Ford comments on The Least Convenient Possible World - Less Wrong

165 Post author: Yvain 14 March 2009 02:11AM

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Comment author: Ford 19 May 2016 04:46:44PM 1 point [-]

I tend to agree, but it depends on how something was tested. In "Darwinian Agriculture", I argue that testing by ability to persist is weaker than testing by competition against alternatives. Trees compete against each other, but forests don't. Societies often compete and their moral systems probably affect competitive success, but things are complicated by migration between societies, population growth (moral systems that work for bands of relatives may not work as well for modern nations), technological change (cooking pork), etc.