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I read it once and have no idea what point they are trying to make. Are they saying, be it reinforcement or punishment, either way its an exercise in futility?

AstralStorm 9y ago
On the contrary - but suggests that a lot of psychological research ignores how the person training reacts to the feedback and performance of the trainee - thus rendering the recommendations hard to follow or moot.
dmichulke 9y ago
Yes, it's an exercise in futility in high noise environments such as initial flight cadet performance (where mean performance only shifts over the long-term)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jgrahamc 9y ago
That has been my experience with all of his writing. I gave up reading Thinking, Fast and Slow because he wasn't clear.
anvandare 9y ago
The instructor thought that "50% chance of receiving a positive signal if you send out a negative signal" was better than "50% chance of receiving a negative signal if you send out a positive signal".
- Sharlin 9y ago
  No, the instructor thought that their feedback had a clear causal connection to the cadet’s subsequent performance (scolding makes them perform better, praise makes them worse) when actually the effect (if any) could not be separated from random noise in performance and regression to the mean.
  - anvandare 9y ago
    My bad, the choice of "thought" implied more deliberation than I meant. As I read it (with the coin experiment) the instructor was more likely to focus on positive results if he gave a negative response and negative results if he gave a positive results than on a positive results if he gave a positive response and negative results if he gave a positive response because of bias reinforcement.
    - Sharlin 9y ago
      It’s not really that either. The correlation the instructor saw was real—a cadet would, on average, actually perform better after scolding and worse after praise! But the instructor wrongly assumed that their feedback caused the change in results when in actuality the only clear causation was from the cadet’s earlier performance to the instructor’s feedback. Because of regression to the mean, an exceptional result is more likely to be followed by a more average one, irrespective of the instructor’s reaction. What the instructor actually achieved was condition themselves to respond in a certain way to a student’s performance, rather than conditioning the student to respond to the instructor’s feedback as intended!
imron 9y ago
No, they are saying that encouragement and reinforcement work better over time, however if you only look at a single example you will get the opposite impression due to regression towards the mean.
yuzulicious 9y ago
He's saying that rewarding success and punishing failure, combined with regression to the mean, leads to a perceptual bias in which we believe that the reward causally failed and the punishment causally succeeded, because of actual but spurious contingencies that are induced. 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.
- Lewton 9y ago
  As long as you keep in mind that it says nothing about whether scolding actually works or not. It only tells you what to account for if you want to test it
  - a3n 9y ago
    I only read the linked summary. I think the lecturer and the objecting instructor are talking about two different things. The instructor's thesis is that positive reinforcement is more effective. I'm assuming that this was a measured, long term result, e.g. students that were positively reinforced did better on final tests or other summarizing measurements. The objecting instructor is talking about single instances "in the seat," not measured over time. "More often than not, the next maneuver ..." I'm assuming that a student's performance will be somewhat more random than an experienced practitioner's performance. So there would be a tendency for regression to the mean in isolated instances, and a small enough sample of instances would not be enough to predict final measured proficiency. Also because of the way the objecting instructor phrased his objection, I'm assuming that he hadn't checked his observations against the final summarizing measurements. This is how I made sense of the conflict between the two people.
jonathanstrange 9y ago
Judging from what I remember of Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, this is probably about the base rate fallacy. So yes, the claim is that often there is no real learning involved.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
Nate Silver's book "Signal and the Noise" is all about this kind of thing. The key question being "What is signal and what is noise?". 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.
EliRivers 9y ago
while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning The point is praise is better. Not futile. Easy to misread reversion to the mean as the consequence of praise / punishment.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  While I agree in general, you seem to be implying that because praise is "better" that punishment has no value. I am sure that isn't what you are saying, but for the sake of argument, here's a counter. After raising a few kids, and watching many other parents do the same, I have found that both praise and punishment is an absolute requirement for success. But praise is good for personal bonding, and punishment for learning responsibility. As an adult we punish ourselves (if raised to self evaluate) and on the extreme side we justify our selves in error if only given praise. Self evaluation cannot be done without self punishment. Before you go nuts on what "self punishment" means in this context, I will provide one. At the lowest level it means acknowledging that an error was "my fault". The most minimum amount of punishment possible is taking responsibility. It hurts, it's punishment. Blaming others is easy, and doesn't hurt at all, but will not help you avoid repeating a mistake. Having to apologize for a mistake or hurting others is a form of self imposed (or parent imposed in some contexts) punishment. And it's extremely effective in resolving conflict. Again, I am sure that I read into your point, but it seemed fitting to address this purely from an argumentative perspective.
Confusion 9y ago
The point is you cannot trust your intuition, even if it is based on your own experience, to determine what works well. As an example, 'regression to the mean' ensures that it seems like blaming works better than praising.

