Even though our general intelligence has allowed us to invent condoms and have sex without the added cost of children, a surprising amount of people decide to take them off because they find it fun and meaningful to have children.
Fertility rates among such groups are often sub-replacement. As far as evolution is concerned, the difference between 2-ε TFR and 0 TFR is merely that they take different times to reach fixation in extinction… The fact that TFRs are so low would cast a lot of doubt on any claim we are maximizing our evolutionary reward.
A more telling example than condoms would be sperm donation. You can, with little effort other than travel, rack up literally hundreds* of offspring through a UK clinic (the UK has a sperm shortage) or just doing it freelance over Facebook anywhere. Since most men will have 1 or 2 children (if that), that implies they are passing up fitness increases of >10,000%**. You can find cases of men doing this in places like NYC or London, where there are literally millions of fertile† men sitting around not having children at that moment & continually passing up that opportunity (publicized regularly in the tabloid media with each revelation that X has 120 kids or Doctor Y did 50 on the sly), while only a handful take it up. To put this in perspective, it means you can beat the most successful men in history like Ghengis Khan at the evolution game for the cost of a monthly subway pass. (The moms will provide the optional turkey baster.) And the main downside is that you may be so reproductively fit that your donor offspring have to worry about accidental incest because there are so many of them all over the place, and also if you try to maintain a minimal amount of contact, the birthday & Christmas card workload adds up rapidly.
The extent to which men pass this up shows dramatically how badly evolution can fail to tune us for inclusive fitness when the environment has changed enough from the EEA. Sperm donation is only one of many ways that men could be boosting inclusive fitness. (Most obviously, lobby their male relatives into doing it as well! That would add >5,000% if you could get a brother or father, >2,500% if a cousin...) If men were doing anything close to maximizing inclusive fitness in the contemporary environment, they wouldn’t be giving away their sperm for free to needy moms, they would be living like monks on a few dollars a day while spending their millions of lifetime income aside from that on paying women to use their sperm or for surrogacies. (Elon Musk is in the news again for turning out to have even more children − 10 total, so far, that we know of, so >500% the norm, and he doesn’t seem to be trying, it’s just what happens when a rich attractive man sleeps around and doesn’t do a lot of work to avoid it. Cases like Mitsutoki Shigeta would not be near-globally-unique nor would they be extremely wealthy—because they would’ve spent it all to purchase far more than merely 13 children. For a classic fiction treatment, Mote in God’s Eye.)
Is ~99.999% of the male population passing up outer-reward gains of >>10,000% in favor of various inner-rewards (often of trivial magnitude) really “pretty good alignment” of the inner with outer processes? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
* I forget if anyone has broken 1,000 yet. Apparently when you really get going as an amateur sperm donor, it’s easy to lose track or fall out of touch and not know how many live births there ultimately are. Fertility clinics are not always good at tracking the paperwork either. Population registries will eventually quantify the extremes here once genetic info becomes standard.
** For further perspective, the largest selective sweeps ever discovered in human evolution are for lactase persistence with a selection advantage of s ~ 0.05, or 5%.
† I assume fertility because most men are. If you aren’t because of health or old age, then evolution would prefer you to not tinker around in retirement, spending money on maintaining your tired worn out body, building ships in bottles or whatever fitness-negative behavior you are engaged in, but to instead run up as much debt as possible & commit crimes, transfer resources to your relatives to increase their fitness such as by teaching them for free, purchasing surrogacies, leading suicidal death charges against your clan’s enemies, and so on. If you can’t do anything like that, then at least have the evolutionary-decency to drop dead on the spot so as to free up resources & reduce competition for spatially near-by relatives.
I completely agree that our behaviour doesn’t maximise the outer goal. My mysteriously capitalised “Pretty Good” was intended to point in this direction—that I find it interesting that we still have some kids, even when we could have none and still have sex and do other fun things. Declining populations would also point to worse alignment. I would consider proper bad alignment to be no kids at all, or the destruction of the planet and our human race along with it, although my phrasing, and thinking on this, is quite vague.
