You mean, if I’m a guy in Pleistocene Africa, then why it instrumentally useful for other people to have positive feelings about me? Yeah, basically what you said; I’m regularly interacting with these people, and if they have positive feelings about me, they’ll generally want me to be around, and to stick around, and also they’ll tend to buy into my decisions and plans, etc.
this might not be easily learned by a behaviorist reward function
I’m not sure what the word “behaviorist” is doing there; I would just say: “This won’t happen quickly, and indeed might not happen at all, unless it’s directly in the reward function. If it’s present only indirectly (via means-end planning, or RL back-chaining, etc.), that’s not as effective.”
I think “the reward function is incentivizing (blah) directly versus indirectly” is (again) an orthogonal axis from “the reward function is behaviorist vs non-behaviorist”.
You mean, if I’m a guy in Pleistocene Africa, then why it instrumentally useful for other people to have positive feelings about me? Yeah, basically what you said; I’m regularly interacting with these people, and if they have positive feelings about me, they’ll generally want me to be around, and to stick around, and also they’ll tend to buy into my decisions and plans, etc.
Also, Approval Reward also leads to norm-following, which is also probably adaptive for me, because probably many of those social norms exist for good and non-obvious reason, cf. Heinrich.
I’m not sure what the word “behaviorist” is doing there; I would just say: “This won’t happen quickly, and indeed might not happen at all, unless it’s directly in the reward function. If it’s present only indirectly (via means-end planning, or RL back-chaining, etc.), that’s not as effective.”
I think “the reward function is incentivizing (blah) directly versus indirectly” is (again) an orthogonal axis from “the reward function is behaviorist vs non-behaviorist”.