Emile comments on Rationality quotes: April 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: wnoise 01 April 2010 08:41PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (307)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Emile 06 April 2010 09:55:42AM 4 points [-]

I would say that Gall's Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar's Number), or is something like "there's a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work", with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.

(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature - she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)

Comment author: gregconen 06 April 2010 06:38:42PM *  1 point [-]

That's not my point. My point is that Gall's law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.

Edit: Not to say that Gall's Law can't be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.