11 ms·

I don't believe Eliezer has ever said that evolution works by incremental improvements, only by incremental changes that become increasingly complex as a system

by Jach 15y ago

I don't believe Eliezer has ever said that evolution works by incremental improvements, only by incremental changes that become increasingly complex as a system when there are dependencies. Therefore even if you have a super-complex system it can still suck, the complexity may add nothing to its goodness, incremental changes can be directly harmful, and the right solution may indeed be to throw it out and start over. This should be clear to any programmer. I'll profess historical ignorance here, though from my knowledge I believe that most instances of government change to a better government (and there have of course been changes to a worse government) have come through sudden revolutions that upset much of the previously existing power hierarchy. Additionally, to me it seems like government is naturally against any change at all, which precludes it from being improved easily. Eliezer has written numerous times elsewhere: "Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change." So I don't think a "scrap the current system" is necessarily a bad idea, though I don't want bloody revolution.

nknight 15y ago
But start over with what? I don't interpret libertarianism as "throw it out and start over", but as "throw it out and do nothing". They seek to strip government down and put it in a sealed box of predetermined size that can never change. It should be equally clear to any programmer that boxing yourself in eventually leads to disaster.
- Jach 15y ago
  I don't seek to argue for/against libertarianism here (neocameralism intrigues me more), I just aimed to show that your initial statements about a complex system improving automatically with changes were false. I also wanted to show that "throw it out" by itself isn't unreasonable. I'm not sure that the programming metaphor here fits, considering languages like Haskell et al. that do box you in have had tremendous success. There are also programs that have been 'running things' just fine for 10+ years unchanged. I'm not aware of any government that could claim that, though with the former I think one of the motivators for having a constitutional government in the first place is to box-in the government. The merits of that vs. having a "Lispy" government that does what it pleases can be argued some other time. (Separately, there is an argument of "premature boxing in" that I have used to argue against full-fledged unit tests early on, but that's getting even further off-topic.)
  - nknight 15y ago
    Actually, the metaphor works fine. Haskell doesn't fundamentally try to restrict what is done, but how it is done. Some things may be harder to do because of those restrictions, but they don't become entirely impossible, even if eventually you might find a corner case where you have to modify the language itself. Constitutions can (usually) be amended. The US Constitution in particular has essentially no restrictions on what can be done by amendment (and it's pretty obvious that the one operative restriction can be dealt with if necessary). This is done out of knowledge of our own ignorance -- we cannot possibly conceive of every situation society will face, nor how our governance models will interact with those situations. This is why libertarianism irritates me. It comes across as such an absolute. Few things are absolutes, and when you're talking about something that will affect millions of people, you can't realistically expect to arrive at an absolutely right solution that will work for everybody every time.
loup-vaillant 15y ago
Eliezer may not have been explicit about this but if your genes suck, you likely die before you spawn. Regardless of the complexity of your genome. So, any harmful incremental change would be eventually selected out of the gene pool (or at least won't spread). Neutral changes are unlikely to become universal. Therefore, only improvements can be universal enough to be build upon.

by Jach 15y ago

nknight 15y ago

But start over with what? I don't interpret libertarianism as "throw it out and start over", but as "throw it out and do nothing". They seek to strip government down and put it in a sealed box of predetermined size that can never change. It should be equally clear to any programmer that boxing yourself in eventually leads to disaster.

Jach 15y ago
I don't seek to argue for/against libertarianism here (neocameralism intrigues me more), I just aimed to show that your initial statements about a complex system improving automatically with changes were false. I also wanted to show that "throw it out" by itself isn't unreasonable. I'm not sure that the programming metaphor here fits, considering languages like Haskell et al. that do box you in have had tremendous success. There are also programs that have been 'running things' just fine for 10+ years unchanged. I'm not aware of any government that could claim that, though with the former I think one of the motivators for having a constitutional government in the first place is to box-in the government. The merits of that vs. having a "Lispy" government that does what it pleases can be argued some other time. (Separately, there is an argument of "premature boxing in" that I have used to argue against full-fledged unit tests early on, but that's getting even further off-topic.)
- nknight 15y ago
  Actually, the metaphor works fine. Haskell doesn't fundamentally try to restrict what is done, but how it is done. Some things may be harder to do because of those restrictions, but they don't become entirely impossible, even if eventually you might find a corner case where you have to modify the language itself. Constitutions can (usually) be amended. The US Constitution in particular has essentially no restrictions on what can be done by amendment (and it's pretty obvious that the one operative restriction can be dealt with if necessary). This is done out of knowledge of our own ignorance -- we cannot possibly conceive of every situation society will face, nor how our governance models will interact with those situations. This is why libertarianism irritates me. It comes across as such an absolute. Few things are absolutes, and when you're talking about something that will affect millions of people, you can't realistically expect to arrive at an absolutely right solution that will work for everybody every time.

loup-vaillant 15y ago

Eliezer may not have been explicit about this but if your genes suck, you likely die before you spawn. Regardless of the complexity of your genome. So, any harmful incremental change would be eventually selected out of the gene pool (or at least won't spread). Neutral changes are unlikely to become universal. Therefore, only improvements can be universal enough to be build upon.