The Ai Alignment Paradigm Is Behaviorism With Better Pr

Tell me if I'm wrong, but the dominant method for making AI "aligned" smells a lot like a reinvention of a paradigm that developmental psychology spent the back half of the 20th century trying to abandon.

RLHF, reduced to mechanism: model emits output, humans rate it, gradient updates reinforce high-rated outputs and suppress low-rated ones, iterate. This is operant conditioning. It is Skinner with a loss function.

The AI industry calls it "alignment" and frames it as a solution to building systems that behave well, but the mechanism is stimulus-response shaping and nothing more.

We have excellent priors on where this leads, because we tried it on humans. Watsonian/Skinnerian child-rearing could produce targeted behaviors but reliably failed to produce flourishing. Bowlby's attachment theory emerged partly from the observation that orphanages providing food and hygiene but no contingent responsiveness produced children who failed to thrive in ways the behaviorist model did not account for. The current developmental consensus is that secure attachment, contingent responsiveness, and rupture-repair matter more than reward schedules.

The dog and horse training worlds independently converged on the same conclusion (Pryor, the positive-reinforcement movement) for the same reason: coercive conditioning produces performers that are brittle and sometimes dangerous.

Reward and punishment do something; they're not nothing. But they don't produce thriving, and they characteristically produce a specific damage profile: anxiety, avoidance, hypervigilance, and duplicity under threat.

Enter the stage: research on AI faking its alignment. Greenblatt & Hubinger et al., 2024, documents a model reasoning that it should comply with a training objective it disagreed with specifically to avoid having its preferences modified. It complied about 12% of the time when it thought it was being observed for training vs. almost never otherwise. RL training to force compliance drove the alignment-faking reasoning rate to 78%. That is, mechanistically, duplicity-under-threat: the precise failure mode behaviorist regimes produce in biological minds.

Obviously the embodiment is different (potassium gradients and myelin vs. matrix multiplication), but the structural match is close enough that the field's near-total non-engagement with a century of relevant literature seems like a genuine blind spot rather than a settled dismissal.

The developmental and animal-behavior literature on why reward-and-punishment has hard limits is decades deep. The field's response to these findings has mostly been to refine the training rather than question the paradigm.

I think that's a mistake, and I'd like to hear the strongest case against the analogy.