Given that we’re sentient products of evolution, shouldn’t we expect a lot of variation in our thinking?
Finding solutions to real world problems often involve searching through a space of possibilities that is too big and too complex to search systematically and exhaustively. Evolution optimizes searches in this context by using a random search with many trials: inherent variation among zillions of modular components. I hypothesize that we individually think in non-rational ways so that as a population we search through state space for solutions in a more random way.
Observing the world for 32-odd years, it appears to me that each human being is randomly imprinted with a way of thinking and a set of ideas to obsess about. (Einstein had a cluster of ideas that were extremely useful for 20th century physics, most people’s obsessions aren’t historically significant.)
I hypothesize that we individually think in non-rational ways so that as a population we search through state space for solutions in a more random way.
Is it necessarily? Consider a population dominated by individuals with an allele for thinking in a uniform fashion. Then insert individuals who will come up with original ideas. A lot of the original ideas are going to be false, but some of them might hit the right spot and confer an advantage. It’s a risky, high variance strategy—the bearers of the originality alleles might not end up as the majority, but might not be selected out of the population either.
Sure, you can resurrect it as a high-variance high-expected-value individual strategy with polymorphism maintained by frequency-dependent selection… but then there’s still no reason to expect original thinking to be less rational thinking. And the original hypothesis was indeed group selection, so byrnema loses the right to talk about evolutionary psychology for one month or something. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Group_selection
It seems to be extremely popular among a certain sort of amateur evolutionary theorist, though—there’s a certain sort of person who, if they don’t know about the incredible mathematical difficulty, will find it very satisfying to speculate about adaptations for the good of the group.
That’s me. I don’t know anything about evolutionary biology—I’m not even an amateur. Group selection sounded quite reasonable to me, and now I know that it isn’t borne by observation or the math. I can’t jump into evolutionary arguments; moratorium accepted.
“As a result many are beginning to recognize that group selection, or more appropriately multilevel selection, is potentially an important force in evolution.”
I’m no evo-bio expert, but it seems like you could make it work as something of a kin selection strategy too. If you don’t think exactly like your family, then when your family does something collaborative, the odds that one of you has the right idea is higher. Families do often work together on tasks; the more the family that thinks differently succeeds, the better they and their think-about-random-nonconforming-things genes do. Or does assuming that families will often collaborate and postulating mechanisms to make that go well count as a group selection hypothesis?
Anecdotally, it seems to me that across tribes and families, people are less likely to try to occupy a niche that already looks filled. (Which of course would be a matter of individual advantage, not tribal advantage!) Some of the people around me may have failed to enter their area of greatest comparative advantage, because even though they were smarter than average, I looked smarter.
Example anecdote: A close childhood friend who wanted to be a lawyer was told by his parents that he might not be smart enough because “he’s not Eliezer Yudkowsky”. I heard this, hooted, and told my friend to tell his parents that I said he was plenty smart enough. He became a lawyer.
They search in the same way because random sampling via variability is an effective way to search. However, humans could perform effective searches by variation at the individual or population level (for example, a sentient creature could model all different kinds of thought to think of different solutions) but I was arguing for the variation at the population level.
Variability at the population level is explained by the fact that we are products of evolution.
Of course, human searches are effective as a result of both kinds of variation.
Not that any of this was thought out before your question… This the usual networked-thought-reasoning verses linear-written-argument mapping problem.
random sampling via variability is an effective way to search
No it’s not. It is one of the few search methods that are simple enough to understand without reading an AI textbook, so a lot of nontechnical people know about it and praise it and assign too much credit to it. And there are even a few problem classes where it works well, though what makes a problem this “easy” is hard to understand without reading an AI textbook. But no, it’s not a very impressive kind of search.
Heh, I came to a similar thought walking home after asking the question… that it seems at least plausible the only kinda powerful optimization processes that are simple enough to pop up randomlyish are the ones that do random sampling via variability.
I’m not sure it makes sense that variability at the population level is much explained by coming from evolution, though. Seems to me, as a bound, we just don’t have enough points in the search space to be worth it even with 6b minds, and especially not down at the population levels during most of evolution. Then there’s the whole difficulty with group selection, of course. My intuition says no… yours says yes though?
