Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.
> One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.
I don't see why. Nothing humans do transcends culture (tautologically), so pretending it does or could won't get you far. Best you can do is try and understand the effect.
Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.
You are making a category error here. Culture doesn't produce a theorem (or a work of art, or a [fill in the blank]), but the people that did produce it necessarily operate in a culture. Among other things this affects what work gets done supported, what people do it (and get supported), how the results are communicated (and if) etc. As a student it effects what you are taught, what you are told is important, and what areas you are pointed towards.
You can't tease this stuff apart. Part of the process of becoming a scientist is to become acculturated to that science.
Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.
i guess i'd argue that the more abstract something becomes, the more its original motivations tend to be obscured. this is the nature of abstraction, for better and worse.
i'd hesitate to say though that this means more abstract ideas are less culture-bound in the sense of being value-neutral. an abstract idea still carries at least the implicit assertion that this is an idea worth paying attention to, at the unavoidable opportunity cost paying attention to others. and ideas which seem entirely free-floating are probably worth paying special suspicion to.
Yes, the maths that underpin a nuclear power plant exist independent of any culture, but the same cannot be said of the decision to deploy that plant in a rain forest on the edge of an ocean where a village has survived for millennia.
I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.
Even today there is no genetic model that can explain the emergence of human altruism--non-kin eusociality. Eusociality among kin, such as naked mole rat sisters and bee clones, is trivially modeled using selfish gene theory. But no one has yet proposed a stable model for its emergence and persistence outside close kin groups. And in fact humans are the only species that exhibit this phenomenon. All other forms of cooperation in nature can be explained by selfish gene theory (that is, individualized sexual selection benefit directly commensurate with the individualized risk), or as non-stable outliers (e.g. a cat befriending a bird).
Apparently Darwin believed in a group selection-type model, as still many do, even though its been disproven (at least refutations have never been overcome). And if you believe in group selection I suppose one would find it easy to rationalize racial models, Victorian or otherwise, especially if you were born on an island or otherwise believed substantially physically segregated human groups--and therefore segregated sexual selection dynamics--was typical. Indeed, even today anthropologists are severely allergic to the possibility of rapid gene flow, especially back flow, of specific genes. The notion that there could have been back flow of genes into Africa is anathema, which makes it easier even for scientists to conceptualize humanity as groups of islands, rationalize group selection theories, and be more credulous of narratives whereby some groups "advance" faster than others--because good genes wouldn't individually leak out, and bad genes wouldn't individually leak in.
But that's only a partial defense of Darwin. The very fact that humans are the only species to exhibit inexplicable non-kin eusociality, while all these proposed models would apply equally well to any other species (suggesting they're incomplete, because mass selfless cooperation is quite obviously a powerful group advantage if attainable), hints at a massive gap in our understanding of our own evolution, counseling against strong positivist claims about how human evolution worked and continues to work. IOW, Darwin could have been more humble.
That altruism is selected for highlights what was long selected against. The non-selfish and even selfless or self-sacrificing behaviors seem a likely consequence of eons of semi-just capital punishment as a societal level selection mechanism.
You are looking at the wrong level. It is tribal reproduction that is being optimized. An individual is just a cell of that tribe and doesn’t even need to reproduce as long as the tribe reproduces. This is just like how your hair doesn’t have to reproduce as long as you do. Also, it isn’t your genes that matter but the relative distribution of traits in a population.
Again, models of group selection have been refuted time and time again.
Group selection may still be true, but there's neither persuasive evidence nor persuasive models for that. It's merely an assertion. Which is my point. Wedon'tknow. All these theories are just building castles on sand.
Obviously there are limits to human cooperation. And of course there are innumerable concordances between what we see in society (i.e. "tribal politics") and various group selection theories. But without an anchor in genetics these theories are dangerously close to--if not patently--political or religious beliefs.
