Recovering_irrationalist comments on An Alien God - Less Wrong
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Comments (137)
Eliezer...
It really bothers you that a mindless, unthinking process is smarter than you, doesn't it.
I wouldn't go that far! But I do think you bias towards Faith in Flawlessness and against anything that involves randomness.
Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes... When I design a toaster oven, I don't design one part that tries to get electricity to the coils and a second part that tries to prevent electricity from getting to the coils.
Toasters are designed for simpler problems. When you need to survive overwhelming complexity/unknown unknowns/fog of war, designs relying on Feedback/Checks and Balances often survive where designs without it fail spectacularly. Examples: US founding father's design for a government; various engineering control systems; successful economic systems; protocol about feedback in science.
Human beings fake their justifications, figure out what they want using one method, and then justify it using another method.
Hmm...