All three of your examples involve using a phrase as a shorthand for a track record. You call something a pollution-reducing law, a vehicle-producer, or a fit athlete after observing consistent pollution reduction, vehicles, or field records. That’s like the doctor calling something a “sleeping pill”, which is ok because he’s doing that after observing its track record.
The problem is when there is no track record. For example, when someone proposes a new “environmental protection” law that has not really been tested, others who hear that name may be less skeptical than if they hear “subsidies for Teslas”. In the latter case, they may ask whether this would really help the environment and whether there might be unintended consequences.
Suppose we have a black box. We put the word “airoplane” into the box, and out comes a well designed and efficient airoplane. We put the word “wind turbine” in and get out a highly efficient wind turbine. We expect that if we entered the word “car”, this box would output a well designed car.
In other words, seeing one result that is highly optimised tells you that other results from the same process are likely to be optimized.
The term “optimization power” doesn’t seem to add much here. Any prediction I make would be based on the track record you mentioned (using some model that “fits” that training data). For example, maybe we would predict it producing a good car, but not necessarily a movie or a laptop. Even for the examples of “optimization processes” mentioned in the article, such as humans and natural selection, I predict using the observed track record. If we say a chess player has reached a higher Elo than another, we can use that to predict that he’ll beat the other one. That will invite justified questions about the chess variant, their past matches, and recent forms. Why bring in the claim that he has more “optimization power”, which provokes fewer such questions?
All three of your examples involve using a phrase as a shorthand for a track record. You call something a pollution-reducing law, a vehicle-producer, or a fit athlete after observing consistent pollution reduction, vehicles, or field records. That’s like the doctor calling something a “sleeping pill”, which is ok because he’s doing that after observing its track record.
The problem is when there is no track record. For example, when someone proposes a new “environmental protection” law that has not really been tested, others who hear that name may be less skeptical than if they hear “subsidies for Teslas”. In the latter case, they may ask whether this would really help the environment and whether there might be unintended consequences.
The term “optimization power” doesn’t seem to add much here. Any prediction I make would be based on the track record you mentioned (using some model that “fits” that training data). For example, maybe we would predict it producing a good car, but not necessarily a movie or a laptop. Even for the examples of “optimization processes” mentioned in the article, such as humans and natural selection, I predict using the observed track record. If we say a chess player has reached a higher Elo than another, we can use that to predict that he’ll beat the other one. That will invite justified questions about the chess variant, their past matches, and recent forms. Why bring in the claim that he has more “optimization power”, which provokes fewer such questions?
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.