= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on Towards a New Decision Theory - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (142)
Woah, it took me a long time to parse "Smart Losers". The technical parts of the article seem to be correct, but as for its evolutional relevance... In your scenario, being smart doesn't hurt you, being known to be smart does; so it's most advantageous to be "secretly smart". So if your conclusions were correct, we'd probably see many adaptations aimed at concealing our intelligence from people we interact with.
Not if the cost of concealing intelligence was too high. Our ancestors lived in tribes with a lot of gossip. Trying to conceal intelligence would have entailed pretending to be dumb at virtually all times, which implies giving up most of the benefits of being intelligent.
There would still be benefits if your model is at all accurate and there are 'secret rounds' in ordinary human life. Just pretend to be stupid in public and then be smart in private rounds. To frustrate this, one would need to assume that the additional smartness costs too much. (It is so expensive that it outweighs the gains, or the gains are minimal so any cost outweighs them.)
It seems reasonable to me that there are private rounds in real life and that smartness is a net win.