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by fl0ki
951 days ago
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I apologize in advance for criticism you only half deserve. I know this is HN, but not every single topic needs to be compared to LLMs or Blockchain. Concepts like fitness functions, selective pressures, feedback mechanisms, etc. -- as applied to both embodied organisms and constructs like cultures and ideologies -- predate not just the last two hype cycles but artificial computation altogether. Referring to such deeply established foundation is normal -- I'm sure many of us remember when novel AI approaches like perceptrons and evolutionary algorithms were described by analogy to biology -- but skipping over the established literature to talk about nascent concepts makes you sound less like you're contributing to an educated discussion and more like you're courting angel investors with buzzwords. At the very least it could be "here's the analogy to <established thing>, and to help round out the concept, <new thing> is also analogous to <established thing> with <important differences>". That makes both a stronger argument and a more educational essay than skipping straight to the new thing with no foundation. For example, one very important difference is that DNA can be edited and lose history, unlike blockchain, but an intact fossil record could be used to infer how those edits came in over time and space, kind of like an incomplete distributed ledger. |
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That is a very good point.
It is true that editing blockchain completely destroys the chain, and editing DNA in very specific ways does not. I was thinking (when I wrote it) that because of the way the genes interact it can be completely destructive to take only a single piece of DNA. But, as you correctly point out, we do that all the time. So, yes, the blockchain analogy only partially fits.
Thank you.