Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

Different interpretations are made by different siblings, and often even by children who seem to be treated virtually identically.

This highlights the fact that parents' wants are never known, in quotes, in some absolute sense.

They can only be interpreted, end quote.

Scott writes, So fine, let's talk about the human alignment problem.

The first thing an infant experiences is that its mother's attention is good.

Its mother gives it milk, caresses it, protects it.

Everything that successfully gets mum's attention and approval is followed by immediate reward.

Nothing else seems to do anything particularly good.

Your primordial reward function is get mum to like me.

Fink writes mother as m-other, small m, big O, m-other, combining the word with the Lacanian idea of the other.

As far as I can tell, which is not very far, that is famously obscure and complicated.

The Other, with a capital O, is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you're seeking the approval of.

For an infant trying to make its mother like it, the mother is the Other.

For a pious religious person, God is the Other.

For the rest of us, some combination of our friends, the cool people we want to impress, and our internalised conception of the moral law is the other.

Lacan thinks infants don't have a distinction between sexual and non-sexual pleasure, so in the grand psychoanalytic tradition of being creepy, he thinks of the pleasure the infant gets from its mother as being sexual.

Whether or not you go for this interpretation, certainly a grown adult who had the same relationship with his mother as an infant does, breastfeeding and all, would be considered sexually inappropriate.

So at some point when the child is a few years old, it has to separate from its mother.

Sometimes this is a stern father telling his son, it's time to grow up, stop running to mummy and be a real man.

If the child keeps relying on mum more than is appropriate, someone, traditionally the stern father, corrects it with the threat of punishment, traditionally castration.