And psychological literature is very clear on how you do this: you reward good behavior and you punish bad behavior. All life on Earth adapts to positive and negative reinforcement.

Psychological literature has made a variety of observations about behavior changes. It turns out that while positive and negative reinforcements do have effects behavior change is complex. More importantly external reinforcement can in certain cases reduce internal motivation.

Although I like the idea of "chess of life" it can very easily be problematic (primarily from a moral standpoint) to describe your broader human interactions, even everyday ones, as attempts to "affect the behavior of intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) agents."

Now, a lot of the moral objections that come to mind associated with this are stemming primarily from Sissela Bok's Lying to Children. In short, she writes specifically about paternalistic lies, she defines acting paternalistic as "to guide and even coerce people in order to protect them and serve their best interests, as a father might his children. He must keep them out of harm's way, by force if necessary." she goes on to write that the way in which this is done is through "paternalistic restraints" a few examples of this that she uses is, a child attempting to drink ammonia causing the parents to intervene, or similarly in many U.S. states another example would be the laws requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet. Of course, as I'm sure you're wondering what does this have to do with morals?

Well, towards the end of the fourth paragraph she touches on the thought that "deception may well have outranked force as a means of subjection [to paternalistic interests]" this seems to be easily applicable to a life organized in such a way that the primary goal is to affect the behavior of others for your own self interests. Although there is more to say on the morals associated with intentional duping or attempting to affect actions of others to further your own personal goals, even when done in good faith, you touch back on morals further into the article so we will come back to it.

Psychological reinforcement is usually talked about in psychological literature in the same way that Skinner described it, that is to describe it in terms of behavioral consequences. He defined reinforcement in Beyond Freedom & Dignity as a behavioral consequence that increases the probability that a response will be repeated in the future or more specifically, "When a bit of behavior is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer." I say all of this because presumably, the one exerting the authority and ability that come as a prerequisite to positive and negative reinforcement in Operant Conditioning does not view as equal the "agent" that which they are exerting these things over because, if that were the case then this form of conditioning (which works on the subconscious mind's reward system) would be not useful. You touch on this a bit with the admission that you don't "shape" people through these reinforcements since you don't consciously attempt a system of positive and negative reinforcements. Which, on a separate note, is a bit presumptuous since an act of shaping people would imply permanent or at the very least long standing changes to their character or behavior, which as we know, is only possible with Operant Conditioning if the system of rewards (or lack thereof) is repeated continuously through positive and negative reinforcement. Failure to continue with the reinforcement, results in extinction of the response to the stimulus. I say presumptuous because the chances not only that you would be able to just shape people to your liking on a whim but also that you would be able to keep that up consistently in a real life situation with multiple people, is in short very unlikely. That's also not accounting for the fact that you see the only thing preventing you from doing so is exerting a simple consequence/reward system, which is an extreme simplification when applying this to humans, especially given that you are an adult I'd imagine the human adults you would be attempting to use for these reasons are just as competent as you and would realize your end goal is only personal achievement.

All of that being said, however the bigger thing that I take issue with in this article as a whole, is primarily this odd language that perpetuates this idea that we/me/the rest of us/anyone who isn't you is just some tool waiting for you to use. Believe it or not, egocentric thinking has been around a long time and has so proven to be a very inefficient way to run a life, in any sense. Yes of course certain relationships can prove to benefit the overall quality of your life and may even be a stepping stone in it, but considering the way in which you described interpersonal relationships or rather the way in which you view your independent mindset as being separate from a regular human mindset, I'd imagine that being secretly manipulative in a social setting is not your strong suit (just as it isn't most people's).

"Shaping agents by reward is not bad, if you don’t do it for bad purposes. It’s not manipulative, within the standard meaning of the word."

I guess technically, on the surface "shaping agents by reward" is not "bad"? Depending on if you meant morally bad to which I would say - it isn't outside the realm of possibility that it could be. Or if you meant "not bad" to mean it isn't the worst thing you could ever do then yeah I guess you're mostly right. Although viewing "agents" as tools and stripping them of their humanity could be said to be morally, pretty bad. But I won't harp on that because for someone reason I get the feeling it's useless. However it most certainly is manipulative, especially within the "standard meaning" of the word, which for the record is here -"influencing or attempting to influence the behavior or emotions of others for one's own purposes."

"(Punishment is great at the level of populations – evolution doesn’t really reward populations, it just “prunes” them. But such pruning doesn’t do much good to the individual.)"

For starters, I would be very interested in the data you are formulating your opinions and theories off primarily because of the odd generalizations you seem to continue to make don't line up with any data or study with which I'm aware of...

One, punishment being "great" for populations seems very subjective, I know that seems like I'm nitpicking but It's only because you take that (again unsubstantiated) claim and use it as the basis for yet again another untrue statement that evolution prunes populations. Natural selection prunes populations for sure but the entire evolutionary process being oversimplified to "pruning" and then to further be degraded as not beneficial for an individual is just not true.

I would simply urge you to maybe start form scratch (because there are a few worthwhile points made here) and focus on looking at human advancement both on an international and interpersonal level with a different lens than you have been. Narcissistic and egotistic undertones don't go very far, and anything that which you have experienced on a small scale (using positive rewards in dog training), that you then feel can be immediately and generally applied to your entire life is usually a misstep, to say the very least.