We seem to have different observational data. I do know some people who make all their major life decisions based on quality and quantity of offspring. Most of them are female but this might be a bias in my sample. Specifically, quality trades off against quantity: waiting to find a fitter partner and thus losing part of your reproductive window is a common trade off. Similarly, making sure your children have much better lives than you by making sure your own material circumstances (or health!) are better is another. To be fair, they seem to be a small minority currently but I think that is due to point 3 and would be rectified in more a constant environment.
A lot of our drives do indirectly help IGF. Your aestethic sense may be somewhat wired to your ability to recognize and enjoy the visual appearance of healthy mates. Similarly for healthy environments to grow up in, etc. Sure, it gets hijacked for 20 other things, but how big is the loss in IGF to keep it around? I would argue it’s generally not an issue for the subsection of humans that are directly driven to have big families.
Many of us have badly optimized drives cause our environments have changed too fast. It will take a few generations of constant environment (not gonna happen at our current level of technological progress) to catch up. The obvious example is birth control: sex drive used to actually be a great proxy signal to optimize on offspring. Now it’s no longer but we still love sex. But in a few generations the only people alive are the descendants of people who wanted kids no matter their sex drive. ‘evolution’ will now select directly on desire for kids but it takes awhile to catch up.
I’m not saying evolution optimized us very well, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that we are not IGF maximizers. The environment has just changed much too quickly and selection pressure has been low the last few generations, but things like birth control actually introduce a new selection pressure on drive to reproduce. Humans are mediocre IGF maximizers in an environment that is changing unusually fast.
We seem to have different observational data. I do know some people who make all their major life decisions based on quality and quantity of offspring. Most of them are female but this might be a bias in my sample. Specifically, quality trades off against quantity: waiting to find a fitter partner and thus losing part of your reproductive window is a common trade off. Similarly, making sure your children have much better lives than you by making sure your own material circumstances (or health!) are better is another. To be fair, they seem to be a small minority currently but I think that is due to point 3 and would be rectified in more a constant environment.
In the long term, we would expect humans to end up directly optimizing IGF (assuming no revolutions like AI doom or similar) due to evolution. The way this proceeds in practice is that people vary on the extent to which they optimize IGF vs other things, and those who optimize IGF pass on their genes, leading to higher optimization of IGF. So yes eventually these sorts of people will win, but as you admit yourself they are a small minority, so humans as they currently exist are mostly not IGF maximizers.
Also, regarding quality vs quantity, it’s my impression that society massively overinvests in quality relative to what would be implied by IGF. Society is incredibly safe compared to the past, so you don’t need much effort to make them survive. Insofar as there is an IGF value in quality, it’s probably in somehow convincing your children to also optimize for IGF, rather than do other things.
They are a small minority currently cause the environment changes so quickly right now. Things have been changing insanely fast in the last century or so but before the industrial revolution and especially before the agriculture revolution, humans were much better optimized for IGF, I think. Evolution is still ‘training’ us and these last 100 years have been a huge change compared to the generation length of humans. Nate is stating that humans genetically are not IGF maximizers, and that is false. We are, we are just currently heavily being ‘retrained’.
Re: quantity/quality. I think people nominally say they are optimizing for quality when really they just don’t have enough drive to have more kids at the current cost. There is much less cultural punishment on saying you are going for quality over quantity instead of saying you just don’t want more kids cause it’s a huge investment. Additionally, children who grow up in bad home environments seem less likely have kids of their own, and parents having mental breakdowns is one of the common ‘bad’ environments. So quality can definitely optimize for quantity in the long run.
Ps: i wish I had more time for more nuanced answers. Considering writing this up in more detail. My answers are rather rushed. My apologies
Given the ability to medically remove, store, and artificially inseminate eggs, current technologies make it possible for a woman to produce many more children than the historical limit of ~50 (i.e. one every 9 months for a woman’s entire reproductive years), and closer to the limit (note that each woman produces 100,000s of eggs).