There is an element of unsustainability in your strategy for max gene spreading, where if everyone was constantly doing everything they could to try to spread their genes as much as possible, in the ways you describe, humanity as a whole might not survive, spreading no genes at all. But, even if it would unsustainable for everyone to do the things you described, a few more people could do it, spread their genes far and wide and society would keep ticking along. Or everyone could have just a few more children and things would probably be fine in the long term. I would say that men getting very little satisfaction from sperm donation is a case of misalignment—a deep mismatch between our “training” ancestral environments and our “deployment” modern world.
So I agree we don’t maximise the outer goal, especially now that know how not to. One of the things that made me curious about this whole thing is that this characteristic, some sort of robust goal following without maximising, seems like something we would desire in artificial agents. Reading through all these comments is crystallising in my head what my questions on this topic actually are:
Is this robust non-maximalness an emerging quality of some or all very smart agents? - I doubt it, but it would be nice as it would reduce the chances that we get turned into paperclips.
Do we know how to create agents that exhibit these characteristics I think are positive? - I doubt it, but might be worth figuring out. An AGI that follows their goals only some sustainable, reasonable, amount seems safer than the AGI equivalent of the habitual sperm donor.
Is this robust non-maximalness an emerging quality of some or all very smart agents?
Yeah, I suspect it’s actually pretty hard to get a mesa-optimizer which maximizes some simple, internally represented utility function. I am seriously considering a mechanistic hypothesis where “robust non-maximalness” is the default. That, on its own, does not guarantee safety, but I think it’s pretty interesting.
I narrowly agree that evolution failed to align us well with inclusive genetic fitness.
However, your comment indicates to me that you missed OP’s more important points. I think humans have some pretty interesting alignment properties (e.g. blind people presumably lose access to a range of visually-activated hardcoded reward circuitry, and yet are not AFAICT less likely to care about other human beings; thus, human value formation is robust along some kinds of variation on the internal reward function; is value really that fragile after all?). Your comment focuses on evolution/human misalignment, as opposed to genome->human alignment properties (e.g. how sensitive are learned human values to mutations and modifications to the learning process, or how the genome actually mechanistically makes people care about other people).
in favor of various inner-rewards (often of trivial magnitude)
Inner-rewards as in “the reward meted out by the human reward system”? If so, I don’t think that’s how people work. Otherwise, they would be wireheaders: We know how to wirehead humans; neuroscientists do not wirehead themselves, even though some probably could have it arranged; people are not inner-reward maximizers.
Fertility rates among such groups are often sub-replacement. As far as evolution is concerned, the difference between 2-ε TFR and 0 TFR is merely that they take different times to reach fixation in extinction… The fact that TFRs are so low would cast a lot of doubt on any claim we are maximizing our evolutionary reward.
A more telling example than condoms would be sperm donation. You can, with little effort other than travel, rack up literally hundreds* of offspring through a UK clinic (the UK has a sperm shortage) or just doing it freelance over Facebook anywhere. Since most men will have 1 or 2 children (if that), that implies they are passing up fitness increases of >10,000%**. You can find cases of men doing this in places like NYC or London, where there are literally millions of fertile† men sitting around not having children at that moment & continually passing up that opportunity (publicized regularly in the tabloid media with each revelation that X has 120 kids or Doctor Y did 50 on the sly), while only a handful take it up. To put this in perspective, it means you can beat the most successful men in history like Ghengis Khan at the evolution game for the cost of a monthly subway pass. (The moms will provide the optional turkey baster.) And the main downside is that you may be so reproductively fit that your donor offspring have to worry about accidental incest because there are so many of them all over the place, and also if you try to maintain a minimal amount of contact, the birthday & Christmas card workload adds up rapidly.
The extent to which men pass this up shows dramatically how badly evolution can fail to tune us for inclusive fitness when the environment has changed enough from the EEA. Sperm donation is only one of many ways that men could be boosting inclusive fitness. (Most obviously, lobby their male relatives into doing it as well! That would add >5,000% if you could get a brother or father, >2,500% if a cousin...) If men were doing anything close to maximizing inclusive fitness in the contemporary environment, they wouldn’t be giving away their sperm for free to needy moms, they would be living like monks on a few dollars a day while spending their millions of lifetime income aside from that on paying women to use their sperm or for surrogacies. (Elon Musk is in the news again for turning out to have even more children − 10 total, so far, that we know of, so >500% the norm, and he doesn’t seem to be trying, it’s just what happens when a rich attractive man sleeps around and doesn’t do a lot of work to avoid it. Cases like Mitsutoki Shigeta would not be near-globally-unique nor would they be extremely wealthy—because they would’ve spent it all to purchase far more than merely 13 children. For a classic fiction treatment, Mote in God’s Eye.)
