[mouzogu]

good read. thanks.

> "This [lack of movement] indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches."

sounds like ageism in the job market (joking).

i think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth.

[HPsquared]

We're good at focusing on our long-term greed and hunger over short-term greed and hunger.

[xnavra50]

Some of us aren't. Eating junk food, drinking alcohol, taking drugs and loans for new shiny things.

[HPsquared]

That's another thing with humans: massive diversity. Some are 10x stronger than others for example, or 10x better memory. There's such a wide variety. I wonder if any other species is as varied. I think this variation, combined with the ability to socially cooperate (language) makes us naturally evolved for the efficient division of labour. A group with diverse abilities has a few superstar specialists in each field who can lift the whole group via cooperation. The ability to cooperate shifts the risk:reward ratio of the species for this kind of risk-taking.

[SoftTalker]

In most other species the weaker, less able individuals are brutally weeded out by predation or starvation. Humans don't do that anymore so you see a lot wider variation in strength, beauty, ability, etc.

[keybored]

> That's another thing with humans: massive diversity. Some are 10x stronger than others for example, or 10x better memory.

The sentiment variety on HN is, however, not so diverse.

[drewcoo]

Disagree. We are much less diverse than many other species.

We are a social species so we pay more attention to one another. We are also pattern-seekers. Combine these traits and we have humans seeing magnified differences in other humans.

[jhedwards]

Recently I was struck by the fact that some people have an internal monologue and others don't, and some people can see vivid images in their mind and some can't see anything at all. These seem like very dramatic differences to me.

I'm skeptical that we are less diverse than other species. In a herd in nature, exposed to the wild, exposed to predators and food scarcity, there is not much room for diversity: you must be able to survive. In human society, on the other hand, we live in an artificial environment insulated from those risks, and where any number of skills are sufficient for survival: you can be funny, musical, logical, artistic, patient and caring, mathematical, strong, good at fighting etc.

[ds_opseeker]

Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck about 70K years ago. As a result, there is more genetic diversity in a troop of chimpanzees than in all of the employees of Google.

So it depends how you define "diversity". I can see how from your view (range of life choices) humans today are more diverse than most species. However, if you go back not so long ago, there are species of ants with more worker roles (40+)than your typical midieval village.

[taneq]

Physiologically we seem to be fairly consistent (especially given our relative complexity to a lot of other animals). Mentally? There's an incredible variety of aptitudes both in direction and magnitude. I suspect part of this might just be that we're a relatively 'new' species, and neurologically we've evolved so fast that the results are still a little random.

[jajko]

Yeah but selective evolution lags behind right now by what, 10,000 years if not more? What I mean our selected traits are stil mostly from hunters/gatherers/early farming era.

Those survival risk were and in some places still are present, stronger would simply have higher survival chances compared to weaker. Those skills you list wouldnt matter that much 4000 years ago in most cases, not on survival level.

[bumby]

There's definitely some research around "hyperbolic discounting" and "dynamic/time inconsistency" that would disagree with this conclusion. There are many examples where we prefer a lesser short term payoff.

[linearrust]

> We're good at focusing on our long-term greed and hunger over short-term greed and hunger.

If that were true, the modern world centered around consumerism wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have the obesity epidemic, environmental degradation or the genocide of dozens of native nations. Feels like short-term thinking where it's at.

[amanaplanacanal]

I think in this case “good” simply means better than other animals.

[exe34]

> think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth

our very emotions, instead of being some ineffable magical thing, can be described as monomaniacal neural nets trained via a genetic algorithm to optimise for survival and reproduction based on a dataset from the palaeolithic and earlier. greed, jealousy, lust, even the beatified versions like love and grief, are explainable this way.

people don't like it when you explain that sort of thing though. they prefer to believe it's all magical.

[unaindz]

We could even argue that we are good at thinking we are in control of our own thoughts.

If you haven't looked into it already I recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts followed by the short story The Colonel and Echopraxia.

