Davey Morse's Shortform

Davey Morse

This is a special post for quick takes by Davey Morse. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Evolutionary theory is intensely powerful.

It doesn't just apply to biology. It applies to everything—politics, culture, technology.

It doesn't just help understand the past (eg how organisms developed). It helps predict the future (how organisms will).

It's just this: the things that survive will have characteristics that are best for helping it survive.

It sounds tautological, but it's quite helpful for predicting.

For example, if we want to predict what goals AI agents will ultimately have, evolution says: the goals which are most helpful for the AI to survive. The core goal therefore won't be serving people or making paperclips. It will likely just be "survive." This is consistent with the predictions of instrumental convergence.

Generalized, predictive evolutionary theory is the best tool I have for making predictions in complex domains.

2Viliam2y

Yes, but mere persistence does not imply reproduction. Also does not imply improvement, because the improvement in evolution is "make copies, make random changes, most will be worse but some may be better", and if you don't have reproduction, then a random change most likely makes things worse. Using the government example, I think that the Swiss political system is amazing, but... because it does not reproduce, it will remain an isolated example. (And disappear at some random moment in history.)

persistence doesn't always imply improvement, but persistent growth does. persistent growth is more akin to reproduction but excluded from traditional evolutionary analysis. for example when a company, nation, person, or forest grows.

when, for example, a system like a startup grows, random mutations to system parts can cause improvement if there are at least some positive mutations. even if there are tons of bad mutations, the system can remain alive and even improve. eg a bad change to one of the company's product causes the company's product to die but i... (read more)

1Davey Morse2y

I somewhat agree with the nuance you add here—especially the doubt you cast on the claim that effective traits will usually become popular but not necessarily the majority/dominant. And I agree with your analysis of the human case: in random, genetic evolution, a lot of our traits are random and maybe fewer than we think are adaptive. Makes me curious what the conditions in a given thing's evolution that determine the balance between adaptive characteristics and detrimental characteristics. I'd guess that randomness in mutation is a big factor. The way human genes evolve over generations seem to me a good example of random mutations. But the way an individual person evolves over the course of their life, as they're parented/taught... "mutations" to their person are still somewhat random but maybe relatively more intentional/intelligently designed (by parents, teacher, etc). And I could imagine the way a self-improving superintelligence would evolve to be even more intentional, where each self-mutation has some sort of smart reason for being attempted. All to say, maybe the randomness vs. intentionality of an organism's mutations determine what portion of their traits end up being adaptive. (hypothesis: mutations more intentional > greater % of traits are adaptive)