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Superstimuli

Edited by brook, Multicore, Ruby, et al. last updated 8th Feb 2022

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

  • Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
  • Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers

External Links

  • Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny by Daniel Dennett at TED

See Also

  • Akrasia
  • Adaptation executers
  • Evolutionary psychology
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Posts tagged Superstimuli
158Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
Eliezer Yudkowsky
19y
90
210Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
68
174Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
33
34[link] The AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men
Kaj_Sotala
5y
10
112How do you deal w/ Super Stimuli?
Logan Riggs
9mo
25
42The Rise of Hyperpalatability
Jack
6mo
10
38Satisficers want to become maximisers
Stuart_Armstrong
14y
70
32Has there been a "memetic collapse"?
Q
Eli Tyre, jessicata
6y
Q
7
22Social host liability
CraigMichael
4y
39
15Notes from Dopamine Detoxing
Alice Blair
5mo
4
1Goodhart's Law and Emotions
Zero Contradictions
1y
5
133New Improved Lottery
Eliezer Yudkowsky
19y
45
105Two Neglected Problems in Human-AI Safety
Ω
Wei Dai
7y
Ω
25
100Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
Eliezer Yudkowsky
19y
73
81Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
Alicorn
16y
843
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