Quick summary of a reason why constituent parts like of super-organisms, like the ant of ant colonies, the cells of multicellular organisms, and endosymbiotic organelles within cells[1] are evolutionarily incentivized to work together as a unit:
Question: why do ants seem to care more about the colony than themselves? Answer: reproduction in an ant colony is funneled through the queen. If the worker ant wants to reproduce its genes, it can't do that by being selfish. It has to help the queen reproduce. Genes in ant workers have nothing to gain by making their ant more selfish and have much to gain by making their worker protect the queen.
This is similar to why cells in your pancreas cooperate with cells in your ear. Reproduction of genes in the body is funned through gametes. Somatic evolution does pressure the cells in your pancreas to reproduce selfishly at the expense of cells in your ear (this is pancreatic cancer). But that doesn't help the pancreas genes long term. Pancreas-genes and the ear-genes are forced to cooperate with each other because they can only reproduce when bound together in a gamete.
This sort of bounding together of genes making disperate things cooperate and act like a "super organism" is absent in members of a species. My genes do not reproduce in concert with your genes. If my genes figure out a way to reproduce at your expense, so much the better for them.
Like mitochondria and chloroplasts, which were separate organisms but evolved to work so close with their hosts that they are now considered part of the same organism.
EDIT Completely rewritten to be hopefully less condescending.
There are lessons from group selection and the extended phenotype which vaguely reduce to "beware thinking about species as organisms". It is not clear from this essay whether you've encountered those ideas. It would be helpful for me reading this essay to know if you have.
Hijacking this thread, has anybody worked through Ape in the coat's anthropic posts and understood / gotten stuff out of them? It's something I might want to do sometime in my copious free time but haven't worked up to it yet.
Sorry, that was an off-the-cuff example I meant to help gesture towards the main idea. I didn't mean to imply it's a working instance (it's not). The idea I'm going for is:
This might be a reason to try to design AI's to fail-safe and break without controlling units. E.g. before fine-tuning language models to be useful, fine-tune them to not generate useful content without approval tokens generated by a supervisory model.
I suspect experiments with almost-genetically identical twin tests might advance our understanding about almost all genes except sex chromosomes.
Sex chromosomes are independent coin flips with huge effect sizes. That's amazing! Natural provided us with experiments everywhere! Most alleles are confounded (e.g.. correlated with socioeconomic status for no causal reason) and have very small effect sizes.
Example: Imagine an allele which is common in east asians, uncommon in europeans, and makes people 1.1 mm taller. Even though the allele causally makes people taller, the average height of the people with the allele (mostly asian) would be less than the average height of the people without the allele (mostly European). The +1.1 mm in causal height gain would be drowned out by the ≈-50 mm in Simpson's paradox. Your almost-twin experiment gives signal where observational regression gives error.
That's not needed for sex differences. Poor people tend to have poor children. Caucasian people tend to have Caucasian children. Male people do not tend to have male children. It's pretty easy to extract signal about sex differences.
(far from my area of expertise)
The player can force a strategy where they win 2/3 of the time (guess a door and never switch). The player never needs to accept worse
The host can force a strategy where the player loses 1/3 of the time (never let the player switch). The host never needs to accept worse.
Therefore, the equilibrium has 2/3 win for the player. The player can block this number from going lower and the host can block this number from going higher.
I want to love this metaphor but don't get it at all. Religious freedom isn't a narrow valley; it's an enormous Shelling hyperplane. 85% of people are religious, but no majority is Christian or Hindu or Kuvah'magh or Kraẞël or Ŧ̈ř̈ȧ̈ӎ͛ṽ̥ŧ̊ħ or Sisters of the Screaming Nightshroud of Ɀ̈ӊ͢Ṩ͎̈Ⱦ̸Ḥ̛͑.. These religions don't agree on many things, but they all pull for freedom of religion over the crazy *#%! the other religions want.
Suppose there were some gears in physics we weren't smart enough to understand at all. What would that look like to us?
It would look like phenomena that appears intrinsically random, wouldn't it? Like imagine there were a simple rule about the spin of electrons that we just. don't. get. Instead noticing the simple pattern ("Electrons are up if the number of Planck timesteps since the beginning of the universe is a multiple of 3"), we'd only be able to figure out statistical rules of thumb for our measurements ("we measure electrons as up 1/3 of the time").
My intuitions conflict here. One the one hand, I totally expect there to be phenomena in physics we just don't get. On the other hand, the research programs you might undertake under those conditions (collect phenomena which appear intrinsically random and search for patterns) feel like crackpottery.
Maybe I should put more weight on superdetermism.
Thanks for crossposting! I've highly appreciated your contributions and am glad I'll continue to be able to see them.