Fitness does have a relatively strong correlation with overall human utility.
I really don’t think that’s true, if you mean ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense. One massive counterexample is the popularity of birth control—which seems to rise as people feel better off. Evolutionary fitness is not what we, as humans, value. And a good job too, I say: evolution produces horrors and monstrosities, favouring only those things that tend to reproduce.
That’s why I said relatively. Obviously, what we value is better correlated with utility since this is almost a tautological statement. However, so far we weren’t able to come up with any other function better correlated with utility than fitness, although we can see many clear cases where it fails miserably in doing that.
...so far we weren’t able to come up with any other function better correlated with utility than fitness...
Really? Are people with eight children much better off than people with one child? Do people who choose to have no children lead terrible lives? Even crude metrics like “income” and “seconds humans spend smiling” seem like much better proxies for utility than genetic fitness.
One thing are good proxies for utility at the present time, another is coming up with a design-shaping process which generates utility out of a primitive earth across billions of years. Even looking forward, would you claim that a smiling or income maximizer would do better than evolution in the next 10,000 years? I highly doubt. Perhaps a better comparison, but still at fault, would be between our attempts of envisioning a FAI and evolution.
I really don’t think that’s true, if you mean ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense. One massive counterexample is the popularity of birth control—which seems to rise as people feel better off. Evolutionary fitness is not what we, as humans, value. And a good job too, I say: evolution produces horrors and monstrosities, favouring only those things that tend to reproduce.
That’s why I said relatively. Obviously, what we value is better correlated with utility since this is almost a tautological statement. However, so far we weren’t able to come up with any other function better correlated with utility than fitness, although we can see many clear cases where it fails miserably in doing that.
Really? Are people with eight children much better off than people with one child? Do people who choose to have no children lead terrible lives? Even crude metrics like “income” and “seconds humans spend smiling” seem like much better proxies for utility than genetic fitness.
One thing are good proxies for utility at the present time, another is coming up with a design-shaping process which generates utility out of a primitive earth across billions of years. Even looking forward, would you claim that a smiling or income maximizer would do better than evolution in the next 10,000 years? I highly doubt. Perhaps a better comparison, but still at fault, would be between our attempts of envisioning a FAI and evolution.