http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology#Testability

In another thread, you linked to some book, I forgot the name, there was critique from another prominent guy saying it's not how mind works. Clearly there is critique.

Do you have an explanation why do you expect considerably more complex changes to wiring in the brain, than to gross morphology, i.e. shape of organism? I honestly just don't see why it would be more common for evolution to hardwire a reflex than to make a new organ. edit: Okay, for the organs there is the argument that the existing organs are pretty damn good. Still, there's plenty of opportunity for improving e.g. human locomotion, and pressure, too, and one can clearly see how slow did the bones change shapes.

edit: ahh, now i have a great question: Why would it be so much more common to evolve some complex but hard to separate from culture psychology, than it was to evolve verifiable, simple, straightforward hardwired reflexes? There's not a single well defined, agreed upon reflex i can think of that humans have, which chimps lack. There's a lot of evo-psych stuff that is allegedly unique to us humans, evolved during our hunter gatherer times.

I think this really should nail it down WRT plausibility of evo-psych. It propositions big number of very complex psychological adaptations, over the time when no straightforward, agreed upon hard wired reflexes evolved. Not just gross morphology. Anything well identifiable at which we can look and say - okay, chimps don't have this innate reflex - and agree.

Good point. Still, the brain's choice can be quite deterministic, if you give it enough thought - averaging out noise.

Hmm, can you see it now? (I of course kept a copy of the text on my computer, in case you were joking, so i do have the draft reposted as well)

Well, normally if you are dealing with a company as a partner, it's a company for which the partnerships are a huge factor - e.g. in my case re-distributors.

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is an oversimplified problem. In the real world, usually, the non-cooperative players are known for their non-cooperative behaviours try channels other than getting screwed over yourself.

Furthermore, there are disparity of force cases where everyone's defecting against other party, just because other side can not retaliate. E.g. you could of paid me $0.5 per day to do the work I normally do, if I had no computer of my own or ability to go work at other employer, and I would have to do the work while barely surviving - and you could then pocket well over 99% of the income. That's how it works with outsourcing to third world.

Well, i can implement omega by scanning your brain and simulating you. The other 'non implementations' of omega, though, imo are best ignored entirely. You can't really blame a decision theory for failure if there's no sensible model of the world for it to use.

My decision theory, personally, allows me to ignore unknown and edit my expected utility formula in ad-hoc way if i'm sufficiently convinced that omega will work as described. I think that's practically useful because effective heuristics often have to be invented on spot without sufficient model of the world.

edit: albeit, if i was convinced that omega works as described, i'd be convinced that it has scanned my brain and is emulating my decision procedure, or is using time travel, or is deciding randomly then destroying the universes where it was wrong... with more time i can probably come up with other implementations, the common thing about the implementations though is that i should 1-box.

and if i apply same prior to him as he applies to me, probably a person with little programming experience. Everyday tit-for-tat reflex (that one might have evolved because its conceivable it was good through much of our on-trees existence as well, albeit i'm a bit dubious as of how the DNA would code for something like tit for tat, in mammalian brain; it would code for something that sort of works like tit for tat, with a lot of side effects, such as getting irritated, and responding in the equivalent style; [learning what to be irritated at]).

Hmm, weird. I thought the hide button would hide it from public, and un-hide button would unhide. How do i make it public as a draft?

Hmm, its curious. I am pretty good at coming up with examples or picking out items from crowded environments. Well, for the social changes... what's about gradual abolition of religious fundamentalism? It can be self enforcing (just as introduction of fundamentalism is; instability implies self-enforcing effects both ways).

In general if you can come up with some self-reinforcing social change that you think is bad, the same change, starting from the bad state (assuming that it can start at all), would be self-reinforcing in the good direction. A steel object falling off from under a magnet is a self-reinforcing process - the further it falls, the lower is the attraction - and so is the steel object snapping onto a magnet - the closer it gets, the stronger is the attraction force.

edit: ahh, i looked up in comment thread. Indeed, the problem is that it is hard to keep unstable process in equilibrium, and the self-reinforcing processes go too far. At same time, if you take a terribly religious population where we burned witches, or where they stone the rape victims to death, it is easy to imagine that on the other end of the slippery slope - if the slope is at all inclined in the other direction - the life is massively better.

I made a magnetic levitation device once - it would suspend iron nail under electromagnet. It seems deceptively simple - when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on - but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations - you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.

For the real world anekdote, all successful businesses that i worked with seem to be tit-for-tat-ers (i never tried to screw anyone and never got screwed, and i'm pretty sure they do apply tit for tat, or else the defectors would be more common). There could be some sneaky cheaters out there, but mostly due to misplaced beliefs of shareholders that a sociopath CEO will do better than tit-for-tat CEO.