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 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.