Overall this critique has tons of useful links and resources, so thanks for that! :) I also think it’s misunderstanding what we meant by assumption 1 (local random initialization). I think some other commenters have addressed this, though.
Genetic influences on the brain’s connectome are often modulated by age and sex – in contrast to Shard Theory’s implicit model that all humans, of all ages, and both sexes, shared the same subcortical hardwiring. [...]
Integration of the Human Connectome Project and the Allen Human Brain Atlas reveals pervasive heritability for myelination patterns in human neocortex – which directly contradicts Shard Theory’s Assumption 1 that “Most of the circuits in the brain are learned from scratch, in the sense of being mostly randomly initialized and not mostly genetically hard-coded.”
But to clarify, neither of these contrast with what I would expect. I don’t see why shard theory implies that e.g. reward circuitry can’t vary depending on the sex chromosome, or be differentially activated over the course of the lifetime?
I also don’t presently see why myelination heritability contradicts learning from scratch. Genetic influence on what areas get myelinated in what circumstances, doesn’t conflict with the idea “the genome isn’t functionally hardcoding a bunch of circuitry like ‘how to recognize a dog’ or ‘how bold to be when flirting with a potential mate’.” (Let me know if I seem to have misunderstood your points, here)
Assumption 1 in Shard Theory is presented as foundational to the whole project (although I’m not sure it really is).
I think it’s not essential to the mechanistic analysis, but it’s such an important part of my model of how people work that I included it in the three main assumptions. If assumption 1 is true, we can extract a lot more information about alignment (relative ease of aligning agents to various kinds of concepts—eg inclusive genetic fitness versus eating food).
But if it weren’t true, I’d start wondering about what other complicated solutions evolution somehow found, which would make me put less weight on the mechanistic analysis in the shard theory essay. I’d start wondering about other influences on how values get there, and how I make decisions, beyond learned and meta-learned circuitry in the brain.
Overall this critique has tons of useful links and resources, so thanks for that! :) I also think it’s misunderstanding what we meant by assumption 1 (local random initialization). I think some other commenters have addressed this, though.
But to clarify, neither of these contrast with what I would expect. I don’t see why shard theory implies that e.g. reward circuitry can’t vary depending on the sex chromosome, or be differentially activated over the course of the lifetime?
I also don’t presently see why myelination heritability contradicts learning from scratch. Genetic influence on what areas get myelinated in what circumstances, doesn’t conflict with the idea “the genome isn’t functionally hardcoding a bunch of circuitry like ‘how to recognize a dog’ or ‘how bold to be when flirting with a potential mate’.” (Let me know if I seem to have misunderstood your points, here)
I think it’s not essential to the mechanistic analysis, but it’s such an important part of my model of how people work that I included it in the three main assumptions. If assumption 1 is true, we can extract a lot more information about alignment (relative ease of aligning agents to various kinds of concepts—eg inclusive genetic fitness versus eating food).
But if it weren’t true, I’d start wondering about what other complicated solutions evolution somehow found, which would make me put less weight on the mechanistic analysis in the shard theory essay. I’d start wondering about other influences on how values get there, and how I make decisions, beyond learned and meta-learned circuitry in the brain.