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Given evolution's "modularity/abstraction/engineering principles be damned" approach to problem solving, I'd wager the shape of the bottleneck and every other l
by jcgrillo 2y ago
Given evolution's "modularity/abstraction/engineering principles be damned" approach to problem solving, I'd wager the shape of the bottleneck and every other little detail is actually important.
Put another way, evolution writes the worst side-effecting spaghetti code you've ever seen that somehow, (seemingly) miraculously does exactly the right thing, robustly, more efficiently than you can possibly imagine doing it.
- roenxi 2y ago> right thing, robustly, more efficiently than you can possibly imagine doing it. Well... actually evolution doesn't tend to do that well against an engineered process. It has higher bandwidth than human engineers. For example, engineers can move humans around faster and with better energy efficiency [0] than evolution managed directly. We've also figured out more effective ways to organise society (laws & principles) than nature managed (many of our instincts have effects that lead to measurably stupid outcomes, eg, mob forming instincts are just a disaster). There are quite a lot of examples where it turns out engineering > evolution in a quite strict sense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
- jcgrillo 2y agoEvolution made the engineers, though. And the politicians. We are just as much a "part of nature" as, say, rodents.
- skydhash 2y ago> There are quite a lot of examples where it turns out engineering > evolution in a quite strict sense. Only if you're considering human agents more important than anything else. When considered the system as a whole, nature seems very efficient.