I would be curious to know how you calculated this, but sure.
I just meant that if Genghis has 2^10 offspring, and likewise 1/2^10 men, while other men have 0 offspring, that’s 9 or 10 bits. Of course that’s not what actually happens, but what happens is some intermediate version that’s like 1-3 bits or something.
the total would be 75 bits. That’s… not very much?
I think it’s surely less than that. I think when people say evolution is slow, they mean something much stronger, like that evolution is only 1-5 bits / generation.
I think you might also be discounting what’s being selected on. You wrote:
Whereas I think I could easily do orders of magnitude more in a day.
You can do orders of magnitude more opimization power to something on some criterion. But evolution’s evaluation function is much higher quality than yours. It evaluates the success of a complex organism in a complex environment, which is very complex to evaluate and is relevant to deep things (such as discovering intelligence). In a day, you are not able to do 75 bits of selection on cognitive architectures being good for producing intelligence.
I think you might also be discounting what’s being selected on. You wrote:
Whereas I think I could easily do orders of magnitude more in a day.
You can do orders of magnitude more opimization power to something on some criterion. But evolution’s evaluation function is much higher quality than yours. It evaluates the success of a complex organism in a complex environment, which is very complex to evaluate and is relevant to deep things (such as discovering intelligence). In a day, you are not able to do 75 bits of selection on cognitive architectures being good for producing intelligence.
I agree that this is an important distinction and didn’t mean to imply that my selection is on criteria that are as difficult as evolution’s.
I just meant that if Genghis has 2^10 offspring, and likewise 1/2^10 men, while other men have 0 offspring, that’s 9 or 10 bits. Of course that’s not what actually happens, but what happens is some intermediate version that’s like 1-3 bits or something.
I think it’s surely less than that. I think when people say evolution is slow, they mean something much stronger, like that evolution is only 1-5 bits / generation.
I think you might also be discounting what’s being selected on. You wrote:
You can do orders of magnitude more opimization power to something on some criterion. But evolution’s evaluation function is much higher quality than yours. It evaluates the success of a complex organism in a complex environment, which is very complex to evaluate and is relevant to deep things (such as discovering intelligence). In a day, you are not able to do 75 bits of selection on cognitive architectures being good for producing intelligence.
I agree that this is an important distinction and didn’t mean to imply that my selection is on criteria that are as difficult as evolution’s.