If you're asking about future possible states, and literally counting them as Eliezer suggests, even a refinery that has very little input flexibility is a powerful optimizer, provided it puts out well-refined products. It's a more powerful optimizer than most people, by that metric. How do I know? It has influence over a lot more total mass. The total entropy reduction it performs is vast.
Why does it matter how humans are involved? That's one of the positive aspects of Eliezer's definition: it doesn't care about whether there are humans pulling levers, humans and a lot of automation and sensors, or a fully automated lights-out computerized operation.
The difference in entropy reduction produced doesn't care about what the refinery could handle, only what it does handle. Switching between different kinds of crude of similar quality won't change the optimization power rating, even if lots of adjustments get made when that happens. Worse crude, with more weird stuff in it, probably has a marginally higher starting entropy, so using that as feedstock will produce a higher rating. Being able to use it won't, though.
Using that definition very few things that humans do count as optimization, and virtually nothing our brains do counts. For instance my brain doesn't till a field and plant seeds and harvest grain; my muscles twitch to make my bones and skin exert forces on a plow and seeds and grains, and the sun and plants do the vast majority of the work. My brain just happens to be the thing that sets the initial process in motion and tweaks it along the way.
Of course maybe since this was just a preliminary article that's fine, and a study of "intelligence"...
Today's post, Optimization was originally published on 13 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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