The fitness maximising calculations are encoded, by evolution, in the neural patterns relating to the cuteness response. The individuals whose cuteness response correlates with fitness are themselves more fit. Those who would give more food to their malformed three-legged offspring will go extinct. So of course the mother is doing fitness calculations. It doesn't feel like that from the inside, but that doesn't make it any less true.
No she is not. Except in the sense that she is perhaps one small step in something that does fitness calculations, but looking at her brain you wouldn't find fitness maximization calculations being done just execution of old adaptations.
And the religions people who merely believe that they believe in their god, they feel very religions from the inside.
Religious people believe they believe in God. And many of them are correct on this.
There is a distinction to be made between the internal state of they who argue violence against a certain group is a good thing, but don't lift a finger themselves (BELIEF1) , and, they who upon being convinced that violence against this group is a good thing, actually attack said group (BELIEF2). It is that distinction that I mean when I say they don't really believe, even though both feel like honest belief from the inside. Neither is faking it, but there's still a distinction.
It can also be called division of labour. My comparative advantage may lie in bashing Wiggin heads or crafting arguments for why bashing Wiggin heads is good or organizing the logistics so our heads don't get bashed by Wiggins so that we can bash more of theirs.
I don't see from a consquentalist stand point what is so different between me pyhsically bashing a Wiggin head, pressing a button that activates a machine that bashes as Wiggin head and manipulating someone into bashing a Wiggin head. To call only one of these indication of "real" belief that bashing Wiggin heads is good (and I hope we all agree it is!) seems not very useful at all, especially since it is perfectly possible that the preferences are literally identical inside their brains but merely the means available to them are what varies.
The distinction seems useful only in very peculiar circumstances, like trying to discover my preferences with regards to personal physical confrontation or combat.
No she is not. Except in the sense that she is perhaps one small step in something that does fitness calculations, but looking at her brain you wouldn't find fitness maximization calculations being done just execution of old adaptations.
These old adaptations encode rough heuristics of limited applicability which approximate fitness calculations (if the environment has been fairly constant for long enough). They are actually there inside the brain. What else do you think the cuteness response as you used here is?
...Religious people believe they believe i
New proposed censorship policy:
Any post or comment which advocates or 'asks about' violence against sufficiently identifiable real people or groups (as opposed to aliens or hypothetical people on trolley tracks) may be deleted, along with replies that also contain the info necessary to visualize violence against real people.
Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable, and makes LW look bad; and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet; if it's a bad idea, promoting it conceptually by discussing it is also a bad idea; therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there's a good way to settle the bet?'
Yes, a post of this type was just recently made. I will not link to it, since this censorship policy implies that it will shortly be deleted, and reproducing the info necessary to say who was hypothetically targeted and why would be against the policy.