https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5QmtqBt6GDM8hYkAr/training-my-friend-to-cook
You know a post is questionable when even the LessWrong comment section has concerns.
My goal for covid lockdown was to train Brittany to cook.
OK…and what did Brittany want?
It was summer. […] After each picnic I’d send the leftovers home with her in lovely glass jars. This associated “homemade food” with sunshine, verdant trees, picnic tables and quality time with good friends.
Have already established the “homemade food” = “warm verdant picturesque parks” association, we moved our hangouts to her apartment. […] Though I always provided Brittany with leftovers, I also made sure that they never lasted more than a few days. Brittany would eat delicious food for a few days and then she’d be back to her TV dinners.
I keep forgetting Brittany is a person (as a matter of fact, a 20-something medical school student!) rather than a literal lab rat. Jesus.
One day Brittany ordered a box of meal kits. I gently, but stubbornly, refused to help her with them.
Wow, so she’s making baby steps towards cooking! Great. Imagine shutting those down because they aren’t what you think she should want.
I worried that I had conditioned Brittany to cook solely when I came over.
Blechhhhh
The second most important protocol I used was backchaining. I didn’t start by bringing Brittany to the store, then teach her to cook and have her eat at the end. I started by feeding her, then I taught her to cook and only at the end did I bring her to the grocery store. [my emphasis] If I started by bringing her to the grocery store then she wouldn’t understand why we were buying what we were buying. But when I started by serving her food in a park all she had to understand is “eat delicious food”. At every point in the process, Brittany understood exactly how the thing she was doing connected to “eating delicious food on a summer day under green trees”.
She wouldn’t understand? Really?
this is disgusting and I hope their friend reads this article and ejects them from their life
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It sautées the bok choy in the pan it does this whenever it’s told.
Narrator: And then winter came, and Brittany ate nothing but canned soup and untoasted Pop-Tarts.
Rational PUA?
Wait, what’s wrong with sauteing asparagus?
Rationalists making roundabout excuses for why they suck at communicating.
What kind of a pea brain thinks that medical students don’t understand what grocery stores are for?
Sadly common and exhausting. One of my abusers bragged to me over dinner at one point that he would train my then-metamour (a freshman in college at the time) to not experience disordered eating any more. Through sex. He insisted he could literally cure her ED with his dick.
Galaxy brain operant conditioning strikes again, and meanwhile LW is all like “aw it’s so kind of you to train this high agency med student!”
Ugh disgusting. Also not reinforcing baby steps toward a behavior is idiotic. What he’s trying to do is called “shaping” when used with people, and the protocol is to REWARD baby steps toward the goal. So he didn’t even correctly complete a (very well established) behavioral psychology protocol. Moron.
Ickier when you remember that child grooming is a thing.
If Patrick Bateman had a blog.