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timtyler comments on If it looks like utility maximizer and quacks like utility maximizer... - Less Wrong
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Re: We will not find any utility maximization related outside selection process - so we are not maximizers when it comes to happiness, global well-being, ecological responsibility, and so on.
Is exhaustive search a "selection process"? What about random search?
These are certainly optimisation strategies - and if they are "selection processes" then are there any search strategies that are not selection processes? If not, then "selection process" has become a pretty meaningless term.
It's like saying that you can't find an optimum unless you perform a search for it - which is hardly much of an insight.
Search, or at least its results, is what selection works on. You could even think of evolution as a dual process with mutations as searches of possible genetic combinations followed by selection for survival and reproduction.
I strongly recommend Jonathan Baron's "Thinking and Deciding"; he conceptualizes all thinking, decision making, creativity as the dual process of searching and selection. It's a very interesting book. (I'm reading an older edition and am not yet finished, so I don't know how well he makes the case in total, or how he may have modified his ideas for later editions. But what I have read so far is fascinating.)
So... to return to my unanswered questions:
Is exhaustive search a "selection process"? What about random search?
If yes, is there any search strategy that is not a "selection process"? (If no, then what is it?) Otherwise, "selection process" is just a rather useless synonym for "search", and the cited thesis just says you can't find an optimum unless you actually look for it.
If no, that defeats the cited thesis - that optimisation only results from selection processes - since exhaustive search optimises functions fine.
It's a prediction -- an empirical claim, not a definition.
The post talks about "selection processes" without saying what that term actually means. If you think for a moment about what that term means, the claim seems likely to either be wrong, or trivially true.
I took "selection processes" to mean "natural selection".
That is probably not what it means. There are various definitions of selection - e.g. see Hull 1988 for one example:
Selection: 'a process in which the differential extinction and proliferation of interaction causes the differential perpetuation of the replicators that produced them'.