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Superstimuli

TagLast edit: Feb 8, 2022, 9:28 PM by Gunnar_Zarncke

Humans evolved various desires that promoted survival and reproductive success in the ancestral environment. Superstimuli are modern inventions that satisfy desires better than anything in the ancestral environment could but are detrimental to survival, reproduction, or other high-level goals.

See also: Evolutionary Psychology, Goodhart’s Law, Wireheading

A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point in tastespace that wasn’t in the training dataset—an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilisation

Notable Posts

External Links

See Also

Su­per­stim­uli and the Col­lapse of Western Civilization

Eliezer YudkowskyMar 16, 2007, 6:10 PM
150 points
90 comments4 min readLW link

Adap­ta­tion-Ex­e­cuters, not Fit­ness-Maximizers

Eliezer YudkowskyNov 11, 2007, 6:39 AM
165 points
33 comments3 min readLW link

Is Click­bait De­stroy­ing Our Gen­eral In­tel­li­gence?

Eliezer YudkowskyNov 16, 2018, 11:06 PM
191 points
65 comments5 min readLW link2 reviews

[link] The AI Gir­lfriend Se­duc­ing China’s Lonely Men

Kaj_SotalaDec 14, 2020, 8:18 PM
34 points
10 comments1 min readLW link
(www.sixthtone.com)

Satis­ficers want to be­come maximisers

Stuart_ArmstrongOct 21, 2011, 4:27 PM
38 points
70 comments1 min readLW link

So­cial host liability

CraigMichaelMay 9, 2021, 7:24 AM
22 points
39 comments6 min readLW link

[Question] Has there been a “memetic col­lapse”?

Eli TyreDec 28, 2019, 5:36 AM
32 points
7 comments1 min readLW link

How do you deal w/​ Su­per Stim­uli?

Logan RiggsJan 14, 2025, 3:14 PM
99 points
25 comments3 min readLW link

Good­hart’s Law and Emotions

Zero ContradictionsJul 7, 2024, 8:32 AM
1 point
5 comments1 min readLW link
(expandingrationality.substack.com)

“Epiphany ad­dic­tion”

cousin_itAug 3, 2012, 5:52 PM
69 points
90 comments1 min readLW link

Lo­tuses and Loot Boxes

DavidmanheimMay 17, 2018, 12:21 AM
14 points
2 comments4 min readLW link

[Question] When(if ever) are su­per­stim­uli good/​use­ful/​ad­van­ta­geous?

PerhapsAug 1, 2023, 3:50 PM
−7 points
2 comments1 min readLW link

Ba­bies and Bun­nies: A Cau­tion About Evo-Psych

AlicornFeb 22, 2010, 1:53 AM
81 points
843 comments2 min readLW link

Two Ne­glected Prob­lems in Hu­man-AI Safety

Wei DaiDec 16, 2018, 10:13 PM
102 points
25 comments2 min readLW link

Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

ZviSep 10, 2019, 12:10 PM
47 points
4 comments5 min readLW link
(thezvi.wordpress.com)

I’m go­ing to help you quit Face­book with some science

EloApr 12, 2018, 3:09 AM
30 points
11 comments5 min readLW link

New Im­proved Lottery

Eliezer YudkowskyApr 13, 2007, 11:42 PM
122 points
43 comments2 min readLW link

Ra­tion­al­ist Lent is over

Qiaochu_YuanMar 30, 2018, 5:57 AM
20 points
16 comments1 min readLW link

Lot­ter­ies: A Waste of Hope

Eliezer YudkowskyApr 13, 2007, 5:36 AM
96 points
73 comments2 min readLW link
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