The list of things seems basically right to me, although I find it a bit jarring to put evolution under “groups” and I might want it to be in its own category or something. When analyzing groups and their agency it seems important to me to be very careful about what the group is actually optimizing for.
What is the group actually optimizing for? Not having an explicit optimization goal is kind of the point here, and it is the common theme between human groups and evolution: lots of agents optimize for something, and something very different happens as a result.
I just mean that it’s easy to judge a group as being bad at doing stuff if you judge it to be optimizing poorly for a thing that it’s not actually optimizing for. Nobody does the thing they are supposedly doing and so forth. There’s a separate question of whether a group is doing a good job optimizing for what its founder(s) wanted it to optimize for.
I share some intuition with Qiaochu that evolution in the “group” section feels off. I feel like there should be a category of something like “other optimization processes” which have as examples “insect intelligences”, “bird intelligences”, “game-of-life-like scenarios” and “evolution”.
I considered doing designed groups vs more accidental groups, but I didn’t consider just having an other category. I think I wish I did that, but I am not going to bother to redo it. I dont think the structure as a taxonomy is that important, I just want people to be aware of what we have to work with.
I think I’m willing to defend this. As a human, I have some social intuitions about how groups of humans work that don’t easily translate to an understanding of how either evolution or groups of insects work. This is also the reason I like having humans in their own category above.
I would add in animals if you are asking questions about the nature of general intelligence. For example people claim monkeys are better at certain tasks than humans. What does that mean for the notion of general intelligence, if anything?
Some Discussion Questions:
Am I missing something? (Animals?)
Do you think that one of these is actually just useless?
Am I wrong to think of evolution and designed groups as the same type of object?
Am I strawmanning/steelmanning any given proxy too much?
Do you disagree with my wrapping data and intuitions together and treating math as a type of empirical data?
Is it the case that takeoff will be slow and these proxies all suck, so we just have to wait for real feedback loops?
The list of things seems basically right to me, although I find it a bit jarring to put evolution under “groups” and I might want it to be in its own category or something. When analyzing groups and their agency it seems important to me to be very careful about what the group is actually optimizing for.
What is the group actually optimizing for? Not having an explicit optimization goal is kind of the point here, and it is the common theme between human groups and evolution: lots of agents optimize for something, and something very different happens as a result.
I just mean that it’s easy to judge a group as being bad at doing stuff if you judge it to be optimizing poorly for a thing that it’s not actually optimizing for. Nobody does the thing they are supposedly doing and so forth. There’s a separate question of whether a group is doing a good job optimizing for what its founder(s) wanted it to optimize for.
I share some intuition with Qiaochu that evolution in the “group” section feels off. I feel like there should be a category of something like “other optimization processes” which have as examples “insect intelligences”, “bird intelligences”, “game-of-life-like scenarios” and “evolution”.
I considered doing designed groups vs more accidental groups, but I didn’t consider just having an other category. I think I wish I did that, but I am not going to bother to redo it. I dont think the structure as a taxonomy is that important, I just want people to be aware of what we have to work with.
I don’t understand. “Evolution” and “group of insects” fall into one category for you, but “group of humans” does not?
I think I’m willing to defend this. As a human, I have some social intuitions about how groups of humans work that don’t easily translate to an understanding of how either evolution or groups of insects work. This is also the reason I like having humans in their own category above.
Yep, my brain does social modeling that doesn’t really transfer to insects or other animals.
I would add in animals if you are asking questions about the nature of general intelligence. For example people claim monkeys are better at certain tasks than humans. What does that mean for the notion of general intelligence, if anything?