Evolution

“That new viewpoint prediction is exactly evolution had to solve by making animals move. You, nature give animals eyes. But nature didn't give trees eyes. Why? Because when you move, you see a new viewpoint.”

“The mental rules of thumb that evolution gives us to deal with risk are not adequate, Munger writes. They resemble the dysfunctional golf grip you would have if you relied on evolution instead of golf lessons.”

“It's not just the competition between organisms, as Darwin suggested, or the competition between genes, the way in which the software can be written down, and partially at least, but it's the competition between spirits, between software agents.”

“I'm very bullish on human augmentation in the very long term, but it's one that I don't see intuitively. I think looking at our brains, even just physically, they seem to be very focused, and this is not surprising, on our IO. And why would there somewhere in …”

“But I think that's because we confuse fine tuning and pre-training. Pre-training is all of evolution. And then basically you arrive at this thing that It's maybe doing something that's completely, in a certain sense, a completely irrelevant task at first, but …”

“Evolution happens usually as a combination of the existing phenomena and in a relatively deterministic way.”

“Evolution, it's a very unique thing in the sense that it's kind of like a search or like a learning algorithm that discovered everything that was ever created in nature in a single run. This is very different from like what you see in typical machine learning,…”

“To really understand, like, how you think through a problem, what evidence means, how do you interpret evidence, What does it mean to have different disciplines line up to get you the same answer, that consilience and convergence, and how important those are i…”

“Evolution has created a ton of features. It's an amazing software engineer of sorts. But, you know, with these features come bugs.”

“It's impossible for anything rational, To successfully evolve, because the byproduct of being rational and efficient, optimally rational and efficient, would be that you'd be predictable. And if you were completely predictable, you'd be dead.”

“My philosophy falls down to, and one pole is evolution as a binding principle, because it explains so much about humans and the near side is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy on the internal state of being inside each of us. …”

“And I think this emergence of computers as a source of knowledge is going to be every bit as momentous as the previous three were.”

“Conversely, a lot of the knowledge that we have from evolution and from experience and from culture, we often tend to think of it as much more certain than it really is. We have this great tendency that's been well studied by psychologists to be overconfident …”