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Galap comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
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"Your perception of the 'quality' of works of art and litterature is only your guess of it's creator's social status. There is no other difference between Shakespeare and Harry Potter fanfic - without the status cues, you wouldn't enjoy one more than the other."
Am I the only one who thinks that there's some kernel of truth in this? that many people's perception of 'quality' is very strongly influenced by the perceived social status of the creator?
There is "some" kernel of truth in everything. There's a large distance between "only your guess" and "no other difference" on the one hand, and "many people's perception" and "very strongly influenced" on the other.
Besides which, status cannot be the whole explanation of status.
Well, EDSC could be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Ecological_dominance-social_competition_model
Was EDSC discussed on LW before?
It's been mentioned here, and also appears in HPMOR. In fact, the idea seems to be taken for granted as part of the LW memeplex.
I don't know if there's any evidence for it.
I think I see more people believing in the "social brain" hypothesis than the EDSC hypothesis; the overly simplistic version of EDSC seems to be "brains help you build tools, and tools help you reproduce" which most LWers don't agree with, since tools seem easy to copy and we don't see much tool innovation until after humans developed modern-ish levels of intelligence. The overly simplistic version of the "social brain" hypothesis is "brains help you manage alliances and social challenges in a larger group, and larger groups help you tackle harder ecological problems," which does seem to agree with what we think the early human environment looks like.
I took these to be the same thing. From the section of the Wikipedia article cited:
The question I have is whether intelligence foomed because it's useful for everything, or primarily because it's useful for social skills ("competition for dominance").
Ah, I think I misread the "to" as "for," but the second paragraph makes clear that my initial impression wasn't the intended one.
So, the more selection pressure, the better--so I think the fact that intelligence is useful for everything can only help. But is social skills enough to cause a foom by itself? It seems possible.
I think that for the specific case of Harry Potter Fanfic, this hypothesis has been disproved by [Yudkowsky, 2010].
Though for "many people's perception of 'quality'", there's probably some truth there.