Note I made a comment about the vast majority of species. There’s a conference devoted to such competition precisely because they are the exception not the rule.
Alright, but that’s an argument that elephants are less likely to reach HLI, as there’s less selection pressure for pattern-matching / swiftness of thought.
Speed of thought isn’t necessarily related to overall intelligence. Note that elephants are one of the smarter species even though they aren’t subject to much of the specific selection pressure that makes humans overactive pattern seekers.
There are three factors in play: ability to know your motives, ability to lie convincingly, and ability to detect sincerity. The easiest one to drop is the ability to know your motives- when people promise to always be faithful, for example, they typically mean it, even though, beneath their consciousness, they don’t.
I don’t see why knowing your motives is easier to drop than the ability to lie convincingly. That may be the general solution for most humans but that doesn’t mean it is the easiest. Indeed, arguably one of the major features of psychopaths is that they are in some ways people who don’t have the motivation confusion but are able to lie well.
It seems to me from this conversation that our views are not as far apart as they initially seemed, and in so far as they disagree, you seem to have made good points about the presence of sexual selection being likely to have certain results. It seems that remaining disagreement is to a large extent based on background intuitions and vague words like the difference between “unlikely” and “very unlikely”. So, unless one or both of us tries to be a lot more precise, or unless we encounter some non-human evolved HLIs, it isn’t obvious to me what to say at this point. You’ve caused me to update my estimate for how close I should expect evolved HLIs to mentally resemble humans in the direction of expecting them to be more similar but I’m not sure how much I should update in that direction.
Note I made a comment about the vast majority of species. There’s a conference devoted to such competition precisely because they are the exception not the rule.
Speed of thought isn’t necessarily related to overall intelligence. Note that elephants are one of the smarter species even though they aren’t subject to much of the specific selection pressure that makes humans overactive pattern seekers.
I don’t see why knowing your motives is easier to drop than the ability to lie convincingly. That may be the general solution for most humans but that doesn’t mean it is the easiest. Indeed, arguably one of the major features of psychopaths is that they are in some ways people who don’t have the motivation confusion but are able to lie well.
It seems to me from this conversation that our views are not as far apart as they initially seemed, and in so far as they disagree, you seem to have made good points about the presence of sexual selection being likely to have certain results. It seems that remaining disagreement is to a large extent based on background intuitions and vague words like the difference between “unlikely” and “very unlikely”. So, unless one or both of us tries to be a lot more precise, or unless we encounter some non-human evolved HLIs, it isn’t obvious to me what to say at this point. You’ve caused me to update my estimate for how close I should expect evolved HLIs to mentally resemble humans in the direction of expecting them to be more similar but I’m not sure how much I should update in that direction.