From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2006 - 18:14:27 MST
At 06:55 PM 2/28/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>I know it's tedious, but you aren't SL4 until you appreciate the depth of
>human irrationality.
"One should not expect the cognitive architectures of evolved organisms to
be "rational" when rationality is defined as adherence to a normative
theory drawn from mathematics or logic. One should expect their cognitive
architectures to be *ecologically rational*: well-designed for solving the
adaptive problems their ancestors faced during their evolutionary history
(Cosmides & Tooby, 1996b; [Tooby & Cosmides.. 19991)."
Rode, C., Cosmides, L., Hell, W., & Tooby, J. (1999). When and why do
people avoid unknown probabilities in decisions under uncertainty? Testing
some predictions from optimal foraging theory. Cognition, 72, 269-304.
>Yes rationality is there, but at a level that just barely shows up when
>measured with precise instruments.
Viewed from the gene's perspective, humans do the right thing most of the time.
>This is important with respect to non-human intelligences, because
>super-rationality, almost as much as superintelligence, is potentially
>overwhelming and because intelligence bootstraping moves a system towards
>rationality. Appreciate how far humans are from rational and you
>appreciate how utterly transformed, and essentially recreated, they would
>be by haphazard bootstrapping.
>
>Appreciate how formidable rationality is and you see why a highly rational
>infrahuman GAI would still be a massive existential threat.
>
>http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/030640.html
It's a point I have made perhaps too often.
Keith henson
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