I want to flag that I’ve become much less convinced that the secret of our success/cultural learning is nearly as broad or powerful as an explanation as I used to believe, and I now believe that most of the success of humans comes more so down to the human body being very well optimized for tool use, combined with the bitter lesson for biological brains, and a way to actually cool them down:
This is because Heinrich mostly faked his evidence:
Do you believe it effects most of it or just individual instances, the example you’re pointing at there isn’t load bearing and there are other people who have written similar things but with more nuance on cultural evolution such as cecilia hayes with cognitive gadgets?
Like I’m not sure how much to throw out based on that?
I’d argue quite a lot, though independent evidence could cause me to update me here, and a key reason for that is there is a plausible argument that a lot of the evidence for cultural learning/cultural practices written in the 1940s-1960s were fundamentally laundered to hide evidence of secret practices.
More generally, I was worried that such an obviously false claim implied a lot more hidden to me wrong claims that I couldn’t test, so after spot-checking I didn’t want to invest more time into an expensive search process.
Just wanted to drop these two books here if you’re interested in the cultural evolution side more:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707599-moral-tribes
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-of-our-success
I want to flag that I’ve become much less convinced that the secret of our success/cultural learning is nearly as broad or powerful as an explanation as I used to believe, and I now believe that most of the success of humans comes more so down to the human body being very well optimized for tool use, combined with the bitter lesson for biological brains, and a way to actually cool them down:
This is because Heinrich mostly faked his evidence:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8ZLeiAFrSAGLEvX8/#MFyWDjh4FomyLnXDk
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8ZLeiAFrSAGLEvX8/#q7bXpZb8JzHkXjLm7
Do you believe it effects most of it or just individual instances, the example you’re pointing at there isn’t load bearing and there are other people who have written similar things but with more nuance on cultural evolution such as cecilia hayes with cognitive gadgets?
Like I’m not sure how much to throw out based on that?
I’d argue quite a lot, though independent evidence could cause me to update me here, and a key reason for that is there is a plausible argument that a lot of the evidence for cultural learning/cultural practices written in the 1940s-1960s were fundamentally laundered to hide evidence of secret practices.
More generally, I was worried that such an obviously false claim implied a lot more hidden to me wrong claims that I couldn’t test, so after spot-checking I didn’t want to invest more time into an expensive search process.