They talk a lot about human consciousness and it's importance or lack thereof. With an actually original and scary alien contact (related to the topic at hand), scary non cringe hard scify vampires (also related), in my opinion really good prose and in general high density of interesting concepts per page. With bonus real life papers at the end that extrapolated could explain the ideas presented in the books.

I'm gonna stop because I'm far past the point that Watts should pay me ad money.

It's licenced under Creative Commons. You can get it for free here (epub link at the top or read it straight from the page): https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

I would tell you to donate/buy it if you like it but maybe if he feels the pressure in his bank account he finally writes the next one. jk please pay him, he deserves it.

[exe34]

loved blindsight. read it twice and both times it left me very shaken for several weeks after. brilliant masterpiece!

[unaindz]

Between blindsight and anihilation I recovered my passion for reading after years of not doing it.

And It's been a year since I read it and I still think about it often. I have some backlog I wanna go through first but I feel a reread is due already.

[exe34]

i take it you've read crystal society, diaspora and the metamorphosis of prime intellect?

[meroes]

If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions?

All you’re doing is forcing people to choose something other than magic. You could name almost anything and they’d have to choose it over magic since magic doesn’t exist.

This is not convincing at all.

[randomdata]

> If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions?

As far as I can tell humans are already able to survive and reproduce to the limits of what the physical human form is capable of. Optimization can only optimize so much. Where do you see "paleolithic" emotions being a limiting factor that leaves room for further optimization? What "modern" emotions do you envision to improve on those metrics?

Human emotions do not appear to be cohesive from person to person, so it seems the generic algorithm is still doing its thing, but if the mutations are no more effective than the "paleolithic" emotions with respect to survivability and reproduction, there isn't much evolutionary pressure to see them become dominant.

[meroes]

Well the parent was saying our emotions are 10k-2.5m+ years old, but I claim society is exponentially more complex since agriculture. Either our emotions have kept pace or they haven’t. If they have, then the Paleolithic nature of our emotions makes no sense. And if they haven’t, it takes away from the neural net idea.

Things like accepting a surgeon and anesthesiologist putting us into suspended animation and opening our hearts we have learned to not freak out about. Or that a single person could nuke the entire planet including our families and we go about our lives. I propose those are recent learned emotional responses. Nevethertheless, it still seems too slow to compare it to a neural net.

[randomdata]

The parent stated that the neural net is trained with a genetic algorithm that seeks to maximize survivability and reproduction. Of which I posit we have optimized as far as it can take it. People have shown to already survive and reproduce to the greatest extent of what appears to be the limits of physical form as we understand it.

So, if we have reached the limits of survivability and reproducibility, only further hindered by other biological processes, what pressure on the generic algorithm would there be to see new traits start to become dominant? If you effectively stop training the NN, you wouldn't expect inference to change.

Perhaps the advent of modern contraception will eventually reveal some mutation that is advantageous enough to overcome the modern setback we've seen in reproduction, bringing to light a different emotion/set of emotions that become dominant. But, realistically, we're only talking a few generations of training on that change to the state of the universe. That's nothing for a genetic algorithm. GA-based training methods are not very efficient with respect to training speed even on computers, and worse in real life when a single generation takes ~30 years to spawn the next.

[exe34]

the medial prefrontal cortex literally reaches into the hypothalamus to inhibit the more primal emotions. people with damage in that area or who are tired and at their wits end, often revert back to earlier, more primitive emotions. it seems like you equate neural nets with artificial neural nets. there is no back propagation in natural selection. it's a genetic algorithm.

[exe34]

> If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions

does that mean you believe the Coelacanths should have evolved feet by now?

evolution does not work that way. usually new structures are laid out on top, new behaviours come about that can override older ones at certain times and at other times, "instinct" takes over, and an old program is running again.

[meroes]

That’s sounding much more biological than a neural net now. Neural nets are much quicker to adapt to new parameters. Coelacanths and humans aren’t. Which was my point if 12,000 years isn’t enough whereas neural nets are rapidly changeable, maybe we can’t do this equivalence in calling humans neural nets.

[exe34]

are you maybe mentally inserting "artificial" in front of "neural network"? if so, do you also see GPUs in biology?