[ExI] evolution and crazy thinking

[William Flynn Wallace]

Now imagine an agent that can adapt to novelty. Initially it is 'wrong' in
some sense. Later it becomes 'right' in the sense of predictive.

I am not claiming being wrong as a necessary first step. I am claiming that
being wrong is a natural result of an encounter with the unknown. By
definition.
Colin

The agent that adapts to novelty is intelligence (in fact, some define
intelligence this way).  I studied mental retardation in grad school, and
for the borderline MR it was often the case that they could learn as well
as the average Ss, but when called on to transfer (generalize) that
knowledge to a similar problem, they performed more poorly than the average
Ss.  (When they were prompted to use the prior skill they did so, but a
third problem stumped them.  They did not learn to generalize - for
whatever reason - they had to be prompted each time.  Thus they will do
well in a work situation when closely supervised and prompted - btw - we
could make far more use of the MR than we do now and enable some to live an
independent existence (or for the worse off, semi-independent,like a
halfway house)  and use far less tax money).

So it was not IQ per se that solved the problem, but the recognition that
similar features were found in the new problem compared to the older one.
An attention skill, if you will.  The more similar the new problem to the
old one, the more successful the old skill was at working the new one.

I do not understand your second paragraph above.  "By definition"  What is
being defined?  Failure is not a forgone conclusion, as you said yourself.

Now if by 'unknown' you mean that there are no features to something that
resembles older situations, then there is no opportunity to generalize, and
failure is a certainty, barring luck.

bill w

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 4:00 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 11:27 AM, "Spike Jones" <spike at rainier66.com>>
> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > Billw, cog biases can be explained using evolutionary psychology, but
> one needs to call upon the controversial notion of group selection.
>
> Spike, "group selection" for humans fails to make logical sense.
> "Selection" means changes in gene frequency.  Assume some human group,
> tribe, band, etc. managed to accumulate a favorable set of genes.  The
> first thing they do is swap women (who carry the favorable set) with
> neighbors.  Unless you want to call the whole human race a group,
> there can be no group selection with a species that practices exogamy
>
> > Strong arguments have been promoted that evolution only works on the
> individual level.  I would argue that to explain easily-verifiable
> observations, such as cognitive biases, we must acknowledge that
> evolutionary selection does work at the group level, not just families, but
> particularly there.
>
> There is no reason to invoke group selection.  "Inclusive fitness" as
> described by Hamilton and earlier by Haldane is enough to account for
> cognitive biases toward relatives.
>
> > Clarification: group selection works in those species which do work as
> groups.  Alligators and flies and such: not.  Lions, bees, orcas, humans,
> yes.  Humans compete against other species, against other tribes, against
> each other and compete at the gene level.  If common cog biases somehow
> benefit the tribe, or the species, or promotes copulation (even at the
> expense of the individual) it can explain why they persist in humans.
>
> I disagree.  Gene survival alone is enough when you remember that
> copies of a gene for cog biases also exist in relatives.  From the
> long term viewpoint of a gene, those copies are just as important as
> the local copies.  As Haldane said, he should be willing to die if
> doing so would save more than two of his brothers or more than 8 of
> his cousins.
>
> Of course, humans don't come with 23andMe kits.  So we make do by
> assuming that the people we grow up with are relatives to one degree
> or another.
>
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