To reiterate, there is no established genetic model that links individual sexual selection pressures to group evolution, in the sense that evolution can select for group traits without a pathway where the genes advantage each individual, and do so incrementally as the gene spreads. (Because genes don't magically appear all at once in the entire group, and even they did you're still left with the stability problem because you also need to explain--at an individualized sexual selection pressure level--how cheaters are suppressed.) Group selection models are merely based on the tautological presumption that genetic sexual selection acts at the level of groups.
Furthermore, there's no reason to believe group selection must be true in order for human altruism to have emerged. That is, it's not the only option. Though the alternatives (e.g. Joseph Jordania's theories for the emergence of articulated speech, which also explains the emergence of empathy--two birds, one stone) haven't been shown with concrete evidence either. Though at the very least they get extra points for working with selfish gene theory, rather than in seeming contravention of it.
So without knowing the precise genetic dynamics of altruism (neither how it emerged nor how it persists, which isn't necessarily the same question), we can't make any strong claims about its contours, limitations, potentiality, etc, beyond hand-wavey inferences from observation, which are highly susceptible to our own prejudices.
> At some point between 150-person ancient tribes and New York City, human evolution jumped off of the “survival of the fittest biology” snail and onto the “survival of the fittest stories” rocket.
If we ignore alot of the hand-wavey stuff (debates on the viability of various models often come down to hard math--i.e. the rate of selection benefit drop-off as a function of kin distance--and thus you need that level of specificity to make a persuasive case) one of the root assumptions up to and including this point is that intelligence is driving fitness for group participation. But that only begs the question of what's driving intelligence.
In 2021 the notion that human's are unique benefactors of high-order intelligence is quaint. We see intelligence everywhere. In fact, as far as we can tell, at least for the past several hundred million years (dinosaurs, mammals, etc) intelligence arises easily in nature, at least to the extent it's ecologically advantageous to the individual.
In the above story, it seems that incrementally increased group intelligence precedes incremental increased altruism. But if that's so, why don't we see more human-magnitude intelligence everywhere, considering that incremental increases in intelligence come rather quickly in higher order species. Alternatively, intelligence increases incrementally on an individualized basis because it's a better fit for a more cooperative society, which again only begs the question of why the society became more cooperative. And that question needs concrete answers other than "because it obviously benefits the group."
I can't really tell how strongly the article depends on group selection theory. On its surface it doesn't, but arguably it still subtly does. In any event, it's not an answer. It's just another plausible narrative. Better than most narratives, but it doesn't even come close to the level of scientific specificity required to draw meaningful conclusions about the evolution of human altruism or intelligence. Joseph Jordania has a much better narrative; far more specific (perhaps too specific, and thus likely wrong in the strictest sense), and one with more concrete predictions (e.g. that prevalence of speech impediments will be lower in East Asian populations, due to the gene(s) for articulated speech arising in East Asia and back migrating to Africa and Europe).
> I don’t know what sort of evidence or experiment you are looking for.
1) One that doesn't have large conceptual gaps. 2) One that makes precise, relevantly falsifiable predictions that can be (and iteratively are) confirmed.
> It’s even possible that it isn’t stable and we are undergoing evolution now.
Indeed. But if we had a concrete understanding of our evolution, we'd have a much better idea not only if that's the case (continuing evolution is a good bet), but what those fundamental dynamics look like, as opposed to high-level, squishy observations about how they manifest.
Actually, I have a movie script idea about a group of scientists figuring that all out and concluding that the evolutionary pressures sustaining human altruism are rapidly receding, threatening not only the collapse of human society but in turn human intelligence. The group of scientists endeavor to use genetic engineering to "artificially" sustain altruistic tendencies--a metaprocess which if successful could be seen as a sort of next level evolutionary leap in higher-order life. But a group of evil scientists surreptitious infiltrate the program with the intention of creating a world of slaves (highly intelligent, but focused only the well-being of the rulers), begging the question of how the ruling minority could sustain itself with such malevolence. And the drama plays out thusly, perhaps leaving the question unanswered as to whether the good scientists win, or if not whether the evil scientists are simply acting out the prediction of an inevitable end to humanity and human-scale intelligence.
