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TheOtherDave comments on Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (73)
I agree that this approach likely works well for software precisely because software tends to be built modularly to begin with... it probably would work far less well for analyzing evolved rather than constructed systems.
I wouldn't be so sure. Tooby and Cosmides keep finding evidence that our brains are organized to some degree in terms of adaptive modules, like "cheater detection" and "status seeking" which work spectacularly well in the domain for which they evolved, and then fail miserably when expanded to other domains. If we had a "modus tollens" module or a "Bayesian update" module, we'd be a lot smarter than we are; but apparently we don't, because most people are atrociously bad at modus tollens and Bayesian updating, but remarkably good at cheater detection and status seeking.
(If you haven't seen it already, look up the Wason task experiments. They clearly show that human beings fail miserably at modus tollens---unless it's formulated in terms of cheater detection, in which case we are almost perfect.)
Yup, I'm familiar with the cheater stuff, and I agree that the brain has subsystems which work better in some domains than others.
The thing about a well-designed modular architecture, though, is not just that it has task-optimized subsystems, but that those subsystems are isolated from one another and communicate through interfaces that support treating them more or less independently. That's what makes the kind of compartmentalization thomblake is talking about feasible.
If, instead, I have a bunch of subsystems that share each other's code and data structures, I may still be able to identify "modules" that perform certain functions, but if I try to analyze (let alone optimize or upgrade) those modules independently I will quickly get bogged down in interactions that require me to understand the whole system.