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“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

gwern.net

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Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#41

Post by m3kw9 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #36
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…

Unless you remind yourself what -1 means. Is like how people have a house, and then they bitch about it because it doesn’t have enough garages(that’s like -1 1). But if they know about people renting basements. They can still become 0 2.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#42

Post by m3kw9 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #41
meheleventyone wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unless you remind yourself what -1 means. Is like how people have a house, and then they bitch about it because it doesn’t have enough garages(that’s like -1 1). But if they know about people renting basements. They can still become 0 2.

Is also what being grateful is all about, it can keep you happy even at bad times

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#43

Post by PaulStatezny »

_v7gu wrote: post #40
dang wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incentiviz…

100% agree. There is a very nonzero amount of "punishing wrongthink with downvotes" on HN. (Even if the post follows posting guidelines.)

As long as the community continues this kind of behavior, we'll have people spamming new accounts.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#44

Post by meheleventyone »

m3kw9 wrote: post #41
meheleventyone wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unless you remind yourself what -1 means. Is like how people have a house, and then they bitch about it because it doesn’t have enough garages(that’s like -1 1). But if they know about people renting basements. They can still become 0 2.

Right but those are different parameters.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#45

Post by DrLindemann »

I don't get his point. After all there is no need for a conscious introspection from evolutionary perspective - not even for pain. There is observable behaviour driven by events from the "outside" world. That all could easily be represented by a function of some input. No qualia needed. The truth behind this is that science has no grip on certain things. And these things are the central aspects of human experience. So all science can do is explaining consciousness "away". Like Dennet (among others) does. Magicans that distract and redirect the focus away from the matter. It could be just an epiphenomenon.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#46

Post by kbenson »

refurb wrote: post #23
kbenson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that's common nomenclature, but to me "selected" always feel like it implies intelligence in some manner. I've always preferred saying "the environmental factor caused evolution" in some manner or something similar. For example, if feels more natural to me to say "an obstacle in my path may cause me to go around it", compared to "an obstacle in my path selected for me to go around it". I think of evoluti…

I probably didn't do a good job explaining it, but using your obstacle analogy... When you say "an object in my path caused me to go around it", you're switching the cause and effect. A more accurate way to say it would be "an obstacle on the path meant that only a handful of the population can go around it". The change that allows you to go around the obstacle was not caused by the obstacle, it would have happened r…

> However, the change is only important if the obstacle is there - that's what drives evolution (selection).

I understand what's being said, it's the "selects" that triggers the problem for me.

I think of evolution as a system. Inputs cause the system to act in a certain way, but it's the system responding to the inputs, not the inputs choosing to get a specific output (which is what it sounds like to me to say A selects for B).

In the same way with orbital mechanics I wouldn't say a one object selected for a change in trajectory in the other. I would say one caused the change in the other, or more specifically, due to the how orbital mechanics work (the "system", the law of gravity), one object caused a change in the trajectory of the other.

So I guess my question is, why does evolution prefer the "selects" terminology? Is that common in any other sciences?

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#47

Post by sukilot »

xenadu02 wrote: post #33
emrehan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pathology is just personality when you use a -1 to 1 scale instead of a 0 to 1 scale.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#48

Post by dang »

PaulStatezny wrote: post #43
_v7gu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incentiviz…

100% agree. There is a very nonzero amount of "punishing wrongthink with downvotes" on HN. (Even if the post follows posting guidelines.) As long as the community continues this kind of behavior, we'll have people spamming new accounts.

Usually there's something else wrong with a downvoted comment besides just "wrongthink". Since people don't like being downvoted, or seeing something they agree with being downvoted, they tend to reach for "wrongthink" a little too readily as the explanation.

Certainly there are unfairly downvoted comments, but users tend to give those corrective upvotes after a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#49

Post by ChainOfFools »

dang wrote: post #48
PaulStatezny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. There is a very nonzero amount of "punishing wrongthink with downvotes" on HN. (Even if the post follows posting guidelines.) As long as the community continues this kind of behavior, we'll have people spamming new accounts.

Usually there's something else wrong with a downvoted comment besides just "wrongthink". Since people don't like being downvoted, or seeing something they agree with being downvoted, they tend to reach for "wrongthink" a little too readily as the explanation. Certainly there are unfairly downvoted comments, but users tend to give those corrective upvotes after a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&pre…

What are your thoughts on the meta-moderation system used by Slashdot? That seemed to curb a lot of common brigade abuse and is the one feature I miss most about other discussion systems.

Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”

#50

Post by gwern »

Reelin wrote: post #24
gwern wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nociception" is one of those words which assumes its conclusion, and is a kind of dormitive fallacy. "What is pain?" "Well, it is a behavioral response to a nociceptive stimuli..." Talking about nociception may be useful once you have already gone through all of the anomalies about pain and made a good case for distinguishing between the different parts and have an implicit taxonomy. But it's not useful for my essay…

I'm having trouble seeing it as fallacious and what (I think?) you're describing there doesn't seem to capture what I was taught nor the usage I'm accustomed to encountering in the literature. Rather I see it as splitting along an intuitive boundary - namely a whole host of low level biological responses (seriously there's a lot) versus higher level psychological (ie perceptive, conscious, whatever) phenomena. This s…

> My understanding is of nociception being a biological phenomenon that can be measured by proxy via behavior...At absolute minimum it seems weird to me to talk about an unconscious patient experiencing pain. Surely we benefit from being able to draw a distinction here?

It may be weird, but I think it's very valuable to have a taxonomy which lets you ask about kinds of pain which are not merely yoked to immediate verbalizable things. As you say, it is complex.

For example, if you thought 'unconscious pain' is a contradiction in terms, then what do you make of things like anesthesia awareness or the troubling long-term PTSD-like symptoms in some people who undergo anesthesia ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzj6WkudtrXQFqL8e/inverse-p-... )? That may be 'behavior' but they certainly are not classic indicators of pain. They are not like dipping a mouse's tail in hot water and observing its movement. They do, however, despite the lack of qualia, look like learning processes about avoiding damage.

And why do we apparently have consciously-perceived damage signals which can in fact motivate behavior (if the person chooses to) without the accompanying painful qualia, if nociception is merely behavioral effects? When Tanya decides to react to burning her hand on a stove by moving it away, is she really experiencing the exact same kind of nociception that you or I experience when we burn our hand on a stove and move it away? It's the same behavior, after all.

I'm sure you can extend 'nociception' as a word to cover some but not all of these cases, but by that point, nociception needs the entire essay as a preface just to explain what one means by that, which is why I don't use it. It is a pointer to an entire theoretical & empirical apparatus the reader does not have. Anyone who already knows all that doesn't need to read the pain section at all as it's obvious why pain in humans is an example of bi-level losses.

> Or perhaps it just helps scientists sleep at night after they throw a few hundred plates with thousands of C. elegans each into the autoclave?

I think it was Steven Pinker who said he stopped doing animal experiments when he could no longer convince himself that hitting mice on the head with tiny hammers to give them brain damage was not the most evil thing he did...

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