Kaj_Sotala comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong

23 Post author: lukeprog 04 August 2011 05:00AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 05 August 2011 07:47:00AM 6 points [-]

When I first read the post, I thought you were going to say something along the lines of:

"Evolution has optimized us to strip away the irrelevant features when it comes to vision, since it's been vital for our survival. But evolution hasn't done that for things like abstract value, since there's been no selection pressure for that. It's bad that our judgments in cases like the K&T examples don't work more like vision, but that's how it goes".

Indeed, saying "let's make the problem worse" and then bringing up vision feels a bit weird. After all, vision seems like a case where our brain does things exactly right - it ignores the "framing effects" caused by changed lightning conditions and leaves invariant the things that actually matter.

Comment author: lukeprog 10 August 2011 11:25:25PM 1 point [-]

I wrote a response here.