I don’t have a worked out plan, but I could see a woman removing most of her eggs, somehow causing many other women to use her eggs to have children (whether it’s by finding infertile women, or paying people, or showing that the eggs would be healthier than others’), and having many more children than historically possible.
I suspect many women could have 50-100 children this way, and that peak women could have 10,000s of children this way, closer to the male model of reproduction.
I’d be interested to know the maximum number of children any woman has had in history, and also since the invention of this sort of medical technology.
I imagine that such a world would have a market (and class system) based around being able to get your eggs born. There are services where a different woman will have your children, but I think the maximizer world would look more like poor women primarily being paid to have children (and being pregnant >50% of their lives) and rich women primarily paying to have children (and having 1000s of children born).
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I also suspect that population would skyrocket relative to the current numbers (e.g. be 10-1000x the current size). Perhaps efforts to colonize Mars would have been sustained during the 20th century, as this planet would have been more obviously overflowing, though probably we would just be using way more of the surface of the Earth for living on.
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.
Similarly, making sure your children have much better lives than you by making sure your own material circumstances (or health!) are better is another.
Is this the best strategy for maximizing IGF? Do happier and wealthier kids have more offspring? Given that wealthier countries tend to have lower birth rates, I wonder if the IGF-maximizing strategy would instead often look like trying to have lots of poor children with few options?
(I’ll note as an aside that even if this is false, it should definitely be a thing many parents seriously consider doing and are strongly tempted by, if the parents are really maximizing IGF rather than maximizing proxies like “their kids’ happiness”. It would be very weird, for example, if an IGF maximizer reacted to this strategy with revulsion.)
I’d be similarly curious if there are cases where making your kids less happy, less intelligent, less psychologically stable, etc. increased their expected offspring. This would test to what extent ‘I want lots and lots and lots of kids’ parents are maximizing IGF per se, versus maximizing some combination of ‘have lots of descendants’, ‘make my descendants happy (even if this means having fewer of them)’, etc.
Yes, good point. I was looking at those statistics for a bit. Poorer parents do indeed tend to maximize their number of offspring no matter the cost while richer parents do not. It might be that parents overestimate the IGF payoffs of quality, but then that just makes them bad/incorrect optimizers. It wouldn’t make them less of an optimizer.
I think there also some other subtle nuances going on, like for instance, I’d consider myself fairly close to an IGF optimizer but I don’t care about all genes/traits equally. There is a multigenerational “strain” I identify strongly with. A bloodline, you could say. But my mediocre eye sight isn’t part of that, and I’d be surprised to hear this mechanic working any differently for others. Also, I’m not sure if all of the results of quality maximizers are obvious. E.g., Dutch society have a handful of extremely rich people that became rich 400 years ago during the golden age. Their bloodlines are keeping money made back then and the wealth increases every generation. Such a small segment is impossible to represent in controlled experiments, but maybe richer parents do start moving toward trying to “buy these lottery tickets” of reproduction, hoping to move their 1-2 kids in to the stratosphere. It’s not like they need 10 kids to be sure they will be represented in the next generation cause their kids will survive regardless.
Either way, I also realized I’m probably using a slightly different definition of optimizer than Nate is, so that probably explains some of the disagreement as well. I’d consider knowing X is the optimal action, but not being able to execute X cause you feel too much fear to still be in line with an optimizer’s behavior bcause you are optimizing over the options you have and a fear response limits your options. I suspect my perspective is not that uncommon and might explain some of the pushback Nate is referring to for the claim that is obvious from his definition.
Here is my best attempt at working out my thoughts on this, but I noticed I reached some confusion at various points. I figured I’d post it anyway in case it either actually makes sense or people have thoughts they feel like sharing that might help my confusion.
Edit: The article is now deprecated. Thanks for everyone commenting here for helping me understand the different definitions of optimizer. I do suspect my misunderstanding of Nate’s point might mirror why there is relatively common pushback against his claim? But maybe I’m typical minding.
