Or to scare others away from the mere thought of becoming a problem. (Or to piss them off enough to maintain having a problem to maintain reasons for existence and the associated budgets.)
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Makes a person think twice about asking for anti-venom.
I always kept an eye out for them when I lived thereâŚdidnât think twice about the scorpions as they preferred not to sting you.
I donât doubt that a lot of assholes in high places would love to weaponize this, but I still think youâre wrong: people researching torture methodologies donât sit down for a chat with science writers. If there are people doing nasty things with bullet ants, itâs not these guys.
Also, there is loads and loads of precedent for legit medical uses of animal venom. You may think that sounds like a transparent excuse, but itâs not.
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Punishments and rewards encompass literally everything that has ever motivated any human being.
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I like how the post is all âHereâs how scientists milk bullet ants, just like they do with snakes!â and the article is actually âWe tried milking bullet ants, and it didnât work. We just dissect them and remove the venom glands manually.â BoingBoing, everybody!
Another interesting thing that all you guys who didnât read the article missed out on: âBut Backshall goes on to say that after the pain subsides the bodyâs overdose of adrenaline makes you feel âlike a god.â And for weeks afterwards he felt great.â That goes a good way towards explaining why people do this to themselves on purpose, and is also a strong counterargument against the weapon/torture idea. The last thing the po-pos want is for those pesky protesters they zapped to get up a few hours later with superhuman purpose and determination.
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Not just human beings; pretty much any multi celled organism.
Yeah, pretty much. I stated it conservatively because I didnât want to get into an argument about whether, say, ants are sentient enough to perceive ârewardsâ and âpunishmentsâ as we would understand them, or operate more on the level of a complex robot.
The great thing about operant conditioning (rewards and punishments) is that the receiver doesnât need to understand whatâs going on, they just respond to the consequences. Bacteria will learn to move toward a food source or away from an aversive stimulus even though they lack any kind of language to reason about what is happening (I presume).
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Yeah yeah torture, horrific pain, comedians doing dumb things blah blah, really the more important question that needs answering is this: Are the lapels really necessary? The belt AND buckle? Is the nametag sewn in, or is it removable via velcro� Exactly what the fuck kind of outfit does this guy have on?!?
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I think itâs âcome to work as your favorite TV character day,â and he picked Jane Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies.
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You donât need prisoners that have been wiped from the inventory. Plus prisoners are more likely to tolerate pain and be more used to torture than the general population.
This is why we must abduct Canadians from various walks of life to ensure a more realistic assessment.
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Here is an example - but there was another I was thinking of when I wrote comment above - just donât want to find it at the moment.
Not even close! Punishment and reward are conditions put in place with a specific intention. Somebody has to deliberately choose for something to count as either. If I stumble around in the wilderness and find tasty food which simply happens to be there, then it is not descriptive of anyone rewarding me for anything. I am guessing that what you are thinking of are more like affinity versus avoidance, which is what the individual organism feels.
It is entirely possible to work around by being methodical. Notice the stimulus around you and favor every fifth one. Avoid every seventh one. Do this regardless of what you think or feel about them. Wire your sensory neurons to experience stimulus, and wire your motor neurons to yield a reaction uncorrelated to the stimulus. The reality is that a person can occupy many kinds of states between the poles of pure determinacy and randomness. Use algorithms to stimulate and/or inhibit affective states according to various criteria.
The environment delivers you a reward for looking at the right place at the right time. That it is not intentionally placed there by somebody does not make it any less a reward.
Except that âthe environmentâ has no intentions. This is anthropomorhising of the world at large to reflect conditioning experiments undertaken by a person. If I put cheese in a maze, it is a reward because I am using it to train a certain behavior or outcome. By definition, reward and punishment are deliberately given out by some conscious agent, they do not exist by chance. Unless we want to get superstitious!
Thatâs why I contrasted these terms against others which can exist outside of laboratories. I said affinity/avoidance before, but pleasure/pain work just as well. These are simply the pure feelings, the affective states of the organism. In biological terms, expansion/contraction or excitation/inhibition would be yet more accurate.
But applying these to every sort of large-scale human meta-cognition requires a lot of abstraction, and heavily reductive reasoning.
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Whose definition?
A reward is a reward. If I find a coin on the pavement, it is as rewarding when it is there by random as when it is placed there intentionally. The intent of the environment, or lack of it, plays no role there.
Neurologists call the relevant parts of brain âreward centersâ and the mesolimbic pathway a âreward pathwayâ for a reason. The same pathway lights up the mouse brain like a Christmas tree regardless if it is a cheese in a maze placed there by an experimenter or if the same piece of cheese is found on a kitchen floor without an intentional placement.
The rest is merely lawyering and wagging semantics.
Most all of them! Except for yours, and a few others, apparently. I never assumed it was shorthand for âsomething you likeâ.
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A consequence that happens to someone as a result of worthy or unworthy behavior:
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Money offered or given for some special service, such as the return of a lost article or the capture of a criminal.
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A satisfying return on investment; a profit.
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Psychology The return for performance of a desired behavior; positive reinforcement.
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something given or received in return for a deed or service rendered
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a sum of money offered, esp for help in finding a criminal or for the return of lost or stolen property
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profit or return
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something received in return for good or evil; deserts
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(Psychology) psychol any pleasant event that follows a response and therefore increases the likelihood of the response recurring in the future
vb -
(tr) to give (something) to (someone), esp in gratitude for a service rendered; recompense
Itâs the same reason I rage over the misappropriation of the word âprivilegeâ, because at its root the word indicates that somebody is explicitly granting it, not that it happens by itself. Once that happens, it is called something else.
Semantics are hardly âmereâ, it is the discipline of refining meaning between people. That many are too lazy to do it causes no end of problems.
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Worthy behavior: spending effort, finding the cheese.
Unworthy behavior: expelling all the energy of running around, not finding the cheese.
Investing energy and effort, stumbling over the cheese (and getting motivated to scour around the area yet more, possibly discovering pattern that cheese is more likely to be found around kitchens which further increases chance of reward).
See above.
See above.
Exactly like finding the cheese, and increasing the probability of the mouse returning to the kitchen in search for another reward. This very definition is why neurologists use phrases like âreward pathwayâ.
Iâd suggest to say that if it lights up what neurologists call a reward pathway, it is a reward.
Problem solved.
Sometimes it is time to recognize the point of diminishing returns and wave the minuscule differences off. Or realize that oneâs definition is off.
Scientists often use stupid names for things, in hopes of them being popularly adopted. They should know better. But if their term spreads, I suppose their brains light up like pinball machines of virtual cheese.
The differences are often a dismissal of the root meaning of the word itself. Drift is a hell of a drug.
In this specific case, they are spot-on from the beginning.
Drift happens.
