3 ms·

It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. For i

by ajkjk 9y ago

It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. For instance, suppose a tribe of headstrong individuals who would never back down in an argument, and would resort to violence before losing face. It might be beneficial for random personality variation to exist to allow them to settle such a debate nonviolently. Maybe one individual randomly becomes able to laugh off conflict, or becomes more meek, or is more easy going. It's kinda like how four cars that pull up to a four way stop at the same instant decide who goes: some randomness in the timing of their reactions leads to one pulling out a little before the others, and they're allowed to go, gracefully resolving the deadlock. Four naively designed AIs might get stuck in that situation (of course, simultaneity is implausible, but there are similar cases that might be more realistic).

Gravityloss 9y ago
Two thoughts here. If you look at fingerprints or the spongy interior of bones, clearly there's a lot of detail there. But the position of every skin whorl or bone void is not specified directly by a gene. Identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. This doesn't matter for finger or bone functionality, as long as the material works on a statistical, higher level. If you think of it as a blueprint for a bone, like for a building, the specification just says "x percentage of void with average cell size y and variance z", just like a building specification doesn't specify the location of every grain of sand. And of course then it also grows in response to how it's stressed. Anyway, this is because it wouldn't make sense to store all the exact information, you just store some metadata and generate the actual stuff when building. Also you do testing and build more after that. With the brain, it's the same, the amount of neurons and synapses is large compared to the amount of genes or "blueprints". But in a brain, as opposed to a bone or a finger, because the whole thing is designed to amplify weak signals, detail differences can have more effect on the function of the whole. There is this whole internal testing pattern going on while the brain is being built, but it seems it's not so perfect that clear differences creep in easily.
- irickt 9y ago
  Yes, I was surprised that the article didn't mention neurogenesis. It's worth pointing out a result from game theory: Given related individuals (using the example of two shepard brothers who may signal each other for help) there are many signaling equilibria. The particular path is sensitive to random initial conditions. Interestingly, even for a simple game where a non-signaling altruistic solution dominates, a signaling solution reliably emerges and converges. Game Theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis, 2000 (first edition), pp 321-323.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
I apologize in advance if I'm being overly pedantic, this weekend I took the time to do a cursory study of chaotic complex, systems emergence and fractals and i'm still trying on this new knowledge, but is it really considered random? (I dont know the precise definition) Even if raised in identical conditions, a small perturbation in a social interaction (say one od the fish is looking directly at an event whilr another only catches a glance at it from the side) can bubble up to produce large changes in behavior?
- Retric 9y ago
  QM effects are considered random and influence just about every real world system. PS: At the 'other end' relativity actually influences a lot of chemistry because electrons are just that fast in orbit around atoms. But, that's generally ignored by just about everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
- ajkjk 9y ago
  It's not (probably) random in the sense of true, quantum mechanical randomness, but random can be thought of existing 'with respect to the certain knowledge'. So if you flip a coin and have as input the precise physics of the launched coin and the air, the result isn't random; if you only know 'a coin was flipped' then it's essentially random. So I imagine chaotic systems' outcomes seem random if you have only approximate the initial conditions (since small perturbations will greatly modify the outcome) (that's probably a good, equivalent definition of a chaotic system, also).
65827 9y ago
That's basically the thesis of the paper, there is some randomness completely independent of both genes and environment. I think it's super cool but I can see how some (white) people would find this upsetting.
- dang 9y ago
  You've repeatedly been violating the HN guidelines by posting inflammatory, unsubstantive comments and dropping gratuitous flamebait. If you continue to do this, we're going to have to ban your account, so please (re)-read the following and fix this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gwern 9y ago
> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. There is no need for randomness there. This scenario is handled by frequency-dependent selection like the 'hawk and dove' model or the male/female sex ratio. If aggressiveness becomes too common, then it gets selected against until it's driven back down to a frequency where it's neutral. This sort of frequency-dependent selection is one of the behavioral genetics interpretation of why we have personality factors, actually: see "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality" http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20targetarticle.pdf http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20... , Penke et al 2007; & "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality Revisited" http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolutionary_Genetics_of_Personality_Revisited.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolu... , Penke & Jokela 2016 (I ran into a nifty mouse study on personality the other day demonstrating this sort of thing: https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Temporally-fluctuating-selection-on-a-personality https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Tem... )
ouid 9y ago
It's not just decision making deadlock that receives a benefit. The survival of my offspring is often dependent on them expressing strategic diversity from one another. The only feature that you share in common with your ancestors who survived snowball earth is the uncertainty of inheritance through mutation. If uncertainty is adaptive, it makes sense that it would also be encoded into the genome.
qb45 9y ago
> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality There is also a question of possibility. Do we really understand how few hundred megabytes of information driving a soup of self-replicating peptides could encode the details of large, complex organisms, completely with all their behaviors, regardless of environment and random flukes? It's a miracle that this stuff works even as far as we can observe it working. And on a somewhat tangential note: People discovered genes and sorta jumped to conclusion that there must be genes for every adjective they have ever come up with to describe organisms. They used genetics to justify various eugenics movements. 100 years later, we still have trouble finding genes responsible for complex features. I somewhat trollishly call it "intelligent design" or, more specifically, "anthropomorphically-intelligent design" because it really is an assumption that life is a sort of machinery designed in the same way the current generation of humans would go about engineering that kind of stuff, i.e. describe the "features" we think organisms have and figure out ways to "implement" them using biological processes we assume to be possible. I'm not saying that I know a better way. I'm just not really surprised when science delivers less than people hope and hype.

