The AI alignment paradigm is behaviorism with better PR

Tell me if I'm wrong, but the dominant method for making AI "aligned" smells a lot like a reinvention of a paradigm that developmental psychology spent the back half of the 20th century trying to abandon. RLHF, reduced to mechanism: model emits output, humans rate it, gradient updates reinforce high-rated outputs and suppress low-rated ones, iterate. This is operant conditioning. It is Skinner with a loss function. The AI industry calls it "alignment" and frames it as a solution to building systems that behave well, but the mechanism is stimulus-response shaping and nothing more.