I think that we should be able to test this in a simulation.
I think the crux of the idea is that if a group of people stop fighting for a bit amongst themselves and instead wipe out another group, then the other group will no longer reproduce.
Any mechanism to allows this to happen more effectively will reproduce itself. Tribal thinking is supposedly one such mechanism. So genes/culture that will promote tribalism are selected for to some extent.
Human history seems to be the natural history of this.
These really intense dreams, are you in control of the imagery, or is it something you are experiencing beyond your control? When I have intense dreams and try to control them the fidelity breaks down and I usually wake up.
Didn’t practice too much, maybe you can get better at control, my own actions I could control including things like walking through wall or flying off from balcony, but not so much environment around me, a bit but not much. For waking up (very common when you realise you are in a dream) for me spinning around always worked very well. For me visual and sensual details were absolutely impressive, it’s at the level you can easily believe there exists another world, but it’s always nonsense threaded from your own memory with logic errors everywhere, however when inside the feel of truthness of reality is absolutely overwhelming.
By spin around I mean keep turning around in your dream when you feel you're loosing it/waking up, don't close eyes in the dream but in reality you're lying down with closed eyes (without spinning)! :)
Yeah, I don't have much control yet. I can choose where to go, and I can look around and stuff, but I can't really change the scenery. I think you can do it with practice though.
I have managed to fly a few times, but the first couple of times I tried, I jumped and fell flat on my face! I don't really experience pain in my dreams though.
When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.
One of the neatest aspects of git that I never see used is delta debugging, where git automatically finds the code that introduced a bug through binary searching the commit history. This requires many small commits, which is tedious.
I would like to see a good treatment of Lucas like arguments. Most take the form of humans having their own halting problem. But, that objection is completely irrelevant, and it concerns me that objectors do not realize this. Makes me think they are missing something.
There are no mathematical theories of runaway intelligence growth. On the other hand there are many theorems of fundamental limits to maechanical processes. E.g. NP completeness codiscoverer Leonid Levin also proved what he calls independence conservation that states no stochastic process is expected to increase net mutual information. Then there are the more well known theorems with similar implications: no free lunch theorems, halting problem, Kolmogorov complexity's uncomputability, data processing inequality, and so on. There is absolutely nothing that looks like runaway intelligence explosion in theoretical computer science. The closest attempt I have seen in Kauffman's analysis of NK problems, but there he finds similar limitations, except with low K terrains, but that analysis is a bit questionable in mind. To make arguments like gwern and Kurzweil they are essentially appealing to mysticism; assuming there is a yet to be discovered mathematical law utterly unlike anything we have ever discovered. They are engaging in promissory computer science, writing a whole bunch of theory checks they hope will be cashed in the future.
My internal devops group has this issue. We had a working system on teamcity and the hashicorp stack and linkerd. Now we are working on a brand new system using gitlab and openshift and istio. Highly redundant with, from my perspective, only incremental advantage. At the beginning I spoke out against this, but failed to convince anyone. Progress has been alright because of our new 10x hire who hated the old tech and loves the new stuff. But once he is out of the picture, we will be maintaining two highly redundant stacks both requiring deep technical knowledge to maintain effectively. I guess bailing is always an option, but I would prefer to be a force for good somehow. Any suggestions?
I'm surprised one guy can bring in gitlab, openshift, and istio all by himself. They're not small things to setup and to migrate existing software to.
Typically how this goes, few of the existing software migrate to the new stack (it's too much work to migrate and it doesn't work as well). After the guy is gone, you can deprecate the new stack immediately and don't bother supporting it. I've seen it happen a lot.
What you don't say is how large the company is. For startups and small companies, my experience is that every generation of developers (couple years) will rewrite most of everything. That's just how things go in startup, filled by eager young folks who have no experience and build their resume. That's only possible because there isn't that much code in the first place.
