Carl Shulman: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's so interesting. Just for the audience the calculation about like two to the whatever months is just like, you have a half chance of dying this month, a half chance of dying next month, you multiply those together. There's other species though that do live in flocks or as packs. They do have a smaller version of the development of cubs that play with each other. Why isn't this a hill on which they could have climbed to human level intelligence themselves? If it's something like language or technology, humans were getting smarter before we got language. It seems like there should be other species that should have beginnings of this cognitive revolution especially given how valuable it is given we've dominated the world. You would think there would be selective pressure for it. Evolution doesn't have foresight. The thing in this generation that gets more surviving offspring and grandchildren is the thing that becomes more common. Evolution doesn't look ahead and think oh in a million years you'll have a lot of descendants. It's what survives and reproduces now. In fact, there are correlations where social animals do on average have larger brains and part of that is probably the additional social applications of brains, like keeping track of which of your group members have helped you before so that you can reciprocate. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Remembering who's dangerous within the group is an additional application of intelligence. So there's some correlation there but what it seems like is that in most of these cases it's enough to invest more but not invest to the point where a mind can easily develop language and technology and pass it on. You see bits of tool use in some other primates who have an advantage compared to say whales who have quite large brains partly because they are so large themselves and they have some other things, but they don't have hands which means that reduces a bunch of ways in which brains can pay off and investments in the functioning of that brain. But yeah, primates will use sticks to extract termites, Capuchin monkeys will open clams by smashing them with a rock. But what they don't have is the ability to sustain culture. A particular primate will maybe discover one of these tactics and it'll be copied by their immediate group but they're not holding on to it that well. When they see the other animal do it they can copy it in that situation but they don't actively teach each other in their population. So it's easy to forget things, easy to lose information and in fact they remain technologically stagnant for hundreds of thousands of years. And we can look at some human situations. There's an old paper, I believe by the economist Michael Kramer, which talks about technological growth in the different continents for human societies. Eurasia is the largest integrated connected area. Africa is partly connected to it but the Sahara desert restricts the flow of information and technology and such. Then you have the Americas after the colonization from the land bridge were largely separated and are smaller than Eurasia, then Australia, and then you had smaller island situations like Tasmania. Technological progress seems to have been faster the larger the connected group of people. And in the smallest groups, like Tasmania where you had a relatively small population, they actually lost technology. They lost some fishing techniques. And if you have a small population and you have some limited number of people who know a skill and they happen to die or there's some change in circumstances that causes people not to practice or pass on that thing then you lose it. on and you have some limited number of people who know a skill and they happen to die or there's some change in circumstances that causes people not to practice or pass on that thing then you lose it. If you have few people you're doing less innovation and the rate at which you lose technologies to some local disturbance and the rate at which you create new technologies can wind up imbalanced. The great change of hominids and humanity is that we wound up in this situation where we were accumulating faster than we were losing and accumulating those technologies allowed us to expand our population. They created additional demand for intelligence so our brains became three times as large as chimpanzees and our ancestors who had a similar brain size.…

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