Comment by m12k

I think a major takeaway here is that balancing a reward system to reward more than a single behavior is really hard - it's easy to tip the scales so one behavior completely dominates all others. It's an interesting lens to use to look at the heuristic reward system humans have built in (hunger, fear, desire, etc). This tends to have an adaptation/numbing effect, where repeated rewards of the same type tend to have diminishing returns, and that makes sense because it protects against "gaming the system" and going for one reward to the exclusion of all others.