NancyLebovitz comments on Thou Art Godshatter - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 November 2007 07:38PM

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

Comments (75)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 July 2010 10:09:37PM 0 points [-]

The question is indeed interesting, but the presumed answer is a powerful motivator for whom? Even if human evolution will lead to a super-amazing future of greatness, I doubt that future would be as super-amazing as a correctly implemented FAI; avoiding dystopian evolutionary existential catastrophes has never been listed as main reason for wanting to build a friendly really powerful optimization process by anyone I've talked to. Most don't think humanity will even get that far.

But I'm curious as to what your intuitions are regarding the probably counterfactual world where humans continue evolving for a long, long time.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 28 July 2010 05:23:51PM 1 point [-]

Eliezer has a bias against evolution, and a bias against randomness, as exhibited in his series ending in Worse than Random, which is factually correct in the details, but misleading in the real world, as demonstrated by repeated times when his acolytes have used it to attack probabilistic search, probabilistic models, etc.

My take all along has been that something about evolution has caused it to reliably make the world a more complicated, more interesting, and better place; and evolution, with randomness, is the only process that can be trusted to continue this. Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.

I see E's story about the moties as being one possible source of his bias against evolution, and hence against randomness.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 July 2010 08:02:20AM 2 points [-]

My assumption is that it isn't really possible to take charge of evolution. You might be able to have less undirected biological evolution, but only by having memetically-driven evolution. Things are still going to have random influences.