The smallest possible button (or: moth traps!)
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>the blind idiot god of moth evolution would find a way to elude my traps by pressing an alternate small button to those specific pheromones, in order to power its reproduction. This type of brute force, which grants a stupid and blind enemy the power of adaptation, can be found in battles with cancer, viruses, or pesticides
Interestingly some cockroaches have evolved to perceive sugar as bitter, due to its use as bait in traps: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8003998/
1Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who've read papers like "Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach" and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we're seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept "complex glucose"), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we'll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.
This reminds me of an insight I found while staring at the ground, a spider was frantically crawling on the soil, under leaves and sticks and then suddenly through an opening a spider wasp sweeps in, attaches itself to it and kills the spider within a second.
Crawling insects are 2D navigation specialists, often prey to flying insects, 3D navigation specialists. In this sense a geometric dimension is used by the 3D specialists to hunt down crawling insects. Merely raising a dimension doesn't give you the trap, though, because a high perception and energy cost is incurred to maintain that 3D navigation ability. With this perception and energy cost, flies are more vulnerable to the traps of spiders. These costs could probably be modeled as extra latent space dimensions alongside the spacial dimensions involved.
Web-weaving Spiders are 2D specialists that slice a 3D space with a sticky web, capturing 3D specialists without expending energy to navigate their prey's space.
Just like it takes work for the manufacturer of moth traps to source the cardboard and obtain the knowledge of moth pheromones, it takes work for a spider to actually make the web (with patterns related to the silk's transparency and web design encoded in DNA). That being said, I don't know of spiders that coat their webs with prey insect pheromones to further attract their prey (and one is left wondering, would that be too small of a button as-to significantly deplete a spider's food source?).
There are predator insects that mimic the flashing patterns of certain firefly species, but they have to have more "skin in the game" and can only trap-then-eat one firefly at a time, there is less of an asymmetry in this instance.
Effective traps are time <-> space translation constructions. The button of the construction is in latent space.
1Hello! To support your point, I think entomology is particularly fascinating as a window into how evolution works because of how many niches there are in the micro world. "Amazon rainforest" is more or less a single biome for macroscopic humans. But for insects, a whole new set of dimensions are navigable and there are substantial differences between, say, tree X, pond Y, canopy W or river V. When you're small, things aren't just bigger; there's also a lot more variety because what look like subtle differences to us (like whether a tree is wet or not) is a huge difference for small buggers (water is sticky at small scales, and can drown insects).
This is to say that there aren't just two dimensions in the small world; some spiders operate on one dimension, other spiders operate on an other dimension, and of course 12,000 different species of ants all have their own way of integrating whatever niche dimensions they operate in.
You can continue your way downward, by the way: the world of unicellular organisms is incredibly dense and varied, and there are way over a million clearly identifiable bacterial species alone.
So when you describe the nature of traps, there are probably thousands of effective space translation constructions, beyond just 2D and 3D.
I mention the Amazon specifically because that part of nature is a hellish death zone, where insects genocide each other every other Tuesday while odd inventions like door-shaped-ants, zombie-ants fungus and worryingly intelligent trial-and-error capable spiders like Portia (technically not native to the Amazon) pop up all the time before getting out-tactic-ed by some other horridly violent species. There is a lot of small-button-pressing going on here, and new tactics that let you explore a new dimension are so effective that "one fell swoop" strategies are common.
It's like in Worm where every time the protagonists are up against a person with a new power, they nearly die, because the effect of surprise is just that powerful. When you live in a world with superpowered individuals, capability distribution between humans is uneven; the same can be said for the level of variance between species of ants, for example. In both cases, individuals have access to space translations very different from those of their enemies, which is why surprise and the inability to adapt are common observations.
Hi! Thank you for this walk in the space of insects. The spacial complexity implicit in pockets of miniature space seem akin to fractal dimensions or hausdorff dimensions.
Exploring insect space reminds me of my experience exploring non-self-similar 3D fractals, such as hybrid variants of mandleboxes and menger sponges. In these 3D fractals there are fields of complexity and patterns bound to specific scales, and zooming into surfaces would reveal more highly complex space on that surface; branches would "pop up", and I could rotate my camera around these branches, then zoom into those. And I could repeat this until my zoom level exceeded the floating-point precision offered by by program I was using.
I also see what you mean by the implicit time / energy constraints when moving on surfaces giving extra dimensionality, from the perspective of an insect. Depending on the insect's locomotion abilities certain surfaces would allow it to move way faster and easier than others, and the differences can be quite stark.
This reminds me of another insight, while thinking about brain-machine interfaces, regarding to how brain neurons are organized: neurons on the cortex / surface of the brain of are highly connected and have a high fractal dimension (~ 2.8 according to wikipedia and the paper it references). As you go deeper into the brain, towards the corpus callosum, this complexity is reduced... axons are longer and tend to be covered with myelin sheath, which increases the conductivity of these connections for longer-running connections. So from the perspective of a neuron in the cortex, neurons way further away can appear closer since the charge and sensitivity requirements between topologically distant neurons are similar to the connections of its neighbors.