by ajkjk 9y ago

Gravityloss 9y ago

Two thoughts here. If you look at fingerprints or the spongy interior of bones, clearly there's a lot of detail there. But the position of every skin whorl or bone void is not specified directly by a gene. Identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. This doesn't matter for finger or bone functionality, as long as the material works on a statistical, higher level. If you think of it as a blueprint for a bone, like for a building, the specification just says "x percentage of void with average cell size y and variance z", just like a building specification doesn't specify the location of every grain of sand. And of course then it also grows in response to how it's stressed. Anyway, this is because it wouldn't make sense to store all the exact information, you just store some metadata and generate the actual stuff when building. Also you do testing and build more after that. With the brain, it's the same, the amount of neurons and synapses is large compared to the amount of genes or "blueprints". But in a brain, as opposed to a bone or a finger, because the whole thing is designed to amplify weak signals, detail differences can have more effect on the function of the whole. There is this whole internal testing pattern going on while the brain is being built, but it seems it's not so perfect that clear differences creep in easily.

irickt 9y ago
Yes, I was surprised that the article didn't mention neurogenesis. It's worth pointing out a result from game theory: Given related individuals (using the example of two shepard brothers who may signal each other for help) there are many signaling equilibria. The particular path is sensitive to random initial conditions. Interestingly, even for a simple game where a non-signaling altruistic solution dominates, a signaling solution reliably emerges and converges. Game Theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis, 2000 (first edition), pp 321-323.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

I apologize in advance if I'm being overly pedantic, this weekend I took the time to do a cursory study of chaotic complex, systems emergence and fractals and i'm still trying on this new knowledge, but is it really considered random? (I dont know the precise definition) Even if raised in identical conditions, a small perturbation in a social interaction (say one od the fish is looking directly at an event whilr another only catches a glance at it from the side) can bubble up to produce large changes in behavior?

Retric 9y ago
QM effects are considered random and influence just about every real world system. PS: At the 'other end' relativity actually influences a lot of chemistry because electrons are just that fast in orbit around atoms. But, that's generally ignored by just about everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
ajkjk 9y ago
It's not (probably) random in the sense of true, quantum mechanical randomness, but random can be thought of existing 'with respect to the certain knowledge'. So if you flip a coin and have as input the precise physics of the launched coin and the air, the result isn't random; if you only know 'a coin was flipped' then it's essentially random. So I imagine chaotic systems' outcomes seem random if you have only approximate the initial conditions (since small perturbations will greatly modify the outcome) (that's probably a good, equivalent definition of a chaotic system, also).

65827 9y ago

That's basically the thesis of the paper, there is some randomness completely independent of both genes and environment. I think it's super cool but I can see how some (white) people would find this upsetting.

dang 9y ago
You've repeatedly been violating the HN guidelines by posting inflammatory, unsubstantive comments and dropping gratuitous flamebait. If you continue to do this, we're going to have to ban your account, so please (re)-read the following and fix this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

gwern 9y ago

> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. There is no need for randomness there. This scenario is handled by frequency-dependent selection like the 'hawk and dove' model or the male/female sex ratio. If aggressiveness becomes too common, then it gets selected against until it's driven back down to a frequency where it's neutral. This sort of frequency-dependent selection is one of the behavioral genetics interpretation of why we have personality factors, actually: see "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality" http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20targetarticle.pdf http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20... , Penke et al 2007; & "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality Revisited" http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolutionary_Genetics_of_Personality_Revisited.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolu... , Penke & Jokela 2016 (I ran into a nifty mouse study on personality the other day demonstrating this sort of thing: https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Temporally-fluctuating-selection-on-a-personality https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Tem... )

ouid 9y ago

It's not just decision making deadlock that receives a benefit. The survival of my offspring is often dependent on them expressing strategic diversity from one another. The only feature that you share in common with your ancestors who survived snowball earth is the uncertainty of inheritance through mutation. If uncertainty is adaptive, it makes sense that it would also be encoded into the genome.

qb45 9y ago

> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality There is also a question of possibility. Do we really understand how few hundred megabytes of information driving a soup of self-replicating peptides could encode the details of large, complex organisms, completely with all their behaviors, regardless of environment and random flukes? It's a miracle that this stuff works even as far as we can observe it working. And on a somewhat tangential note: People discovered genes and sorta jumped to conclusion that there must be genes for every adjective they have ever come up with to describe organisms. They used genetics to justify various eugenics movements. 100 years later, we still have trouble finding genes responsible for complex features. I somewhat trollishly call it "intelligent design" or, more specifically, "anthropomorphically-intelligent design" because it really is an assumption that life is a sort of machinery designed in the same way the current generation of humans would go about engineering that kind of stuff, i.e. describe the "features" we think organisms have and figure out ways to "implement" them using biological processes we assume to be possible. I'm not saying that I know a better way. I'm just not really surprised when science delivers less than people hope and hype.