Will_Pearson comments on Underconstrained Abstractions - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 December 2008 01:58PM

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

Comments (27)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Will_Pearson 05 December 2008 07:02:49AM 0 points [-]

Consider the following. Chimpanzees make tools. The first hominid tools were simple chipped stone from 2.5 million years ago. Nothing changed for a million years. Then homo erectus came along with Acheulian tech, nothing happened for a million years. Then two thousand years ago H. Sapiens appeared and tool use really diversified. The brains had been swelling from 3 million years ago.

If brains had been getting more generally intelligent at that time as they were increasing in size, it is not shown. They may have been getting better at wooing women and looking attractive to men.

This info has been cribbed from the Red Queen page 313 hardback edition.

I would say this shows a discontinous improvement in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as the ability to *generally* hit a small target in search space about the world. Rather than the ability to get into another hominids pants.