An Argument Against Positive Feedback

2024-07-17

The title of this post is not to imply that positive feedback is useless. Positive feedback can be useful in a couple of ways.

Morale

Sometimes the one thing that you need to muster the willpower to keep going is validation from someone else. Similar to a drug, it's best to be experienced only when necessary lest you become dependent on it for normal function. Practically, you don't always know when a person needs validation and it isn't as addictive as any drug, so a little here and there is healthy.

Building perspective

If the goal of the positive feeback is to align the recipient's perspective of "good" with your own, then it can be a way to get there. But, ideally, you don't want the recipient to rely on you to tell them what is good. Eventually you want them to be able to figure it out by themselves, and that's where consistent postitive feedback can break down.

An Alternative Strategy

As an alternative, if you don't give positive feedback and only give negative feedback, you stray the recipient away from things you don't like, while training them to figure out what is good by themselves. This not only get them closer to what you deem as good, it also opens the possibility of them presenting you with something that you had not previously thought of, but now you know is good.

Obviously, it could be argued that now the recipient relies on you to tell them what is bad, which is true. But at its core, this prioritizes being surprised by good things rather than being surprised by bad things, which I would prefer. The limited factor is now the bad stuff instead of the good stuff. The recipient is incentivized to explore the good instead of the bad.

In a way, this situation can be boiled down to a special case of "if you teach a man to fish..." and that, as a rule of thumb, if your goal is progress, then it's best to teach someone how to think and not what to think.