modular.

Rather than, as a child, learn "Suzie likes it when I buy her a 10c candy when I buy some for myself."

as we get older, we generalize the rule as "Women like it when I buy them a gift when I buy something for myself."

Forgive the specificity, I'm sure you understand my point.

Human experience is a continual process of pattern/rule forming, pattern/rule testing, pattern/rule revision. There are plenty of good books about human thought at your local bookstore, if at all interested you should check some out.

Also as V touches on below (I confess, I only skimmed her post), EXPERIENCE is the key. The patterns that you form and validate build on each other and become experience. That's why people become wiser as they age - They have more patterns (Experience) to draw on and are thus more capable of assessing and dealing with certain situations. That's also why children are generally teh stupid.

time*(natural ability) = experience

natural ability < AVERAGE: (natural ability) = between 0-.9999999
natural ability = AVERAGE: (natural ability) = 1
natural ability > AVERAGE: (natural ability) = between 1.11111111 +

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