Larger companies can be stuck with multiple stacks because there's too many software to migrate and no sucker to do it. Older projects are stable and have no active developers working on them, they're not going to be rearchitectured. Other departments/developers know that they can't trust the shiny new tool from your department, that's going to be deprecated next year, they don't adopt in the first place (a great example of why large companies resist changes).
It's just the state of the industry I guess.
IMO it's crazy how few people working on tools/frameworks can inflict migrations on a hundred developers/projects (thousands in larger companies), often for no benefits.
I realize this doesn't answer your question, how to help?
No idea. Would be nice to cancel projects early before they reach that stage. It's probably too late now.
What you can improve is your perception. If it makes you feel better, one pro of all this churn is that there are many more jobs, doing rewrites over and over again. It's nice to have a job in the current climate.
He is handling the integration. The maintenance of the products falls on the ops team. He is doing a great job. I just don't think he will stick around to maintain things once he is done, and we will have two stacks to migrate and maintain.
What do you think about intelligent design sort arguments? It is hard to understand how random variation and natural selection can produce the equivalent of a biological operating system. I have also a fair amount of experience with evolutionary algorithms, and they add to my perplexity as to how random variation and natural selection are sufficient mechanisms to produce the genome, let alone how the whole system would get started in the first place. This does seem to be a pretty good piece of scientific evidence for the intrusion of something entirely unlike any physical process we know of, and capable of feats only analogous to what human intelligence can produce. This seems to me a quite persuasive scientific argument for something deity-ish.
No, despite being very open minded. I was a hard core physicist, but it would have been really cool to find something unusual (I did not have much hope, though).
Most people were in the category "I really saw it" and expected to just search "for that".
Some told that they or their relatives had special abilities. When I wanted to witness them they never happened, usually due to my "aura".
I spent a few nights in haunted houses. These were cool, the cracking at night was quite frightening. But ultimately it was not even B-grade horror (no slamming doors or anything). I saw rats once and this is what terrified me.
I met once an energothepeutist (he was "magnetizing" people's heads to cure them). It was on the radio, he came with a lady whom he cured. When he touched her neck, she collapsed. I asked him to touch my neck and make me collapse, he said it was dangerous, I told him that I officially agree to anything and take all the risks, he touched my neck ... (there is no music when you are on air, but the listeners do hear one, it was quite tense) ... I felt his fingers on my neck and yelled "aaaahhh!". He jumped 2 meters away. Of course I did not feel anything.
I particularly dislike the fraud kind (like the one above) who are putting people at risk (the ones that are sick and instead of medicine choose home - similar to the homeopaths). I was making special efforts to show how useless they are.
I had a lot of empathy for people who thought they saw something and wanted to understand whether this was true or not, I once met an old lady who thought that her dead husband was talking to her and I helped her to realize that these were various sounds in her appartement. She was really nice.
Unfortunately, many people will not believe anything even if it jumps to their face. This is BTW the same message I was being given by the ones that were showing me effects I could not objectively see or record.
One thing I did not agree to are "philippin healers" - they tell that they will extract your sick organs without you feeling anything. I did not want to do that because I feared that they would have some cutting devices under their nails (or something similar) and that this could get seriously dangerous.
Although I only completed my undergrad in physics, we may have had similar trajectories. I have seen one inexplicable thing but it was rather nebulous. If that is all the supernatural has to offer, it was pants.
The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.
That reminds me a bit of PEAR, which also held that the "level" is so weak that it requires massive samples to detect. If I recall, in The Demon-Haunted World Sagan mentioned it as one of the three "psychic phenomenon" concepts he thought that it was worth examining further, not because he believed in them, but because the usual mechanisms of science had not yet completely removed all of the confounding factors to reduce the results to mere noise.
I read a similar article by Scott Alexander, about the fact some psi researchers could generate a reliable signal with their studies, but since he a priori ruled out the possibility of psi, he is convinced there is something wrong with the scientific process.
SRI International (no affiliation with Stanford since 1970) is a private company that does research for the US government and, later, private companies.
