[SEQ RERUN] Aiming at the Target

MinibearRex

Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you make plans, you are trying to steer the future into regions higher in your preference ordering.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

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Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you make plans, you are trying to steer the future into regions higher in your preference ordering.

I'm not sure that this does the job, but I might be misunderstanding:

Clippy the paperclip maximiser, being placed in a given system S, transitions the system from state S1 (not many paperclips) to state S2 (many paperclips), and does this reliably across many different systems. We can confidently predict that if we put Clippy in a new system, it will soon end up full of paperclips, even if we aren't sure what the mechanism will be.
Water, being placed in a given system S, transitions from state S1 (water is anywhere) to state S2 (water occupies local minima and isn't just floating around), and does this reliably across many different systems. We can confidently predict that if we put water in a new system, it will soon end up with a wet floor but not likely a wet ceiling. It just so happens that we do know the mechanism of transition but that shouldn't matter, I think.

So I feel like this kind of behaviour is actually necessary but isn't sufficient to identify an optimisation process. But I might be missing your point.

Ah, OK. I think I get you now.
I agree that whether we know the mechanism doesn't matter.

Personally, I'm comfortable saying that gravity is an optimization process. The interesting question is what gravity optimizes for. I might conclude, for example, after watching how gravitational fields affect matter, that gravity optimizes for minimizing the distance between sources of mass.

From that it follows that gravity is not a particularly powerful optimization process. I conclude this because I observe many situations where distance between masses is no longe... (read more)

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