

An Alien God (Eliezer Yudkowsky, about Evolution) - MikeCapone
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

======
electromagnetic
Technically you don't need multiple Gods, you need a God that's an economist.
If rabbits can't run, the foxes will kill themselves off because there's a
near infinite demand but extremely limited supply.

I suppose if the 'one true god' was an economist, all religion got it wrong
and our ancestors have been worshipping pure evil for the past few millennia.

~~~
MikeCapone
I want what you're having...

~~~
stcredzero
Once, to a long, rambling post that looked like a the product of overexposure
to AI and OO combined with schizophrenia, I replied: "I want that algorithm.
Not the one described in the post, the one that wrote it!"

------
Dove
"Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to
evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?"

I suppose the author thinks God must be either pro-rabbit or pro-fox? That
seems odd to me. Calvin and Hobbes argue a lot--just think of how self-
defeating that is. How short-sighted of Bill Watterson to have overlooked that
he could have assigned them milder temperments. Why all the villians and
heroes in novels? Why all the weapons and defenses in the video games? Why all
the contrasting elements in the painting?

The engineer sees nonsense in creating one thing to foil another, but it is no
mystery to the artist. Sometimes the conflict is what makes each part what it
is, what makes it great. The desired rabbit-fox population equilibrium could
be achieved with lower effort, but that presumes the wrong goal. The artist
creates for the joy of the thing itself. One can delight in the rabbit because
he is fast, and the fox because he is cunning.

It is not the cruelty and conflict of nature that are alien to Christianity;
famine and war and lion and sword and boil and rot and death are never far
from the heart of _that_ story. What Christianity would find so alien is the
idea that life is about personally surviving and avoiding pain and embracing
pleasure. That God is some sort of fool or underachiever for creating a jungle
instead of a zoo.

~~~
MikeCapone
Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs? The author is an atheist,
and uses the supernatural as metaphor to introduce his subject. He states
quite clearly that he believes that evolution by natural selection is quite
sufficient (even necessary) to explain what we can observe and that no god or
gods are necessary.

~~~
goodside
I'm an atheist too, but Dove's point is a fair one. The fact that nature is
filled with chaos and conflict doesn't conflict with the idea that it was
created by a human-like mind, since humans have an aesthetic preference for
stories and art that involve conflict. Presumably, God also saw it
artistically pleasing that some children should live their entire lives in
intolerable pain and then die before reaching their third birthday, but that's
not even especially extreme by the standards of human literature.

~~~
stcredzero
_Presumably, God also saw it artistically pleasing that some children should
live their entire lives in intolerable pain and then die before reaching their
third birthday, but that's not even especially extreme by the standards of
human literature._

Yes, but while it's acceptable to write about horrible things in a literary
context, it would be considered extreme to _enact_ them. So presuming that I
actually exist, and that those children actually exist, God shouldn't get the
literary dispensation. (While on the other hand, Frédéric Mitterrand certainly
_should_.)

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/08/france>

~~~
swombat
Indeed. If you were to write a novel about an Ichneumon wasp, you might be
considered a little bit twisted, but so long as the novel was good that would
be accepted as part of your literary licence.

If you were to create a world containing Ichneumon wasps, though, when you
have the power to not do so, you're just a sadist.

~~~
Dove
In literature as in life, it depends entirely on why you did it. Sadism
implies enjoying pain for its own sake. Literature that does that is no less
sadist than worlds that do. But literature that includes pain is not generally
evidence of sadism, and neither are worlds. What you can say about the
creator's character is entirely driven by what you can say about his purpose.

A simple motivating example: I spent a while undergoing some martial arts
training, and at times it _was_ painful. Injuries weren't intended, but could
the class have possibly been conducted with a little more deference to my sore
feet, with perhaps one less bruise here or there?

In a philosophical sense, of course it could have. But this is not evidence of
sadism on the part of the instructor (or the fellow students who gave me such
a beating). In a practical sense, spending too much effort avoiding pain would
have undermined one of the purposes of the class: teaching me to fight through
it. Teaching me that some things are worth enduring pain to learn.

------
des
I love this: "Evolution has no foresight, it is simply the frozen history of
which organisms _did in fact_ reproduce."

~~~
MikeCapone
Some more quotes I wrote down from the posts in the sequence
(<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution>):

We are simply the embodied history of which organisms did in fact survive and
reproduce, not which organisms ought prudentially to have survived and
reproduced. \--Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God

Mutation is random, but selection is non-random. This doesn't mean an
intelligent Fairy is reaching in and selecting. It means there's a non-zero
statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism
reproduces. Over a few million years, that non-zero statistical correlation
adds up to something very powerful. \--Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God

"Don't think that, in the political battle between evolutionists and
creationists, whoever praises evolution must be on the side of science.
Science has a very exact idea of the capabilities of evolution. If you praise
evolution one millimeter higher than this, you're not "fighting on evolution's
side" against creationism. You're being scientifically inaccurate, full stop.
You're falling into a creationist trap by insisting that, yes, a whirlwind
does have the power to assemble a 747! Isn't that amazing! How wonderfully
intelligent is evolution, how praiseworthy! Look at me, I'm pledging my
allegiance to science! The more nice things I say about evolution, the more I
must be on evolution's side against the creationists! But to praise evolution
too highly destroys the real wonder, which is not how well evolution designs
things, but that a naturally occurring process manages to design anything at
all." \--Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Wonder of Evolution

"One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a
billion years." (Yudkowsky: "According to biologists' best current knowledge,
evolutions have invented a fully rotating wheel on a grand total of three
occasions.") \--biologist Cynthia Kenyon, in Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work
Anyway)

"Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than
as fitness-maximizers." \-- John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, The Psychological
Foundations of Culture.

~~~
Eliezer
Only the first sentence is from Kenyon.

~~~
MikeCapone
True, my mistake. Will correct it.

------
joubert
Good stuff. Just finished Dawkins' new book: The Greatest Show on Earth -
should be introductory biology reading for high school students.

However, still prefer his The Selfish Gene for raising my consciousness the
most.

~~~
billswift
By the time I read "The Selfish Gene" I didn't really see anything that
enlightening in it. "The Extended Phenotype" is the one that I found most
enlightening.

~~~
joubert
I had always viewed evolution from the organism perspective. Whereas Dawkins
lets you see it from the perspective of replicators. This I found an eye
opener.

------
tybris
Took him an awful long time to say natural selection.

------
dfragnito
The "natural world" we observe is not the world God created. It is a ruined
version of it.

~~~
gort
Who ruined it? Certainly not humans, who haven't been genetically engineering
anything until recently. So who created these predators / parasites / diseases
designed to kill and maim?

~~~
Evgeny
_Who ruined it?_

Why, Satan of course

~~~
swombat
You mean Sauron, and his daddy Morgoth. He took the beautiful and perfect
Elves and twisted and tortured them into Orcs. Now that's pretty screwed up.