Given that we’re sentient products of evolution, shouldn’t we expect a lot of variation in our thinking?
Finding solutions to real world problems often involve searching through a space of possibilities that is too big and too complex to search systematically and exhaustively. Evolution optimizes searches in this context by using a random search with many trials: inherent variation among zillions of modular components. I hypothesize that we individually think in non-rational ways so that as a population we search through state space for solutions in a more random way.
Observing the world for 32-odd years, it appears to me that each human being is randomly imprinted with a way of thinking and a set of ideas to obsess about. (Einstein had a cluster of ideas that were extremely useful for 20th century physics, most people’s obsessions aren’t historically significant.)
That’s a group selection argument.
GAME OVER
Is it necessarily? Consider a population dominated by individuals with an allele for thinking in a uniform fashion. Then insert individuals who will come up with original ideas. A lot of the original ideas are going to be false, but some of them might hit the right spot and confer an advantage. It’s a risky, high variance strategy—the bearers of the originality alleles might not end up as the majority, but might not be selected out of the population either.
Sure, you can resurrect it as a high-variance high-expected-value individual strategy with polymorphism maintained by frequency-dependent selection… but then there’s still no reason to expect original thinking to be less rational thinking. And the original hypothesis was indeed group selection, so byrnema loses the right to talk about evolutionary psychology for one month or something. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Group_selection
That’s me. I don’t know anything about evolutionary biology—I’m not even an amateur. Group selection sounded quite reasonable to me, and now I know that it isn’t borne by observation or the math. I can’t jump into evolutionary arguments; moratorium accepted.
See:
“As a result many are beginning to recognize that group selection, or more appropriately multilevel selection, is potentially an important force in evolution.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
I’m no evo-bio expert, but it seems like you could make it work as something of a kin selection strategy too. If you don’t think exactly like your family, then when your family does something collaborative, the odds that one of you has the right idea is higher. Families do often work together on tasks; the more the family that thinks differently succeeds, the better they and their think-about-random-nonconforming-things genes do. Or does assuming that families will often collaborate and postulating mechanisms to make that go well count as a group selection hypothesis?
Anecdotally, it seems to me that across tribes and families, people are less likely to try to occupy a niche that already looks filled. (Which of course would be a matter of individual advantage, not tribal advantage!) Some of the people around me may have failed to enter their area of greatest comparative advantage, because even though they were smarter than average, I looked smarter.
Example anecdote: A close childhood friend who wanted to be a lawyer was told by his parents that he might not be smart enough because “he’s not Eliezer Yudkowsky”. I heard this, hooted, and told my friend to tell his parents that I said he was plenty smart enough. He became a lawyer.
THAT had a tragic ending!
Why would evolution’s search results tend to search in the same way evolution searches?
They search in the same way because random sampling via variability is an effective way to search. However, humans could perform effective searches by variation at the individual or population level (for example, a sentient creature could model all different kinds of thought to think of different solutions) but I was arguing for the variation at the population level.
Variability at the population level is explained by the fact that we are products of evolution.
Of course, human searches are effective as a result of both kinds of variation.
Not that any of this was thought out before your question… This the usual networked-thought-reasoning verses linear-written-argument mapping problem.
No it’s not. It is one of the few search methods that are simple enough to understand without reading an AI textbook, so a lot of nontechnical people know about it and praise it and assign too much credit to it. And there are even a few problem classes where it works well, though what makes a problem this “easy” is hard to understand without reading an AI textbook. But no, it’s not a very impressive kind of search.
Heh, I came to a similar thought walking home after asking the question… that it seems at least plausible the only kinda powerful optimization processes that are simple enough to pop up randomlyish are the ones that do random sampling via variability.
I’m not sure it makes sense that variability at the population level is much explained by coming from evolution, though. Seems to me, as a bound, we just don’t have enough points in the search space to be worth it even with 6b minds, and especially not down at the population levels during most of evolution. Then there’s the whole difficulty with group selection, of course. My intuition says no… yours says yes though?