Adam Marblestone: belief

Transcript context

…Tangential thought. Joe Henrich and others have this idea for the way human societies have learned to do things like, how do you figure out that this kind of bean, which actually just almost always poisons you, is edible if you do this ten-step incredibly complicated process, any one of which if you fail, at the bean will be poisonous? How do you figure out how to hunt this seal in this particular way, with this particular weapon, at this particular time of the year, et cetera? There’s no way but just like trying shit over generations. And it strikes me this is actually very much like model-free RL happening at a civilizational level. No, not exactly. Evolution is the simplest algorithm in some sense. If we believe that all of this can come from evolution, the outer loop can be extremely not foresighted. Right, that’s interesting. Just hierarchies of… Evolution: model-free……

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