As for Worm, I have not read it yet, but the ecological feedback loops being described here is very fun to think about.
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refs:
3D fractal rendering software: https://mandelbulber.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S105381190300380X?via%3Dihub
Just to answer one of your points: there are spiders who mimic female moth pheromones to catch moths. Like Mastophora hutchinsoni. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastophora_hutchinsoni
And a cool video of the hunting technique: https://youtu.be/EWec266Lo3Q
That is a pretty good point, who's to say there aren't 'predators' of some sort in higher spatial or temporal dimensions?
Wouldn't that obviate the concern about 'AI' though? Maybe they will be our best friends against the 4D spider wasps?
I have thought about this. I still don't know if that obviates the concern about an advanced super-intelligence. Why would it not collaborate with the 4D spider wasps?
I'm not sure how useful it is to speculate about 4 dimensional spider wasps. Seems like the same type of reasoning that leads people to seriously debate about being in a simulation; the answer to that is "no experiment you can perform inside a simulation can prove that you are in one". In my conception of "dimension", you're essentially stuck where you are and would be operating on literally zero evidence if you thought about 4 dimensional spider wasps. There's no point wondering "I wonder whether the simulators skipped lunch today and are therefore particularly grumpy today", because you'd be doing your rationality more harm than good by coming up with elaborate theories about concepts that aren't concrete at all.
I don't see how we can talk about '4 dimensional spider wasps' in any productive way, much less wonder what side the 4 dimensional spider wasps would take in an alliance, or whether AI would want to help us in our fight against the 4 dimensional spider wasps.
If there's something I'm not understanding or if you guys have a clear image of what a 4D spider wasp is and I don't for some reason, please tell me. I'd be genuinely curious if '4D spider wasp' was an actually useful concept.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Hey, that comic’s originally from https://www.buttersafe.com/2011/01/27/traps/ Might be nice to put a link to the original artist :-)
Interesting, thanks for sharing that! I tried searching it up on knowyourememe.com but nothing turned out for some reason.
Given how fast human progress is going, it won’t be long before we have more efficient moth traps that can respond to adaptation, or before we find a reliable “one fell swoop” solution (like gene drives for mosquitoes, chemotherapy for cancer, or mass vaccination for smallpox).
We do, in fact, already have several foolproof methods of moth elimination, involving setting the ambient temperature to several hundred degrees, entirely evacuating the air from the space, or a small thermonuclear warhead. The reason that we don't use these methods, of course, is that there are things we're trying to optimise for that aren't merely Moth Death, such as "continuing to have a house afterwards". This is probably also an analogy for something.
1Hello! Indeed, and those are all one fell swoop solutions, and they are messy and destructive. What I meant by "reliable one fell swoop solution" and by the examples of gene drives, chemotherapy and mass vaccination, is that you could target moths on a dimension so specific to them that only they get damaged. The three examples demonstrate this, as gene drives target specific species without interfering with others, chemotherapy is targeted to the tumor (chemo is the most iffy of the three), and mass distribution of smallpox vaccines only affects smallpox.
If you understand your enemy well enough you can fight it on a battlefield so specific to it that no collateral damage occurs. This is what I referred to as "finding the smallest button".
The point is to build a moth trap, which is very precise, on a scale that can actually achieve Moth Death. The three solutions I'm positing against moths are "pure brute force" (thermonuclear warhead in your house), targeted subtle button-pushing (moth traps), or a combination of the two, which could very well be gene drives (which would end the 250 million year old bloodlines of moths forever without so much as touching anything else we care about). I'm saying that we don't have that last option just yet but if we really wanted to, current technology could probably let us (which is kind of insane). It's that third solution I was getting at, not the first.
The fundamental problem with this (and the big question of returns to intelligence) is that the buttons have to exist. And that is not guaranteed at all scales and for arbitrarily difficult tasks. It is unlikely that human intelligence is peak gains in general, but I don't think that we couldn't at least gesture in the direction of possible mechanisms for things to happen. It's a complicated question, but IMO to answer it it's more useful to ask "what kind of world do we live in?" than about intelligence in itself. The problem is that known hard thermodynamic limits on such stuff are usually very high, and practical limits are much harder to guess.
This idea reminds me a lot of how social media came to power. The goal of social media, contrary to how it advertises itself, is to show you ads. Social media is looking for a smallest possible button it needs to push to show you ads. Additionally, all successful social media have used machine learning to help determine the smallest possible button to show a user as many ads as possible. I believe what this post predicts has already begun to come to pass.
I think this could generalize to "low Kolmogorov complexity of behaviour makes it easy (and inevitable) for a higher intelligence to hijack your systems." Similar to the SSC post (I forgot which one) about how size and bodily complexity decreases likelihood of mind-altering parasite infections.
