This is cool, I had never heard of the Ergodic Hierarchy before!
Related to your second point—Alex Cai showed this psychology paper to me. It found that when humans are predicting the behavior of physical systems (e.g. will this stack of blocks fall over?), in their subconscious they are doing exactly this: running the scene in their brain’s internal physics engine with a bunch of initial perturbations/randomness and selecting the majority result. Of course, predicting how a tower of blocks will topple is a lot different from predicting the probability of an event one month into the future.
This is cool, I had never heard of the Ergodic Hierarchy before!
Related to your second point—Alex Cai showed this psychology paper to me. It found that when humans are predicting the behavior of physical systems (e.g. will this stack of blocks fall over?), in their subconscious they are doing exactly this: running the scene in their brain’s internal physics engine with a bunch of initial perturbations/randomness and selecting the majority result. Of course, predicting how a tower of blocks will topple is a lot different from predicting the probability of an event one month into the future.