Ability to cooperate is important, but I think that status-jockeying is a more ‘fundamental’ advantage because it gives an advantage to individuals, not just groups. Any adaptation that aids groups must first be useful enough to individuals to reach fixation(or near-fixation) in some groups.
I don’t think so, jockeying can only get you so far, and even then only in situations where physical reality doesn’t matter. If you’re in a group of ~50 people, and your rival brings home a rabbit, but you and your friend each bring back half a stag because of your superior coordination capabilities, the guy who brought back the rabbit can say all the clever things he wants, but it’s going to be clear to everyone who’s actually deserving of status. The two of you will gain a significant fitness advantage over the rest of the members of the tribe, and so you will outcompete them.
Fair point, but I note that the cooperative ability only increases fitness here because it boosts the individuals’ status, i.e. they are in a situation where status-jockeying and cooperative behavior are aligned. Of course it’s true that they _are_ often so aligned.
There are primates with proto-language, which I think let them communicate well enough to do these sorts of things. The question then becomes “why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?”, and it seems like runaway dynamics make more sense here (in a way that rhymes with the Deutsch-style “humans developed causal reasoning as part of figuring out how to do ritual-style mimicry better” arguments).
why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?
Bandwidth. 4 grunts let you communicate 2 bits of information per grunt n grunts let you communicate log(n) bits per grunt. In addition, without a code or compositional language, that’s the most information you can communicate. Even the simple agents in the OpenAI link were developing a binary code to communicate because 2 bits wasn’t enough:
The first problem we ran into was the agents’ tendency to create a single utterance and intersperse it with spaces to create meaning.
In my model, the marginal utility of extra bandwidth and a more expressive code is large and positive when cooperating. This goes on up to the information processing limits of the brain, at which point further bandwidth is probably less beneficial. I think we don’t talk as fast as Marshal Mathers simply because our brains can’t keep up. Evolution is just following the gradient.
The main reason I don’t think runaway dynamics are a major factor is simply because language is very grounded. Most of our language is dedicated to referencing reality. If language evolved because of a signalling spiral, especially an IQ signalling spiral, I’d expect language to look like a game, something like verbal chess. Sometimes it does look like that, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Social signalling seems to be mediated through other communication mechanisms, such as body-language and tone or things like vibing. In all cases, the actual content of the language is mostly irrelevant and doesn’t need to be the expressive, grounded, and compositional mechanism of language to fulfill it’s purpose.
I think this explanation misses something very important. Namely, language lets small groups of agents coordinate for their collective gain. The richer the language and the higher the bandwidth, the more effectively the agents can work together and the more complicated the tasks that they can solve. Agents that can work together will mop the floor with agents that can’t. It’s easy to construct tasks that can only be achieved by letting agents communicate with each other and I suspect the ancestral environment provided plenty of challenges that were easier to solve with communication. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large amount of the sophistication of our language comes from it’s ability to let us jockey for status or to deceive others to more effectively propagate our genes, but I don’t think we should discount that language vastly increases the power of agents that are willing to cooperate.
Ability to cooperate is important, but I think that status-jockeying is a more ‘fundamental’ advantage because it gives an advantage to individuals, not just groups. Any adaptation that aids groups must first be useful enough to individuals to reach fixation(or near-fixation) in some groups.
I don’t think so, jockeying can only get you so far, and even then only in situations where physical reality doesn’t matter. If you’re in a group of ~50 people, and your rival brings home a rabbit, but you and your friend each bring back half a stag because of your superior coordination capabilities, the guy who brought back the rabbit can say all the clever things he wants, but it’s going to be clear to everyone who’s actually deserving of status. The two of you will gain a significant fitness advantage over the rest of the members of the tribe, and so you will outcompete them.
Fair point, but I note that the cooperative ability only increases fitness here because it boosts the individuals’ status, i.e. they are in a situation where status-jockeying and cooperative behavior are aligned. Of course it’s true that they _are_ often so aligned.
There are primates with proto-language, which I think let them communicate well enough to do these sorts of things. The question then becomes “why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?”, and it seems like runaway dynamics make more sense here (in a way that rhymes with the Deutsch-style “humans developed causal reasoning as part of figuring out how to do ritual-style mimicry better” arguments).
Bandwidth. 4 grunts let you communicate 2 bits of information per grunt n grunts let you communicate log(n) bits per grunt. In addition, without a code or compositional language, that’s the most information you can communicate. Even the simple agents in the OpenAI link were developing a binary code to communicate because 2 bits wasn’t enough:
In my model, the marginal utility of extra bandwidth and a more expressive code is large and positive when cooperating. This goes on up to the information processing limits of the brain, at which point further bandwidth is probably less beneficial. I think we don’t talk as fast as Marshal Mathers simply because our brains can’t keep up. Evolution is just following the gradient.
The main reason I don’t think runaway dynamics are a major factor is simply because language is very grounded. Most of our language is dedicated to referencing reality. If language evolved because of a signalling spiral, especially an IQ signalling spiral, I’d expect language to look like a game, something like verbal chess. Sometimes it does look like that, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Social signalling seems to be mediated through other communication mechanisms, such as body-language and tone or things like vibing. In all cases, the actual content of the language is mostly irrelevant and doesn’t need to be the expressive, grounded, and compositional mechanism of language to fulfill it’s purpose.