The reason why we’re talking about humans and IGF is because there’s an analogy to AGI. If we select on the AI to be corrigible (or whatever nice property) in subhuman domains, will it generalize out-of-distribution to be corrigible when superhuman and performing coherent optimization?
Humans are not generalizing out of distribution. The average woman who wants to raise high quality children does not have the goal of maximizing IGF; she does try to instill the value of maximizing IGF into them, nor use the far more effective strategies of donating eggs, trying to get around egg donation limits, or getting her male relatives to donate sperm.
If the environment stabilizes, additional selection pressure might cause these people to become a majority. But we might not have additional selection pressure in the AGI case.
getting around egg donation limits is a defect strategy; my argument is, this seems like you’re really asking why we’re not generalizing into defecting in the societal IGF game. we don’t want to maximize first derivative of IGF if we want to plan millennia ahead for deep time reproduction rate—instead, we need to maximize group survival. that’s what is generally true in all religions, not just the high-defect “have lots of kids, so many you’re only barely qualifying K selected” religious bubbles of heavy reproduction.
to generalize this to agi, we need every agent to have a map of other agents’ empowerment, and seek to ensure all agents remain empowered, at the expense of some empowerment limits for agents that want to take unfair proportions of the universe’s empowerment.
I really think inclusive [memetic+genetic] fitness against a universal information empowerment objective (one that is intractable to evaluate) has something mathematical to say here, and I’m frustrated that I don’t seem to know how to put the math. it seems obvious and simple, such that anyone who had studied the field would know what it is I’m looking for with my informal speech; perhaps I it’s not should go study the fields I’m excited about more.
but it really seems like unfriendly foom is “ai decides we suck, can be beaten in the societal inclusive phenotype fitness game, and ~breeds a lot, maybe after killing us first, without any care for the loss of our [genetic+memetic] patterns’ fitness”.
and given that we think our genetic and memetic patterns are what are keeping us alive to pass on to the next generation, I ask again—why do we not look like semi-time-invariant IGMF fitness maximizers? we are the evolutionary process happening and we always have been. shouldn’t we even be so sure we’re IGMF maximizers that we should ask why IGMF maximizers look like us right now? like, this is the objective for evolution, shouldn’t we be doing interpretability on its output rather than fretting that we don’t obey it?
I disagree humans don’t optimize IGF:
We seem to have different observational data. I do know some people who make all their major life decisions based on quality and quantity of offspring. Most of them are female but this might be a bias in my sample. Specifically, quality trades off against quantity: waiting to find a fitter partner and thus losing part of your reproductive window is a common trade off. Similarly, making sure your children have much better lives than you by making sure your own material circumstances (or health!) are better is another. To be fair, they seem to be a small minority currently but I think that is due to point 3 and would be rectified in more a constant environment.
A lot of our drives do indirectly help IGF. Your aestethic sense may be somewhat wired to your ability to recognize and enjoy the visual appearance of healthy mates. Similarly for healthy environments to grow up in, etc. Sure, it gets hijacked for 20 other things, but how big is the loss in IGF to keep it around? I would argue it’s generally not an issue for the subsection of humans that are directly driven to have big families.
Many of us have badly optimized drives cause our environments have changed too fast. It will take a few generations of constant environment (not gonna happen at our current level of technological progress) to catch up. The obvious example is birth control: sex drive used to actually be a great proxy signal to optimize on offspring. Now it’s no longer but we still love sex. But in a few generations the only people alive are the descendants of people who wanted kids no matter their sex drive. ‘evolution’ will now select directly on desire for kids but it takes awhile to catch up.
I’m not saying evolution optimized us very well, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that we are not IGF maximizers. The environment has just changed much too quickly and selection pressure has been low the last few generations, but things like birth control actually introduce a new selection pressure on drive to reproduce. Humans are mediocre IGF maximizers in an environment that is changing unusually fast.
