This post starts as a discussion of babies enjoying simple repetitive games and observes that for babies this is how they learn a skill. It then suggests that we should apply the same frame to understand adults who engage in seemingly maladaptive social behaviors, such as repetitive arguments, romantic drama, and being shocking to get attention. Finally, it gives several ideas of what might being happening in very abstract terms, in the language of machine learning. It fails to connect any of these abstract, machine-learning-type explanations to any of the examples of adult maladaptive behavior, or to consider ways in which human brains don’t work like machine learning algorithms. Overall, the first half might work in a volume on children/parenting, the second half should be labeled as “epistemic status: speculative” and is probably not worth including.
This post starts as a discussion of babies enjoying simple repetitive games and observes that for babies this is how they learn a skill. It then suggests that we should apply the same frame to understand adults who engage in seemingly maladaptive social behaviors, such as repetitive arguments, romantic drama, and being shocking to get attention. Finally, it gives several ideas of what might being happening in very abstract terms, in the language of machine learning. It fails to connect any of these abstract, machine-learning-type explanations to any of the examples of adult maladaptive behavior, or to consider ways in which human brains don’t work like machine learning algorithms. Overall, the first half might work in a volume on children/parenting, the second half should be labeled as “epistemic status: speculative” and is probably not worth including.