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timtyler comments on Behaviorism: Beware Anthropomorphizing Humans - Less Wrong
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This web site apparently has "a thing" about bashing utility-maximizers. Biologists use the concept of fitness maximisation as the fundamental unifying principle in biology. It builds animal brains, as best it can - so that they maximise the same function. As such, the idea deserves a hat tip - or you risk losing the baby with the bathwater.
I have a hypothesis about what is going on here: If humans don't maximise utility but machine intelligences do - and if maximisihg utility sometimes leads to utilitronium shockwave scenarios - then that makes machines look bad and scary. Making machines look bad and scary is a major theme around here.
This is the hat-tip to that idea. Evolution/organisms are so good at maximizing fitness that it's really tempting to think they're perfect at it, or at least perfectly efficient at it, which is something we have to be reminded again and again isn't true.
If it wasn't so close to being universally true, we wouldn't have to keep reminding people that it's occasionally false.
Yay - this comment is better!
Hmm. I can't say I have ever encountered that idea. Organisms are imperfect. They are resource limited. They are cobbled together by natural selection and random mutations. I think most people usually "get" all of that - at least by the "Darwin 101" stage.