In the long term, we would expect humans to end up directly optimizing IGF (assuming no revolutions like AI doom or similar) due to evolution. The way this proceeds in practice is that people vary on the extent to which they optimize IGF vs other things, and those who optimize IGF pass on their genes, leading to higher optimization of IGF. So yes eventually these sorts of people will win, but as you admit yourself they are a small minority, so humans as they currently exist are mostly not IGF maximizers.
Also, regarding quality vs quantity, it’s my impression that society massively overinvests in quality relative to what would be implied by IGF. Society is incredibly safe compared to the past, so you don’t need much effort to make them survive. Insofar as there is an IGF value in quality, it’s probably in somehow convincing your children to also optimize for IGF, rather than do other things.
They are a small minority currently cause the environment changes so quickly right now. Things have been changing insanely fast in the last century or so but before the industrial revolution and especially before the agriculture revolution, humans were much better optimized for IGF, I think. Evolution is still ‘training’ us and these last 100 years have been a huge change compared to the generation length of humans. Nate is stating that humans genetically are not IGF maximizers, and that is false. We are, we are just currently heavily being ‘retrained’.
Re: quantity/quality. I think people nominally say they are optimizing for quality when really they just don’t have enough drive to have more kids at the current cost. There is much less cultural punishment on saying you are going for quality over quantity instead of saying you just don’t want more kids cause it’s a huge investment. Additionally, children who grow up in bad home environments seem less likely have kids of their own, and parents having mental breakdowns is one of the common ‘bad’ environments. So quality can definitely optimize for quantity in the long run.
Ps: i wish I had more time for more nuanced answers. Considering writing this up in more detail. My answers are rather rushed. My apologies
Given the ability to medically remove, store, and artificially inseminate eggs, current technologies make it possible for a woman to produce many more children than the historical limit of ~50 (i.e. one every 9 months for a woman’s entire reproductive years), and closer to the limit (note that each woman produces 100,000s of eggs).
I don’t have a worked out plan, but I could see a woman removing most of her eggs, somehow causing many other women to use her eggs to have children (whether it’s by finding infertile women, or paying people, or showing that the eggs would be healthier than others’), and having many more children than historically possible.
I suspect many women could have 50-100 children this way, and that peak women could have 10,000s of children this way, closer to the male model of reproduction.
I’d be interested to know the maximum number of children any woman has had in history, and also since the invention of this sort of medical technology.
I imagine that such a world would have a market (and class system) based around being able to get your eggs born. There are services where a different woman will have your children, but I think the maximizer world would look more like poor women primarily being paid to have children (and being pregnant >50% of their lives) and rich women primarily paying to have children (and having 1000s of children born).
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I also suspect that population would skyrocket relative to the current numbers (e.g. be 10-1000x the current size). Perhaps efforts to colonize Mars would have been sustained during the 20th century, as this planet would have been more obviously overflowing, though probably we would just be using way more of the surface of the Earth for living on.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.
Is this the best strategy for maximizing IGF? Do happier and wealthier kids have more offspring? Given that wealthier countries tend to have lower birth rates, I wonder if the IGF-maximizing strategy would instead often look like trying to have lots of poor children with few options?
(I’ll note as an aside that even if this is false, it should definitely be a thing many parents seriously consider doing and are strongly tempted by, if the parents are really maximizing IGF rather than maximizing proxies like “their kids’ happiness”. It would be very weird, for example, if an IGF maximizer reacted to this strategy with revulsion.)
I’d be similarly curious if there are cases where making your kids less happy, less intelligent, less psychologically stable, etc. increased their expected offspring. This would test to what extent ‘I want lots and lots and lots of kids’ parents are maximizing IGF per se, versus maximizing some combination of ‘have lots of descendants’, ‘make my descendants happy (even if this means having fewer of them)’, etc.
Yes, good point. I was looking at those statistics for a bit. Poorer parents do indeed tend to maximize their number of offspring no matter the cost while richer parents do not. It might be that parents overestimate the IGF payoffs of quality, but then that just makes them bad/incorrect optimizers. It wouldn’t make them less of an optimizer.
