Endogenous Alignment Requires Dependence

My post on endogenous alignment got several excellent comments. Among them, one from Karl Krueger argued that imitation learning is more important for how humans align their children than reinforcement learning. Teasing out which is more important seems hard, but I agree I was wrong to ignore the importance of imitation, and arguably imitation learning is more fundamental for a reason explained by another comment. As Gunnar Zarncke helpfully pointed out , I had forgotten the most critical part of the endogenous alignment story in humans: it starts not with exogenous alignment, but with hologenous alignment of the child-parent system. As he points out, babies aren’t really separate beings from their parents, in that babies need to model themselves as part of the parent-child system, not as a child interacting with the parent. There’s no sense in which a 6-month-old can make it on their own without the help of an adult. They must learn to work the parent by, for example, crying, to get fed and cleaned, and not by understanding the parent as separate, but rather as another part of the whole that makes up their model of the world. This changes sometime between 12 and 24 months of age,