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xamdam comments on The Curve of Capability - Less Wrong
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And hardware overhang (faster computers developed before general cognitive algorithms, first AGI taking over all the supercomputers on the Internet) and fast infrastructure (molecular nanotechnology) and many other inconvenient ideas.
Also if you strip away the talk about "imbalance" what it works out to is that there's a self-contained functioning creature, the chimpanzee, and natural selection burps into it a percentage more complexity and quadruple the computing power, and it makes a huge jump in capability. Nothing is offered to support the assertion that this is the only such jump which exists, except the bare assertion itself. Chimpanzees were not "lopsided", they were complete packages designed for an environment; it turned out there were things that could be done which created a huge increase in optimization power (calling this "symbolic processing" assumes a particular theory of mind, and I think it is mistaken) and perhaps there are yet more things like that, such as, oh, say, self-modification of code.
Interesting. Can you elaborate or link to something?
I'm not Eliezer, but will try to guess what he'd have answered. The awesome powers of your mind only feel like they're about "symbols", because symbols are available to the surface layer of your mind, while most of the real (difficult) processing is hidden. Relevant posts: Detached Lever Fallacy, Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles.
Thanks.
The posts (at least the second one) seem to point that symbolic reasoning is overstated and at least some reasoning is clearly non-symbolic (e.g. visual).
In this context the question is whether the symbolic processing (there is definitely some - math, for example) gave pre-humans the boost that allowed the huge increase in computing power, so I am not seeing the contradiction.
Speech is a kind of symbolic processing, and is probably an important capability in mankind's intellectual evolution, even if symbolic processing for the purpose of reasoning (as in syllogisms and such) is an ineffectual modern invention.
Susan Blackmore argues that what originally caused the "huge increase in optimization power" was memes - not symbolic processing - which probably started up a bit later than the human cranium's expansion did.