I think there also some other subtle nuances going on, like for instance, I’d consider myself fairly close to an IGF optimizer but I don’t care about all genes/traits equally. There is a multigenerational “strain” I identify strongly with. A bloodline, you could say. But my mediocre eye sight isn’t part of that, and I’d be surprised to hear this mechanic working any differently for others. Also, I’m not sure if all of the results of quality maximizers are obvious. E.g., Dutch society have a handful of extremely rich people that became rich 400 years ago during the golden age. Their bloodlines are keeping money made back then and the wealth increases every generation. Such a small segment is impossible to represent in controlled experiments, but maybe richer parents do start moving toward trying to “buy these lottery tickets” of reproduction, hoping to move their 1-2 kids in to the stratosphere. It’s not like they need 10 kids to be sure they will be represented in the next generation cause their kids will survive regardless.
Either way, I also realized I’m probably using a slightly different definition of optimizer than Nate is, so that probably explains some of the disagreement as well. I’d consider knowing X is the optimal action, but not being able to execute X cause you feel too much fear to still be in line with an optimizer’s behavior bcause you are optimizing over the options you have and a fear response limits your options. I suspect my perspective is not that uncommon and might explain some of the pushback Nate is referring to for the claim that is obvious from his definition.
Here is my best attempt at working out my thoughts on this, but I noticed I reached some confusion at various points. I figured I’d post it anyway in case it either actually makes sense or people have thoughts they feel like sharing that might help my confusion.
Edit: The article is now deprecated. Thanks for everyone commenting here for helping me understand the different definitions of optimizer. I do suspect my misunderstanding of Nate’s point might mirror why there is relatively common pushback against his claim? But maybe I’m typical minding.
The reason why we’re talking about humans and IGF is because there’s an analogy to AGI. If we select on the AI to be corrigible (or whatever nice property) in subhuman domains, will it generalize out-of-distribution to be corrigible when superhuman and performing coherent optimization?
Humans are not generalizing out of distribution. The average woman who wants to raise high quality children does not have the goal of maximizing IGF; she does try to instill the value of maximizing IGF into them, nor use the far more effective strategies of donating eggs, trying to get around egg donation limits, or getting her male relatives to donate sperm.
If the environment stabilizes, additional selection pressure might cause these people to become a majority. But we might not have additional selection pressure in the AGI case.
getting around egg donation limits is a defect strategy; my argument is, this seems like you’re really asking why we’re not generalizing into defecting in the societal IGF game. we don’t want to maximize first derivative of IGF if we want to plan millennia ahead for deep time reproduction rate—instead, we need to maximize group survival. that’s what is generally true in all religions, not just the high-defect “have lots of kids, so many you’re only barely qualifying K selected” religious bubbles of heavy reproduction.
to generalize this to agi, we need every agent to have a map of other agents’ empowerment, and seek to ensure all agents remain empowered, at the expense of some empowerment limits for agents that want to take unfair proportions of the universe’s empowerment.
I really think inclusive [memetic+genetic] fitness against a universal information empowerment objective (one that is intractable to evaluate) has something mathematical to say here, and I’m frustrated that I don’t seem to know how to put the math. it seems obvious and simple, such that anyone who had studied the field would know what it is I’m looking for with my informal speech; perhaps I it’s not should go study the fields I’m excited about more.
but it really seems like unfriendly foom is “ai decides we suck, can be beaten in the societal inclusive phenotype fitness game, and ~breeds a lot, maybe after killing us first, without any care for the loss of our [genetic+memetic] patterns’ fitness”.
and given that we think our genetic and memetic patterns are what are keeping us alive to pass on to the next generation, I ask again—why do we not look like semi-time-invariant IGMF fitness maximizers? we are the evolutionary process happening and we always have been. shouldn’t we even be so sure we’re IGMF maximizers that we should ask why IGMF maximizers look like us right now? like, this is the objective for evolution, shouldn’t we be doing interpretability on its output rather than fretting that we don’t obey it?