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Personality Basins

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cproctor ◴[] No.42204330[source]
I agree that it can be helpful to think of identity as a trajectory shaped by interactions along the way. However, we also continually shape our environments in large and small ways. TFA ignores this completely. Can this be effectively modeled in RL?

Over 130 years ago, Dewey [1] criticized the model of psychology which looked at human behavior in terms of stimulus -> internal processing -> response. Stimuli don't just come to us; we seek them out and modify the world around us to cause them to occur. Dewey and other pragmatists proposed reframing stimulus/response in terms of "acts" or "habits," or changes to the unified agent+environment. Popper was getting at the same entanglement of agent and environment in "Three Worlds" and Simon in "The sciences of the artificial."

I see RL as an elaboration of the stimulus/response paradigm: the agent is discrete from the environment. Does RL work well in an environment like Minecraft, where the real game is modifying the relationship between actions and future states? What about in contexts like Twitter, where you're also modifying the value function (e.g. by cultivating audiences or by participating in a thread in a way which conditions the value function of future responses)?

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#ReflArcDeweRecoPsy...

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1. jonnycomputer ◴[] No.42204430[source]
I agree that the discussion in the blog post is incomplete because it does not consider that we shape the environments that shape us, though it does briefly touch on the fact that other RL agents (people) try to shape us, and we them. But it is certainly more than that.