If you have a strong discount factor, then even if you meet the same person infinitely often, your gain is still bounded above (summing a geometric series), and can be much smaller than winning your current round.

The discount factor can mess things up - you'll meet someone again, but after how long?

There's certainly mathematical models of rumors, which is a similar enough but not quite the same concept.

From memory, they model similar to epidemics, which I'm not sure how that related to genetic drift and selection.

"Meme" is not a model, it's a reference class of models, many of which are informal. In order to talk about testing it, you must first zoom in.

This sounds like a map/territory confusion. "Intelligence" is a concept in the map, used to summarize the common correlations in success across domains. There is no assumption that fully general cross-domain optimizers exist; it's an empirical observation that most of the variance in performance across cognitive tasks happens along a single dimension. Contrast this with personality, where most of the variance is along five dimensions. We could talk about how each person reacts in each possible situation or "island", but most of this information can be compressed into five numbers.

We could always drill down and talk about more factors, ie fluid vs crystallized intelligence or math vs verbal. More factors gives us more predictive power, though additional factors are increasingly less useful when chosen well.

Though a single-factor model works well for humans, this isn't necessarily the case for more general minds. I suspect the broad concept of intelligence carves reality at its joints fairly well, but assuming so would be a mistake.

The citations in this comment are new science, so please take them with at least a cellar of salt:

There are recent studies, especially into Wernicke's area, which seem to implicate alternate areas for linguistic processing : http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=61864&PageTemplateID=295 (they don't cite the actual study, but I think it might be here http://www.pnas.org/content/109/8/E505.full#xref-ref-48-1); and this study (http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/124/1/83.full) is also interesting.

Terrence Deacon's 'The Symbolic Species' also argumes that Broca's area is not as constant across individuals as the other subsections being discussed are; interpretations of Broca's area in particular are shaky (argues Deacon) because this region is immediately adjacent to the motor controls for the equipment needed to produce speech. I have seen no studies attempting to falsify this claim, though, so unless anyone knows of actual evidence for it, we can safely shuffle this one into the realm of hypothesis for now.

In any case, Wernicke's and Broca's areas may not be the best examples of specialization in brain regions; I think we have a much clearer understanding (as these things go) of the sensory processing areas.

In my own experience, self skepticism isn't sufficient. It's bloody useful of course, but it's also an exceptional time sink -- occasionally to the point where I'll forget to actually think of solutions to the problem.

Does anyone have any algorithms they use to balance self-skepticism with actually solving the problem?

Hi all,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I've read some of the Sequences, though I fully intend to re-read and read on.

I'm an undergrad at present, looking to participate in a trend I've been observing that's bring some of the rigor and predictive power of the hard sciences to linguistics.

I'm particularly interested in how language evolved, and under what physical/biological/computational constraints; What that implies about the neural mechanisms behind human behavior; and how to use those two to construct a predictive and quantitative theory of linguistic behavior.

I go to a Liberal Arts college (I started out with a bit more of a Lit major bent), where, after being disillusioned with the somewhat more philosophical side of linguistics (mid-term, no less), I ended up taking an extracurricular dive into the physical sciences just to stay sane. Then a friend recomended HPMOR, and thence I discovered LessWrong, where I've been happily lurking for some time.

I decided it would be useful to actually participate. So here I am.

Yes, but OTOH the “evolutionary processes operating over centuries, millennia, and longer” took place in environments different from where we live nowadays.