5 ms·

It's interesting from Darwinian perspective; that as a species we've produced a system that could select a "less fit" candidate. I wonder if there are other exa

by harryf 9y ago

It's interesting from Darwinian perspective; that as a species we've produced a system that could select a "less fit" candidate. I wonder if there are other examples of this type of behaviour in nature or if we're the first?

wavefunction 9y ago
That presumes the system was already choosing "more fit" candidates. Given the system's historical inequities that claim seems suspect. How many women or ethnic minorities lost out on opportunities in the past because of who they were?
nostrademons 9y ago
Oftentimes when an evolutionary process produces a "less fit" candidate, it's because our intuitive notions of what fitness is are wrong. A bunch of examples from business: Betamax vs. VHS is often cited as an example of the market rewarding an inferior technical solution. Betamax's picture quality was better, but the key VHS feature was you could fit a 90-100 minute feature film on a single tape (Betamax tapes were 1 hour). The market valued the ability to watch a single movie without changing tapes more than picture quality (and still does - look at all the YouTube videos that do horrible things to picture quality to get a full movie up while evading copyright detection). Intel x86 is often cited as a terrible instruction architecture. The mistake here is thinking that "ease of learning for newcomers" is the key value in an ISA. Most programmers are using compilers to generate assembly code anyway, and the key value that consumers want is "runs all my existing software, reasonably quickly". Intel correctly preferences backwards compatibility over elegance. Here's one from biology. Sickle-cell anemia is a terrible disease, leading to extremely painful episodes and often loss of limbs to gangrene. However, it confers increased resistance to malaria. In many of the areas where sickle-cell anemia is endemic, malaria is a bigger killer than gangrene. This is nature optimizing for the actual threat rather than the obvious threat. I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from a few headlines - often press cycles blow over. But if it turns out that this spate of sexual harassment headlines is the new normal rather than just momentary opportunism, it's possible that old models of who the critical constituency to please is are obsolete, and that women collectively now hold more economic power than the old boy's network. If you build a culture assuming that the old boy's network is the critical constituency, and then it turns out that assumption is invalid, then all of your evolutionary adaptations to that environment go out the window.
- abiox 9y ago
  interesting; so (perhaps) an 'underperformer' can be 'more fit' due to other factors.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

by harryf 9y ago

wavefunction 9y ago

That presumes the system was already choosing "more fit" candidates. Given the system's historical inequities that claim seems suspect. How many women or ethnic minorities lost out on opportunities in the past because of who they were?

nostrademons 9y ago

Oftentimes when an evolutionary process produces a "less fit" candidate, it's because our intuitive notions of what fitness is are wrong. A bunch of examples from business: Betamax vs. VHS is often cited as an example of the market rewarding an inferior technical solution. Betamax's picture quality was better, but the key VHS feature was you could fit a 90-100 minute feature film on a single tape (Betamax tapes were 1 hour). The market valued the ability to watch a single movie without changing tapes more than picture quality (and still does - look at all the YouTube videos that do horrible things to picture quality to get a full movie up while evading copyright detection). Intel x86 is often cited as a terrible instruction architecture. The mistake here is thinking that "ease of learning for newcomers" is the key value in an ISA. Most programmers are using compilers to generate assembly code anyway, and the key value that consumers want is "runs all my existing software, reasonably quickly". Intel correctly preferences backwards compatibility over elegance. Here's one from biology. Sickle-cell anemia is a terrible disease, leading to extremely painful episodes and often loss of limbs to gangrene. However, it confers increased resistance to malaria. In many of the areas where sickle-cell anemia is endemic, malaria is a bigger killer than gangrene. This is nature optimizing for the actual threat rather than the obvious threat. I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from a few headlines - often press cycles blow over. But if it turns out that this spate of sexual harassment headlines is the new normal rather than just momentary opportunism, it's possible that old models of who the critical constituency to please is are obsolete, and that women collectively now hold more economic power than the old boy's network. If you build a culture assuming that the old boy's network is the critical constituency, and then it turns out that assumption is invalid, then all of your evolutionary adaptations to that environment go out the window.

abiox 9y ago
interesting; so (perhaps) an 'underperformer' can be 'more fit' due to other factors.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]