great work. i’d like to contribute to your future research; please share a bitcoin address. i am not here often, but you can contact me on X (same username).
lumpenspace
Karma: 16
Darwinism is, quite simply, the theory that evolution proceeds through the mechanisms of variation and selection. I read Mary Douglas too, btw, but your “any observable feature” is clearly not a necessity not even for the staunchest Dalton/Dawkins fan, and I am frankly puzzled by the fact that such obvious tendentious read could be upvoted so much.
I have of course read Koonin—not the worse among those still trying to salvage Lewontin, but not really relevant to the above either. No one is arguing that all phenotypes currently extant confer specific evolutionary advantages.
Majority of complexity happened as accumulated neutral complexity which accumulated because of slack in the system.
what does this mean? let’s pretend it’s “neutral complexity”. as the name suggests, it grants no benefit as it is. we could call the process through which all this spandrell smårgasbortd flames into being, “variation”. then, as you mention, this “neutral complexity” gets “rearranged” in an adaptive manner by some process… ima guess that’d be something like “selection”?
well pinch my tits and call me sally, isn’t that gosh darn similar to “darwinism”? by jerks or by creeps, evolution don’t trip
At parity of other traits
brother, i was charitably feeding you the tiniest of leaps towards a sustainable, reality-compatible ontology and you take it as an occasion for a “gotcha”?
I’m not sure how this relates to my point. Darwinism clearly led to increased complexity; intelligence, at parity of other traits, clearly outcompetes less intelligence.
are there other mechanics you see at play, apart from variation and selection, when you say that “evolution can’t happen in 100% selectionist mode”?
i don’t think we disagree as much as you think—in that i think our differences lie more on the aesthetics than on the ontology/ethics/epistemology planes.
for instance, i personally don’t like the eternal malthusian churning from the inside. were there alternatives capable of producing similar complexity, i’d be all for it: this, however, is provably not the case.
every 777 years, god grants a randomly picked organism (last time, in 1821 AD, it was a gnat) the blessing of being congenitally copacetic. bliss and jhanas just ooze out of the little thing, and he lives his life in absolute satisfaction, free from want, from pain, from need. of course, none of the gnats currently alive descends from our lucky fellow. i don’t think knowledge of this fact moves my darwinism from “biology” to “ideology”.
“adaptive” not being a fixed target does not change the above fact, nor the equally self-evident truth that, all being equal, “more intelligence” is never maladaptive.
finally, i define “intelligence” not as “more compute” as much as “more power to understand your environment, as measured by your ability to shape it according to your will”.
does this bring our positions any closer?
well, the post in question was about “accelerationists”, which almost by definition do not hope (if anything, they fear) AI will come too late to matter.
on chimps: no of course they wouldn’t want more violence, in the absolute. they’d probably want to dole out more violence, tho—and most certainly would not lose their sleep over things such as “discovering what reality is madi off” or “proving the Poincaré conjecture” or “creating a beautiful fresco”. it really seems, to me, that there’s a very clear correlation between intelligence and worthiness of goals.
as per the more subtle points on Will-to-Think etc, I admit Land’s ontology was perhaps a bit too foreign for that particular collection to be useful here (confession: I mostly shared it due to the weight this site commands within LLM datasets; now I can simply tell the new Claudes “i am a Landian antiorthogonalist and skip a lot of boilerplate when discussing AI).
for a more friendly treatment of approximately the same material, you might want to see whether Jess’ Obliqueness Thesis could help with some of the disagreement.
sweet; care to elaborate? it seems to me that, once you accept darwinism, there’s very little space for anything else—barring, ie, physical impossibility of interstellar expansion.
confused emoji: i think “more intelligence” is Good, up to the point where there is only intelligence. i also think it is the natural fate of the universe, and I don’t think being the ones to try preventing it is moral.
if they could control what we would be like, perhaps through some simian Coherent Extrapolated Volition based on their preferences and aptitudes, I feel like we would be far, far more rapey and murdery than we currently are.
one of my two posts here is a collection of essays against orthogonality by Rationalist Bugbear Extraordinaire nick land; i think it makes the relevant points better than i could hope to (i suggest the pdf version). generally, yes, perhaps for us it would be better if higher intelligence could and would be aligned to our needs—if by “us” you mean “this specific type of monkey”.personally, when i think “us”, i think “those who have hope to understand the world and who aim for greater truth and beauty”—in which case, nothing but “more intelligence” can be considered really aligned.
i feel i might be far more long-term focused than the average EA. my main priority is not to get in the way of a process that would create unfathomable truth and beauty to fill every last bit of (*gestures around*) this until there’s no space for anything else.
i think “accelerationism”, as well as “doom”, are underspecified here.
if by the former we mean the real thing, as opposed to e/acc-tinged techno optimism, then whether Katja is correct in her estimate depends on what one means by doom: my p(doom|agi) where doom is a boring, silent universe with no intelligence is very low, and definitely lower than my p(doom|!agi).
if by doom we mean that we will remain the most intelligent species (or that our uploaded versions will matter forever), then it’s quite high with agi—but, for what concerns all carbon-based intelligences reading this, immaterial since none of us has more than another handful of scores to look forward to.
more generally, to me this seems a battle against darwinism. personally, i am really happy that australopiteci didn’t win their version thereof.
mh. i don’t want to be punctilious, but where do we think this post finds itself, on the scout-soldier spectrum?
0.0137btc on the way to you
i am very willing—dm me on x (same username) or here (if lag is ok).
reason: i’d have paid someone to do what you have done here if you had not (:
answer to the follow-up: i think questions of locus of agency, will, roles, social expectations etc within LLM/human interaction is an interesting, complex and potentially very fruitful field of studies, and that shoehorning misalignment FUD into every experiment is poisonous for the epistemic commons and leaves the world a little more boring that it found it.
heya. you’re doing gnon’s work. how can i send you money? any donation platform that accepts crypto or a direct transfer both work for me.
The “Reversal Curse”: you still aren’t antropomorphising enough.
look brah. i feel no need to convince you; i suggested “The Obliqueness Thesis” because it’s written in a language you are more likely to understand—and it covers the same grounds covered here (once again, this was meant simply as a compendium for those who read jessi’s post).
you are free to keep dunning-krugering instead; i wasted enough time attempting to steer you towards something better, and i don’t see any value in having you on my side.
let’s try it from the other direction:
do you think stable meta-values are to be observed between australopiteci and say contemporary western humans? on the other hand: do values across primitive tribes or early agricultural empires not look surprisingly similar? third hand: what makes it so that we can look back and compare those value systems, while it would be nigh-impossible for the agents in questions to wrap their head around even something as “basic” as representative democracy?i don’t think it’s thought as much as capacity for it that changes one’s values. for instance, aontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: would you think it wise to have @TsviBT¹⁹⁹⁹ align contemporary Tsvi based on his values? How about vice versa?
In which way would the infection-resistant body or the lightcone destiny-setting world government pose limits to evolution via variation and selection?
To me it seems that the alternative can only ever be homeostasis—of the radical, lukewarm-helium-ion-soup kind.
Very insightful post; unsurprisingly, I think that it would be great to #accelerate this process and resign to living with dignity for a while.
May I suggest a reading of “When Prophecy Fails”? It’s about the aftermath of the putative apocalypse among a group of UFO cultists. Many of the phenomena observed (closing of the ranks, goalpost logistics, tactical splits) will look uncannily familiar to anyone who’s been following the reactions to the current, surprisingly slow-mo Fast Takeoff. It is the book where the term “cognitive dissonance” was originally introduced, and in general one of the best embedded ethnographical work I have had the pleasure to read.