Malmesbury
In the sequel: the mirror mold evolves into intelligent life, develops a brain on its own, and threatens to take over the world. U3 begrudgingly sends an ambassador to the human city to collect samples of mirror-mirror-pathogens.
That’s impressive work! Out of curiosity, how long did it take to figure all of this out?
Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can’t distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there’s nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.
Oh yeah, I mean to compare things that have the same functionality (e.g. human-made butterfly robot vs natural butterfly). Obviously shovels are more simple than butterflies. But, seeing stuff like the wax motor and other examples people have posted, humans are definitely capable of coming up with great simple mechanisms, and I underestimated that. Thanks for bringing it up.
Kudos for taking the challenge! If I understand correctly, your first point is actually pretty similar to how E. coli follows gradients of nutrients, even when the scale of the gradient is much larger than the size of a cell.
Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
You might enjoy this story I wrote a few months ago, also about AI doom and also set in the future: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgTsxMq5bgzKTLsLA/this-is-already-your-second-chance
Self-review: It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten most of the details of the post, so it’s a good time to re-read it and get a sense of what it reads like for someone who’s discovering the content for the first time. I still believe most of the ideas here are correct. My goal here was to write a bottom-up overview of how the basic molecular structure of DNA might “inevitably” lead to stuff like sexually-dimorphic ornaments, after a long chain of events. The point I wanted to get at was that the male/female binary, which human cultures often depict as a metaphysical fundamental principle of the universe, results from a series of pretty prosaic evolutionary constraints. Love itself isn’t quite as magical and central to the Universe as we make it out to be. This post hints at the idea, but I could have expanded more in that direction. In hindsight, I think most people saw this as a kind of textbook explanation of the evolution of sex, and I guess this post does a OK job at this. However, it’s completely skipping over some important theories, namely the Red Queen Race and the handicap principle. Maybe I should add some links at the end. (To my defense, I did include a disclaimer about this not being a complete overview of the field.)
Which one? I hope it’s not the one where you have to put chocolate, because this is the most crucial instruction.
This is already your second chance
it’s no biology lab
I’m afraid you’re overestimating how well biologists follow the safety procedures. I wouldn’t be surprised if we all had fluorescent bacteria in our guts.
Oh, that’s a really good point. Actually, it might be common for chemists to work with panels of related molecules, while in clinical trials they only work with one purified drug candidate. This makes it less likely for them to discover things by accident. Surely a piece of the puzzle!
Sure, all these stories totally sound like urban legends, but the sweeteners are out there and I don’t see how they could have been discovered otherwise (unless they were covertly screening drugs on a large number of people).
That’s a great question, this is totally mysterious to me. There are a lot of examples of people putting thaumatin in transgenic fruits or vegetables (and somehow in the milk of transgenic mice because there’s always one creepy study), but I don’t know why it hasn’t been commercialized. It sounds like superfruits would make a nice healthy alternative to palm-oil-and-chocolate-based comfort foods. Maybe it’s a regulatory problem?
There is way too much serendipity
That sounds exciting! I hadn’t seen Elisabeth’s comment, I just wrote a reply. Do you think there are modifications I should make to the main text to clarify?
That sounds plausible, but I’ve not looked into the empirical research on that topic so I can’t tell you much more!
(Sorry I missed your comment)
Here by “reproduce” I just meant “make more copies of itself” in an immediate sense (so reproductive fitness is just “how fast it replicates right now”). For example, in Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment, some variants were selected not because they increased the bacteria’s daily growth rate, but because they made it easier to acquire further variants that themselves increased the daily growth rate. These “potentiating” variants were initially detrimental (the copy number of these variants decreased in the population), and only after a long long time they took over the population. So, according the definition of reproductive fitness I used, they lead to a lower reproductive fitness – the reason they were eventually selected for is not that they’re good for reproduction, but that they’re good for evolvability. Of course, you can say that eventually they increased in copy number, but that would be defining “reproduction” in a different way, that I find less intuitive.
Now, is that other definition (how gene copy number increases over the long term) what evolution ultimately selects for? I’m not sure. To quote Kokko’s review on the stagnation paradox:
“Trees compete for sunlight and attempt to outshade each other, but when each tree consequently invests in woody growth, the entire forest must spend energy in stem forming and—assuming time or energy trade-offs—will be slower at converting sunlight into seeds than a low mat of vegetation would have been able to. Every individual has to invest in outcompeting others, but the population as a whole is negligibly closer to the light source (the number of photons arriving in the area is still the same). This is why in agriculture, externally imposed group selection to create shorter crops has improved yields.”
She gives other examples. In these cases, the number of individuals tend to decrease over time, even in the long run.
You’re right. Honestly I wouldn’t be able to talk about this in detail because this is getting far from the things I know best (full disclosure, my own research is on bacteria). The few papers I’ve cited give some general patterns, and my general point was “things can go in many different ways depending on the specifics, and even the well-known Bateman principle isn’t universal”.
That’s unfortunately all can do: there’s a whole world of things to say about how sexual dimorphism actually develops in metazoans, but it takes years of learning to get a deep understanding of what’s going on.
Definitely post the papers you’re thinking about! If you feel like making a new post about that, I can’t encourage you enough to do it. This post was by far my most successful, so it looks like a lot of people are interested in the topic. I’m sure many people would enjoy your contribution (at least I would).
As for the Red Pill thing, I kind of regret mentioning it – I just thought it was funny, but it’s not really that funny or useful. Maybe I should edit it out.
Doesn’t Claude’s training data include all the tutorials and step by step walkthroughs of this game ever published on the internet? How is it not using this information?