But it seems like then every process can be an optimisation process, and when you measure the optimisation power that's really telling you more about whether the 'optimisation target' you selected as your measure is a good fit for the process you're looking at. It tells you more about your interpretation of the optimisation target than it does about the process itself.
Gravity isn't very powerful for minimising distance between sources of mass, but it is very powerful for "making mass move in straight lines through curved spacetime"[1]. For any process at all, you just look at "whatever it actually ends up doing", and then say that was its optimisation target all along, and hey presto, it turns out there are superpowerful optimisation processes everywhere you look, all being hugely successful at making things turn out how (you think) they wanted, provided you think they wanted things the way they actually turned out. If you get to choose your own interpretation of what the optimisation target is, 'optimisation process' doesn't seem like a very useful notion at all.
Also, re: value independence: Evolution seems like a pretty definite candidate for what we want 'optimisation process' to mean, but its values seem to be pretty inextricably baked in to the algorithm. You can't reprogram evolution to start optimising for paperclips, for example. It only optimises for whatever genes are selectively favoured by the environment.
[1] insert a more accurate description of what gravity does here if required.
Yes, I agree that on this account every process is technically speaking an optimization process for some target, and I agree that optimization power can only be measured relative to particular target or class of targets.
That said, when we say that evolution, or a human-level intelligence, is an optimization process we mean something rather more than this: we mean something like that it's an optimization process with a lot of optimization power across a wide range of targets. (And, sure, I agree that if we hold the environment constant, including other evo...
Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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