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Warrigal comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong
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Comments (105)
I'm curious: if instead of moving to Pluto, these people simply bred with each other, what would result?
There might be genes for intelligence, but I'm extremely skeptical that there are genes for LW-style rationality. Teaching each other, on the other hand, might work.
From personal experience, there seems to be a large variance in rationality even after conditioning on intelligence for those that have never had any 'formal' rationality training.
I'm not sure where exactly this comes from, but it would not surprise me if there was a large genetic component.
Given that people can be genetically predisposed to such emergent things as hating homosexuality (how would you make a neural net do that?), it doesn't seem far-fetched that this sort of thing is inheritable. Of course, I don't think homosexuality-hating evolved over mere centuries, nor do I know of statistically significant evidence that LW-style rationality has been inherited.
It seems pretty easy to me. Wire a man up with the following instinctual responses:
It's not too far from there to an outright hatred of homosexuality, if you don't think too hard about it and you don't have the rational defenses to make this a non-issue. This is one of the benefits of rationalism, by the way: defense against miscellaneous harmful bullshit.
How easy is it to make a neural net recognize "woman" and "man"?
I don't know, but since there obviously is a way that our brains distinguish between men and women and assign sexual attraction based on that distinction, I don't know that the mechanism is relevant to this discussion unless you're really into writing image classification algorithms.
What I'm saying here is that I tend to treat a lot of complex brain functions, like image recognition or motor control, as primitives that we get for free from nature. This seems to be the only way to make a cache-lookup-based brain work in practice.