AstralStorm 9y ago

On the contrary - but suggests that a lot of psychological research ignores how the person training reacts to the feedback and performance of the trainee - thus rendering the recommendations hard to follow or moot.

dmichulke 9y ago

Yes, it's an exercise in futility in high noise environments such as initial flight cadet performance (where mean performance only shifts over the long-term)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jgrahamc 9y ago

That has been my experience with all of his writing. I gave up reading Thinking, Fast and Slow because he wasn't clear.

anvandare 9y ago

The instructor thought that "50% chance of receiving a positive signal if you send out a negative signal" was better than "50% chance of receiving a negative signal if you send out a positive signal".

Sharlin 9y ago
No, the instructor thought that their feedback had a clear causal connection to the cadet’s subsequent performance (scolding makes them perform better, praise makes them worse) when actually the effect (if any) could not be separated from random noise in performance and regression to the mean.
- anvandare 9y ago
  My bad, the choice of "thought" implied more deliberation than I meant. As I read it (with the coin experiment) the instructor was more likely to focus on positive results if he gave a negative response and negative results if he gave a positive results than on a positive results if he gave a positive response and negative results if he gave a positive response because of bias reinforcement.
  - Sharlin 9y ago
    It’s not really that either. The correlation the instructor saw was real—a cadet would, on average, actually perform better after scolding and worse after praise! But the instructor wrongly assumed that their feedback caused the change in results when in actuality the only clear causation was from the cadet’s earlier performance to the instructor’s feedback. Because of regression to the mean, an exceptional result is more likely to be followed by a more average one, irrespective of the instructor’s reaction. What the instructor actually achieved was condition themselves to respond in a certain way to a student’s performance, rather than conditioning the student to respond to the instructor’s feedback as intended!

imron 9y ago

No, they are saying that encouragement and reinforcement work better over time, however if you only look at a single example you will get the opposite impression due to regression towards the mean.

yuzulicious 9y ago

He's saying that rewarding success and punishing failure, combined with regression to the mean, leads to a perceptual bias in which we believe that the reward causally failed and the punishment causally succeeded, because of actual but spurious contingencies that are induced. 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.

Lewton 9y ago
As long as you keep in mind that it says nothing about whether scolding actually works or not. It only tells you what to account for if you want to test it
- a3n 9y ago
  I only read the linked summary. I think the lecturer and the objecting instructor are talking about two different things. The instructor's thesis is that positive reinforcement is more effective. I'm assuming that this was a measured, long term result, e.g. students that were positively reinforced did better on final tests or other summarizing measurements. The objecting instructor is talking about single instances "in the seat," not measured over time. "More often than not, the next maneuver ..." I'm assuming that a student's performance will be somewhat more random than an experienced practitioner's performance. So there would be a tendency for regression to the mean in isolated instances, and a small enough sample of instances would not be enough to predict final measured proficiency. Also because of the way the objecting instructor phrased his objection, I'm assuming that he hadn't checked his observations against the final summarizing measurements. This is how I made sense of the conflict between the two people.

jonathanstrange 9y ago

Judging from what I remember of Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, this is probably about the base rate fallacy. So yes, the claim is that often there is no real learning involved.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

Nate Silver's book "Signal and the Noise" is all about this kind of thing. The key question being "What is signal and what is noise?". 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.

EliRivers 9y ago

while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning The point is praise is better. Not futile. Easy to misread reversion to the mean as the consequence of praise / punishment.

RobertRoberts 9y ago
While I agree in general, you seem to be implying that because praise is "better" that punishment has no value. I am sure that isn't what you are saying, but for the sake of argument, here's a counter. After raising a few kids, and watching many other parents do the same, I have found that both praise and punishment is an absolute requirement for success. But praise is good for personal bonding, and punishment for learning responsibility. As an adult we punish ourselves (if raised to self evaluate) and on the extreme side we justify our selves in error if only given praise. Self evaluation cannot be done without self punishment. Before you go nuts on what "self punishment" means in this context, I will provide one. At the lowest level it means acknowledging that an error was "my fault". The most minimum amount of punishment possible is taking responsibility. It hurts, it's punishment. Blaming others is easy, and doesn't hurt at all, but will not help you avoid repeating a mistake. Having to apologize for a mistake or hurting others is a form of self imposed (or parent imposed in some contexts) punishment. And it's extremely effective in resolving conflict. Again, I am sure that I read into your point, but it seemed fitting to address this purely from an argumentative perspective.

Confusion 9y ago

The point is you cannot trust your intuition, even if it is based on your own experience, to determine what works well. As an example, 'regression to the mean' ensures that it seems like blaming works better than praising.