Crops and domestic animals that have been artificially selected for various qualities.
I feel fairly confident this was done before we understood evolution.
The fact that your kids will probably turn out like you without specific intervention on your part to make that happen.
Also seems like a thing we knew before we understood evolution.
The medical community encouraging people to not use antibiotics unnecessarily.
That one seems plausible; though I’d want to know more about the history of how this came up. It also seems like the sort of thing that we’d have figured out even if we didn’t understand evolution, though it would have taken longer, and would have involved more deaths.
Going back to the AI case, my takeaway from this example is that understanding non-real things can still help if you need to get everything right the first time. And in fact, I do think that if you posit a discontinuity, such that we have to get everything right before that discontinuity, then the non-MIRI strategy looks worse because you can’t gather as much empirical evidence (though I still wouldn’t be convinced that the MIRI strategy is the right one).
Ah, I didn’t quite realise you meant to talk about “human understanding of the theory of evolution” rather than evolution itself. I still suspect that the theory of evolution is so fundamental to our understanding of biology, and our understanding of biology so useful to humanity, that if human understanding of evolution doesn’t contribute much to human welfare it’s just because most applications deal with pretty long time-scales.
(Also I don’t get why this discussion is treating evolution as ‘non-real’: stuff like the Price equation seems pretty formal to me. To me it seems like a pretty mathematisable theory with some hard-to-specify inputs like fitness.)
(Also I don’t get why this discussion is treating evolution as ‘non-real’: stuff like the Price equation seems pretty formal to me. To me it seems like a pretty mathematisable theory with some hard-to-specify inputs like fitness.)
Yeah, I agree, see my edits to the original comment and also my reply to Ben. Abram’s comment was talking about reproductive fitness the entire time and then suddenly switched to evolution at the end; I didn’t notice this and kept thinking of evolution as reproductive fitness in my head, and then wrote a comment based on that where I used the word evolution despite thinking about reproductive fitness and the general idea of “there is a local hill-climbing search on reproductive fitness” while ignoring the hard math.
I feel fairly confident this was done before we understood evolution.
Also seems like a thing we knew before we understood evolution.
That one seems plausible; though I’d want to know more about the history of how this came up. It also seems like the sort of thing that we’d have figured out even if we didn’t understand evolution, though it would have taken longer, and would have involved more deaths.
Going back to the AI case, my takeaway from this example is that understanding non-real things can still help if you need to get everything right the first time. And in fact, I do think that if you posit a discontinuity, such that we have to get everything right before that discontinuity, then the non-MIRI strategy looks worse because you can’t gather as much empirical evidence (though I still wouldn’t be convinced that the MIRI strategy is the right one).
Ah, I didn’t quite realise you meant to talk about “human understanding of the theory of evolution” rather than evolution itself. I still suspect that the theory of evolution is so fundamental to our understanding of biology, and our understanding of biology so useful to humanity, that if human understanding of evolution doesn’t contribute much to human welfare it’s just because most applications deal with pretty long time-scales.
(Also I don’t get why this discussion is treating evolution as ‘non-real’: stuff like the Price equation seems pretty formal to me. To me it seems like a pretty mathematisable theory with some hard-to-specify inputs like fitness.)
Yeah, I agree, see my edits to the original comment and also my reply to Ben. Abram’s comment was talking about reproductive fitness the entire time and then suddenly switched to evolution at the end; I didn’t notice this and kept thinking of evolution as reproductive fitness in my head, and then wrote a comment based on that where I used the word evolution despite thinking about reproductive fitness and the general idea of “there is a local hill-climbing search on reproductive fitness” while ignoring the hard math.