[ExI] [Extropolis] Re: Musk set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in 19 days - Nvidia says ​it normally takes 4 years

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 1:19 PM Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 11:15 AM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I don't expect you to understand or agree with this.  Most people have
>> a strong bias against the idea that they have such evolved internal
>> psychological traits. Probably too much insight is bad for your genes.
>>
>>  Keith
>
>
> Yes Keith you are special and smart and everything you think is correct.

I could be dead wrong about humans being subject to evolutionary
psychology, but if I am, many people I respect such as Leda Cosmides,
John Tooby, Michael Gazzaniga, and a long list of people here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology are in the same
boat.

> If someone doesn’t agree with you it means they are lacking insight.

That could be.  It bothered me for at least a decade that so few
people were unable to absorb an EP worldview.  it seemed obvious to
me.  It finally dawned on me that we have probably been selected not
to have a lot of insight.

> Understanding why this is insane might be above your emotional pay grade.  I feel like the disdain you have for black-and-white thinkers like the MAGA people

You miss the point.  It's not what they think at all, but the whole
class of beliefs (memes) that people who think they have a bleak
future adopt.  it is human race-wide.  Would you prefer examples like
Germany in the 1920s or Reanda or Cambodia?  Under some conditions, it
makes sense for humans to circulate xenophobic memes and even go to
war.

> could be a reflection of your own obstinate black-and-white thinking.  Where they say “it’s just the deep state!” like a broken record, you chime in on every post about US politics with “it’s just war genes!”.  I’m sure that’s a facet of it, but the desire to see these people as some kind of monolithic other tribe who behaves along rudimentary lines is the same thing you’re accusing them of doing.

You are making it sound like I blame them.  I don't.  They have no
more control over what they are doing than Patty Hearst or Elizabeth
Smart did in how they responded to being captured.
https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding You might as well
blame someone for pulling their hand back from a hot surface

> It’s documented that people’s thinking becomes more rigid with age—what is the evolutionary explanation for that?

Have not thought about it.  EP makes the general statement that all
animal behavior is the result of something that was directly selected
or a side effect of something that was selected.  From the Wikipedia
article.

" Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that
examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary
perspective.[1][2] It seeks to identify human psychological
adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to
solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are
either functional products of natural and sexual selection or
non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.[3][4] "
. . .

"The theories and findings of evolutionary psychology have
applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health,
law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.[10][11]"

If you are going after me for being an old fart, I got into EP when I
was about 60.  My last paper on this topic was 2006.  (I have a recent
short paper if you want to read it.)

Abstract: Behavior, including human behavior related to war, is no
less subject to Darwinian selection than physical traits. Behavior
results from physical brain modules constructed by genes and
environmental input. The environmental detection and operation of
behavioral switches leading to wars are also under evolutionary
selection. War behavior in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness
(EEA) was under positive selection when the alternative (starvation)
was worse than war. The model is then applied in an attempt to explain
the behavioral difference between chimpanzees and bonobos with
additional thoughts on the KhoeSan People of Southern Africa.

>  Maybe a kind of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” imperative because for eons the stuff you learned at birth was just as relevant when you were older?  But now with how quickly information changes, older people end up not being able to adjust their perspectives to new information.  It’s just in your genes :)

I commented on this in an interview.

RU SIRIUS: When did you first realize that you were a novelty-seeker?

KEITH HENSON: When I was about 8 years old. My mother read Robert A.
Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky to me. I was enthralled and eventually
read every published Heinlein (and many other SF authors) I could
find. She could not have imagined that 25 years later I would be
giving a paper at Princeton University, "Closed Ecosystems of High
Agricultural Yield," that was partly based on descriptions in Farmer
in the Sky.

RU: What are some of the qualities that people can notice perhaps even
in children that might indicate a progressive, neophiliac potential?

KH: That's a hard one because most kids are interested in new things.
The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are
adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any
case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing
attitudes as you get older.

https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/02/05/a-reprint-of-an-interview-with-keith-henson-by-ru-sirius-2/

> I fail to see how this isn’t as valid of a point as yours.  Or are you special and not bound to genetic determination?  It’s just silly.

The last chapter of The Selfish Gene is on memes, and the last
sentence is “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the
selfish replicators.”

> If you use these psychological weapons against others they’re bound to get turned against you.

I doubt you can hold a patch on the clam cult.  They spent a few
million going after me.

> At least John’s statistics about religion and education are accurate.  Poverty isn’t a determinant of political leaning in nearly as significant way as you propose.

Again, you have completely missed the point.  It is not where you are
on the income scale but how you view the future that trips the
behavior on or off.  The IRA lost population support because the
future looked brighter with only a small change in actual income.


Keith

>  And everyone in the world is unsure about the future.  Except perhaps the rich people who will be better off either way, and they’re split between D and R.  And probably more R, so it doesn’t even make any sense your way.
>
> This isn’t even to mention that perhaps some stone age responses to chaos are actually still useful.  Lower immigration for example?  Maintains the status quo to make planning easier, less mouths to feed, less cultural disruption in general.  If a country is in chaos why would you want more people there?
>
> Your hypothesis is easy to show counterexamples against, and it is also formed by putting the cart before the horse wherein you have personally decided which political opinions are vestigial troglodyte responses, and then you find a way to apply your skewed and oversimplified evopsych model by conjuring up a uniting factor for the group you disagree with.   It’s all backwards.  And like I mentioned, possibly due to your obstinacy genes kicking in, you refuse to even consider other opinions.
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "extropolis" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to extropolis+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAKrqSyEwPHoRr7jxx8dXFB8tW7LKg4E0aPQ6i_qVGsvgeHLfxA%40mail.gmail.com.