William_Newman comments on Beware of Stephen J. Gould - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 November 2007 05:22AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (76)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: William_Newman 09 November 2007 08:18:17PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, what Adam Ierymenko said:-) about hitting a complexity limit being not at all synonymous with stopping progress. Except that I was going to say "computer programmers" instead of "engineers", and I was going to use the example that when duplicate functionality in the mitochondrial genome and main-cell genome gets replaced by shared functionality, the organism tends to win back some ground from the the Williams limit you described. And, incidentally, the mitochondrial example is very closely analogous to something that practicing computer programmers pay a lot of attention to: Google for "once and only once" or "OAOO" to see endless discussion.