4 ms·

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even or

by bitL 7y ago

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; maybe somebody was doing alien PhD in a better bipedal design in carbon-based life forms and just planted results here to see how they proliferate... If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.

ben_w 7y ago
> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.
- bitL 7y ago
  The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability, especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    > the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). On the contrary, the complexity is so trivial it’s something I did in 30 minutes, on a laptop, in 2008, as a “prove it to myself” response to a young-Earth Baptist Creationist. What we can’t do is simulate full-lifecycle organ-scale multi-cell protein folding in real time, but that’s a very different thing.
    - bitL 7y ago
      What do you mean? You trivially simulated the process of figuring out that an animal needs to grow a new leg/organ in response to some environmental situation or to gain "an upper leg" against its adversaries? Are you serious?
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Genetic algorithms are a very easy to implement form of AI. The hard part is to create a fitness function which does what you actually want — In the wild, reality and competitors are your fitness function, and none needs to be created; conversely, in a simulation the fitness function is necessarily artificial, and can be made to reach any goal you want, from “compose a song” to “write the rules for an AI for this video game so I don’t have to” to “discover a new superconductor” to “design a clock” to “learn to walk”… etc., and all of those are real examples. Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic examples. But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms work because evolution works. They produce novel solutions without the authors of the programs creating the solutions.
        antisemiotic 7y ago
        Humans have a history of occasionally choosing bad fitness functions that predates computers, for example look at the awful things we've done to persian cats or chihuahua dogs.

by bitL 7y ago

ben_w 7y ago

> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.

bitL 7y ago
The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability, especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.
- ben_w 7y ago
  > the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). On the contrary, the complexity is so trivial it’s something I did in 30 minutes, on a laptop, in 2008, as a “prove it to myself” response to a young-Earth Baptist Creationist. What we can’t do is simulate full-lifecycle organ-scale multi-cell protein folding in real time, but that’s a very different thing.
  - bitL 7y ago
    What do you mean? You trivially simulated the process of figuring out that an animal needs to grow a new leg/organ in response to some environmental situation or to gain "an upper leg" against its adversaries? Are you serious?
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Genetic algorithms are a very easy to implement form of AI. The hard part is to create a fitness function which does what you actually want — In the wild, reality and competitors are your fitness function, and none needs to be created; conversely, in a simulation the fitness function is necessarily artificial, and can be made to reach any goal you want, from “compose a song” to “write the rules for an AI for this video game so I don’t have to” to “discover a new superconductor” to “design a clock” to “learn to walk”… etc., and all of those are real examples. Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic examples. But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms work because evolution works. They produce novel solutions without the authors of the programs creating the solutions.
      - antisemiotic 7y ago
        Humans have a history of occasionally choosing bad fitness functions that predates computers, for example look at the awful things we've done to persian cats or chihuahua dogs.