Hi, LessWrong.
There isn’t too much to say about me. I’m a Kiwi 16 year old high school student who’s been interested in a lot of the topics discussed here for a long time. I stumbled across HPMoR a few months ago. After reading through that, I came here and now I’ve read through pretty much all of the sequences. I’m definitely getting better at decision making and evaluating information, but I don’t think I’m at the same level as most of you just yet.
I’m going to be busy for the next couple of months with exams, and then a trip to Ecuador, but hopefully when I get back I’ll be able to take part in the community properly. I have a bad habit of being unnecessarily shy, even online, with people I have respect for. I’m going to try to change that this time. It should be easier than it has been in the past, because I have a lot of questions to ask, and sometimes even ideas to add to the conversation.
Cheers.
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they’ll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.
Personally, I can see where he’s coming from, though I can’t say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.
This is my time posting here, so I’m probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.