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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   3759 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 16, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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That’s an interesting study. There are other possibilities to human uniqueness, though: humans in a lab know that they are actually safe, and they know that the shock is removed when the food is accessed. An animal lacks the human knowledge of that the pain is transient and surpassable. So I wonder how transferable the experiment is from animal to human. Perhaps we would have to have an experiment where an animal sees another animal accessing the food and being okay. Otherwise the animal has no way of knowing that the pain is harmless and transient.

There are lots of mental disorders in humans where the pain surpasses the reward, like in anxiety disorders, OCD, and eating disorders; in these cases the subject has no actual belief in the transience of the pain, and so could literally starve to death from anorexia or hikkomori-ism before attempting a reward.

Some dogs definitely figure this out w.r.t. those wireless electric fence/shock collar thingies; basically in addition to shocking them as they approach the boundary wire, you need to also train them that the shock (+ audible cue) means they need to turn around and go back. Otherwise they just push past the boundary and enjoy their freedom.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that the whole thing kinda got forgotten due to the Iron Curtain, so I haven't heard about any attempts to replicate and further investigate it these days.

This stuff meshes very well with a lot of stuff when you begin to look at things from that angle. Consider for example this cute video of children subjected to the marshmallow test: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QX_oy9614HQ&t=16 . Forget about the controversy about whether it actually correlates with important life outcomes all that well, the interesting thing is that we can see how the children want to avoid eating the marshmallow, how they employ various external (to the mind) willpower aids like covering their mouth with their hands etc, and how we know that as adults we wouldn't need to.

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