= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CarlShulman comments on Disjunctions, Antipredictions, Etc. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (24)
Expecting humor in novel minds, given that humans display it, isn't so unreasonable: convergently handy traits will be common, and if there are common traits we're likely to have a good portion of them. For instance, rhyme in poetry may seem idiosyncratic, but it makes it easier to remember a poem and the information contained within for creatures that use spreading-activation in memory (one word primes others that share auditory features with it).
CarlShuman, it seems to me that even the set of minds that would have received some fitness benefit from a sense of humor would be much smaller than the set of minds that actually have a sense of humor, since there are almost certainly lots of other ways to solve the kind of fitness problems that humor solves.
Also, the set of minds that would receive benefit from humor is way smaller yet than the whole of plausibly-biologically-evolved mindspace. For example, how would a non-social mind benefit from humor?