Is ~99.999% of the male population passing up outer-reward gains of >>10,000% in favor of various inner-rewards (often of trivial magnitude) really “pretty good alignment” of the inner with outer processes? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
* I forget if anyone has broken 1,000 yet. Apparently when you really get going as an amateur sperm donor, it’s easy to lose track or fall out of touch and not know how many live births there ultimately are. Fertility clinics are not always good at tracking the paperwork either. Population registries will eventually quantify the extremes here once genetic info becomes standard.
** For further perspective, the largest selective sweeps ever discovered in human evolution are for lactase persistence with a selection advantage of s ~ 0.05, or 5%.
† I assume fertility because most men are. If you aren’t because of health or old age, then evolution would prefer you to not tinker around in retirement, spending money on maintaining your tired worn out body, building ships in bottles or whatever fitness-negative behavior you are engaged in, but to instead run up as much debt as possible & commit crimes, transfer resources to your relatives to increase their fitness such as by teaching them for free, purchasing surrogacies, leading suicidal death charges against your clan’s enemies, and so on. If you can’t do anything like that, then at least have the evolutionary-decency to drop dead on the spot so as to free up resources & reduce competition for spatially near-by relatives.
I completely agree that our behaviour doesn’t maximise the outer goal. My mysteriously capitalised “Pretty Good” was intended to point in this direction—that I find it interesting that we still have some kids, even when we could have none and still have sex and do other fun things. Declining populations would also point to worse alignment. I would consider proper bad alignment to be no kids at all, or the destruction of the planet and our human race along with it, although my phrasing, and thinking on this, is quite vague.
There is an element of unsustainability in your strategy for max gene spreading, where if everyone was constantly doing everything they could to try to spread their genes as much as possible, in the ways you describe, humanity as a whole might not survive, spreading no genes at all. But, even if it would unsustainable for everyone to do the things you described, a few more people could do it, spread their genes far and wide and society would keep ticking along. Or everyone could have just a few more children and things would probably be fine in the long term. I would say that men getting very little satisfaction from sperm donation is a case of misalignment—a deep mismatch between our “training” ancestral environments and our “deployment” modern world.
So I agree we don’t maximise the outer goal, especially now that know how not to. One of the things that made me curious about this whole thing is that this characteristic, some sort of robust goal following without maximising, seems like something we would desire in artificial agents. Reading through all these comments is crystallising in my head what my questions on this topic actually are:
Is this robust non-maximalness an emerging quality of some or all very smart agents? - I doubt it, but it would be nice as it would reduce the chances that we get turned into paperclips.
Do we know how to create agents that exhibit these characteristics I think are positive? - I doubt it, but might be worth figuring out. An AGI that follows their goals only some sustainable, reasonable, amount seems safer than the AGI equivalent of the habitual sperm donor.
Yeah, I suspect it’s actually pretty hard to get a mesa-optimizer which maximizes some simple, internally represented utility function. I am seriously considering a mechanistic hypothesis where “robust non-maximalness” is the default. That, on its own, does not guarantee safety, but I think it’s pretty interesting.
I narrowly agree that evolution failed to align us well with inclusive genetic fitness.
However, your comment indicates to me that you missed OP’s more important points. I think humans have some pretty interesting alignment properties (e.g. blind people presumably lose access to a range of visually-activated hardcoded reward circuitry, and yet are not AFAICT less likely to care about other human beings; thus, human value formation is robust along some kinds of variation on the internal reward function; is value really that fragile after all?). Your comment focuses on evolution/human misalignment, as opposed to genome->human alignment properties (e.g. how sensitive are learned human values to mutations and modifications to the learning process, or how the genome actually mechanistically makes people care about other people).
Inner-rewards as in “the reward meted out by the human reward system”? If so, I don’t think that’s how people work. Otherwise, they would be wireheaders: We know how to wirehead humans; neuroscientists do not wirehead themselves, even though some probably could have it arranged; people are not inner-reward maximizers.
By my impression, this is risky; you might be forced to pay child support.