A lot of these points about evolution register to me as straightforwardly false.
I don’t know which particular points you mean. The only one that it sounds like you’re arguing against is
he theory of evolution has not had nearly the same impact on our ability to make big things [...] I struggle to name a way that evolution affects an everyday person
Were there others?
I would take a pretty strong bet that the theory of natural selection has been revolutionary in the history of medicine.
I think the mathematical theory of natural selection + the theory of DNA / genes were probably very influential in both medicine and biology, because they make very precise predictions and the real world is a very good fit for the models they propose. (That is, they are “real”, in the sense that “real” is meant in the OP.) I don’t think that an improved mathematical understanding of what makes particular animals more fit has had that much of an impact on anything.
Separately, I also think the general insight of “each part of these organisms has been designed by a local hill-climbing process to maximise reproduction” would not have been very influential in either medicine or biology, had it not been accompanied by the math (and assuming no one ever developed the math).
On reflection, my original comment was quite unclear about this, I’ll add a note to it to clarify.
I do still stand by the thing that I meant in my original comment, which is that to the extent that you think rationality is like reproductive fitness (the claim made in the OP that Abram seems to agree with), where it is a very complicated mess of a function that we don’t hope to capture in a simple equation; I don’t think that improved understanding of that sort of thing has made much of an impact on our ability to do “big things” (as a proxy, things that affect normal people).
Within evolution, the claim would be that there has not been much impact from gaining an improved mathematical understanding of the reproductive fitness of some organism, or the “reproductive fitness” of some meme for memetic evolution.
I think the mathematical theory of natural selection + the theory of DNA / genes were probably very influential in both medicine and biology, because they make very precise predictions and the real world is a very good fit for the models they propose. (That is, they are “real”, in the sense that “real” is meant in the OP.)
In contrast, I think the general insight of “each part of these organisms has been designed by a local hill-climbing process to maximise reproduction” would not have been very influential in either medicine or biology, had it not been accompanied by the math.
But surely you wouldn’t get the mathematics of natural selection without the general insight, and so I think the general insight deserves to get a bunch of the credit. And both the mathematics of natural selection and the general insight seem pretty tied up to the notion of ‘reproductive fitness’.
But surely you wouldn’t get the mathematics of natural selection without the general insight, and so I think the general insight deserves to get a bunch of the credit. And both the mathematics of natural selection and the general insight seem pretty tied up to the notion of ‘reproductive fitness’.
Here is my understanding of what Abram thinks:
Rationality is like “reproductive fitness”, in that it is hard to formalize and turn into hard math. Regardless of how much theoretical progress we make on understanding rationality, it is never going to turn into something that can make very precise, accurate predictions about real systems. Nonetheless, qualitative understanding of rationality, of the sort that can make rough predictions about real systems, is useful for AI safety.
Hopefully that makes it clear why I’m trying to imagine a counterfactual where the math was never developed.
It’s possible that I’m misunderstanding Abram and he actually thinks that we will be able to make precise, accurate predictions about real systems; but if that’s the case I think he in fact is “realist about rationality” and this post is in fact pointing at a crux between him and Richard (or him and me), though not as well as he would like.
I don’t know which particular points you mean. The only one that it sounds like you’re arguing against is
Were there others?
I think the mathematical theory of natural selection + the theory of DNA / genes were probably very influential in both medicine and biology, because they make very precise predictions and the real world is a very good fit for the models they propose. (That is, they are “real”, in the sense that “real” is meant in the OP.) I don’t think that an improved mathematical understanding of what makes particular animals more fit has had that much of an impact on anything.
Separately, I also think the general insight of “each part of these organisms has been designed by a local hill-climbing process to maximise reproduction” would not have been very influential in either medicine or biology, had it not been accompanied by the math (and assuming no one ever developed the math).
On reflection, my original comment was quite unclear about this, I’ll add a note to it to clarify.
I do still stand by the thing that I meant in my original comment, which is that to the extent that you think rationality is like reproductive fitness (the claim made in the OP that Abram seems to agree with), where it is a very complicated mess of a function that we don’t hope to capture in a simple equation; I don’t think that improved understanding of that sort of thing has made much of an impact on our ability to do “big things” (as a proxy, things that affect normal people).
Within evolution, the claim would be that there has not been much impact from gaining an improved mathematical understanding of the reproductive fitness of some organism, or the “reproductive fitness” of some meme for memetic evolution.
But surely you wouldn’t get the mathematics of natural selection without the general insight, and so I think the general insight deserves to get a bunch of the credit. And both the mathematics of natural selection and the general insight seem pretty tied up to the notion of ‘reproductive fitness’.
Here is my understanding of what Abram thinks:
Rationality is like “reproductive fitness”, in that it is hard to formalize and turn into hard math. Regardless of how much theoretical progress we make on understanding rationality, it is never going to turn into something that can make very precise, accurate predictions about real systems. Nonetheless, qualitative understanding of rationality, of the sort that can make rough predictions about real systems, is useful for AI safety.
Hopefully that makes it clear why I’m trying to imagine a counterfactual where the math was never developed.
It’s possible that I’m misunderstanding Abram and he actually thinks that we will be able to make precise, accurate predictions about real systems; but if that’s the case I think he in fact is “realist about rationality” and this post is in fact pointing at a crux between him and Richard (or him and me), though not as well as he would like.