Constant2 comments on Cached Thoughts - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 October 2007 11:46PM

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Comment author: Constant2 14 October 2007 04:26:00AM 8 points [-]

Eliezer - there is one additional input to surviving ancient wisdom that goes beyond the thought that the ancients put into it, and that is the simple fact of its survival. Even if people came up with an idea for bad reasons, that idea may nevertheless be a good one and may survive on that account. If it survives, then it may be a good idea even though nobody knows why, and even though nobody ever knew why.

I make no recommendation on this basis, I simply point out that there can be more to ancient wisdom than what ancient minds put into it, and an attempt to re-compute, even if it re-captures the original computation, does not necessarily recap the process of selection. (Obviously we would want to distinguish between parasitic and symbiotic memes - the survival of an idea may be, but is not necessarily, a result of its benefit to us.)