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“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

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Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#31

Post by WalterBright »

watwut wrote: post #26
ve55 wrote: post #14

This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere bet…

Aren't past gamblers more likely to relapse then non-gamblers to start? I think that my point here is that while enough pain is good job in making you stop temporally, it takes much more then that to stop forever.

That's characterized by the phrase "hitting rock bottom".

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#32

Post by WalterBright »

donquichotte wrote: post #28

Quite interesting article. After graduating from a control-theory-heavy program, I have started thinking about animal movement as an optimization problem. A manipulator is moved into a desired position while minimizing the cost function of pain, in order to avoid damage to the body. That would fall in the "useful painful pain" category, I guess.

A lot of animal movement is about minimizing energy usage, not optimizing for minimal pain.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#33

Post by xenadu02 »

emrehan wrote: post #29
Lucent wrote: post #27

Few of the comments here seem to discuss his point. He asks if pleasure to pain is a continuum, why have pain at all? Instead of -1 to 1, with negative representing unpleasantness, human experience can instead span 0 to 2 and have the same reinforcement value with no sensation of displeasure. My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek…

A good argument, but not applicable for people practicing self-harm. A quotation from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-harm below: “Those who engage in self-harm face the contradictory reality of harming themselves while at the same time obtaining relief from this act. It may even be hard for some to actually initiate cutting, but they often do because they know the relief that will follow. For some self-harmers th…

Pathologies are not, in the general case, a rebuttal to an argument about behavior.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#34

Post by xenadu02 »

Lucent wrote: post #27

Few of the comments here seem to discuss his point. He asks if pleasure to pain is a continuum, why have pain at all? Instead of -1 to 1, with negative representing unpleasantness, human experience can instead span 0 to 2 and have the same reinforcement value with no sensation of displeasure. My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek…

There seems to be more to it than just that, or so the argument goes. The example of people wearing prosthetics to warn of damaging situations seemed relevant: they would disable the electric shock, do what they wanted, then re-enable it.

For pain to carry value it must represent the ground truth and can't be easily ignorable. That makes it carry a very large cost to override which is important since as the examples demonstrate the long-term consequences of an inability to feel pain can be quite severe.

I suppose that ties in to what you said: humans are way too bad a long-term thinking to properly evaluate consequences so we would end up burning ourselves or hacking off a limb to achieve a short-term reward. Or at least enough of us would be that our species would never have made it this far.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#35

Post by watwut »

WalterBright wrote: post #31
watwut wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't past gamblers more likely to relapse then non-gamblers to start? I think that my point here is that while enough pain is good job in making you stop temporally, it takes much more then that to stop forever.

That's characterized by the phrase "hitting rock bottom".

People who "hit rock bottom" do relapse. And when they relapse it all goes down really fast again. Rock bottom does not imply abstinence forever.

When I said "takes more" I meant that long term, possibly forever, work of changing habits, values, social environment to keep not playing.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#36

Post by meheleventyone »

Lucent wrote: post #27

Few of the comments here seem to discuss his point. He asks if pleasure to pain is a continuum, why have pain at all? Instead of -1 to 1, with negative representing unpleasantness, human experience can instead span 0 to 2 and have the same reinforcement value with no sensation of displeasure. My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek…

If you only ever experience 0 to 2 with a baseline of 1 then that's no different experientially than -1 to 1 with a baseline of 0. Since baseline is going to be the 'normal' experience it's going to be routine in both cases. Whereas they'd be confused talking to one another as the overlap of baselines is at the most positive and most negative positions versus one another.

Basically if we were to go through life only experiencing pleasure would less pleasure basically be pain if you had no capacity to feel or understand pain.

Plus the whole idea that pleasure and pain are a continuum seems overly simplistic.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#37

Post by donquichotte »

WalterBright wrote: post #32
donquichotte wrote: post #28

Quite interesting article. After graduating from a control-theory-heavy program, I have started thinking about animal movement as an optimization problem. A manipulator is moved into a desired position while minimizing the cost function of pain, in order to avoid damage to the body. That would fall in the "useful painful pain" category, I guess.

A lot of animal movement is about minimizing energy usage, not optimizing for minimal pain.

Sure, the cost-function can certainly be multi-dimensional.

Energy, pain, maybe even expected value of death (e.g., take energy-intensive and possibly painful evasive action from a predator) might be dimensions to take into consideration.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#38

Post by mettamage »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
ve55 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely took me quite a few lessons to have a good idea what I was doing there myself. Skin in the game is definitely important, and has become increasingly less common in society, to the detriment of many systems.

A big reason free markets work so well is it is an inherently "skin in the game" setup. This does a better job of weeding out irrational and unproductive behavior than any other system.

My teacher (organizational psychologist) was warning banks before the 2008 crisis about their bonus culture, precisely because they don’t have enough skin in the game.

Also, as an employee, I don’t have enough skin either. I could get fired, I might not be promoted. That’s a whole different level than that one could lose everything immediately as some entrepreneurs.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#39

Post by mwexler »

For another POV on pain perception and it’s role in driving decisions and behavior, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational book talks about his early experiences with immense physical pain and his research into the impact of pain perception. A great book in many ways, this part comes early and is a small part of the book, but puts a new perspective on some of our cognitive biases. If you haven’t read it yet, worth the time.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#40

Post by _v7gu »

dang wrote: post #7
forgotmyp77 wrote: post #2

i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.

Sorry for the offtopicness, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that woul…

The unholy trinity of upvotes/downvotes/karma creates some "echo chamberishness" (if I have to put it nicely) and pressure on posting as users tend to use the power to punish "wrongthink" instead of low effort posts. I think this behavior stems from that.

Having an option to relive the users of this pressure (like enabling a little anonymous posting, or adding distinctions between the downvote types) might incentivize them to drop this unwanted behavior.

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