Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve got to contribute resources back to the group. You can't just be a freeloader. You need to get calories, go out in the jungle, get some berries. If you're just hanging out learning stuff for 50 years, you're just going to die before you get to have kids yourself. Obviously, humans have bigger brains than other primates. We also have longer adolescences, which help us make use potentially of the extra capacity our brain gives us. But if you made the adolescence too long, then you would just die before you get to have kids. If that's going to happen anyways, what's the point of making the brain bigger? AKA, maybe intelligence is easier than we think, and there's a bunch of contingent reasons evolution didn't churn as hard on this variable as it could have. I entirely agree with that particular thesis. In biology in general, when you're trying to engineer a given property, be it being healthier longer or be it making something more intelligent… This is true even at the micro-level of trying to engineer a system to manufacture a protein at high efficiency. You always have to start by asking yourself, “Did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this? If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard. If not, potentially there are some low-hanging fruit.” This is a good argument for why, potentially, intelligence wasn't strongly selected for. The lifespan argument plays back into intelligence to a degree. You start to ask, “If I have intelligence that's able to compound over time and for instance, in some hypothetical universe, my fluid intelligence lasts much longer into my lifespan…” If the number of people who are reaching something like 65 is very small in a population, you're not necessarily going to select for alleles that lead to fluid intelligence preservation late into life. This is part of my own pet hypothesis around some of the interesting phenomenology in when discoveries are made throughout lifespans. There are some famous results. For instance—and I'm going to get the exact age a little bit wrong—but in mathematics, most great discoveries happen roughly before 30. Why should that be true? That doesn't make sense. You can put down a bunch of societal reasons for it. Maybe you become staid in your ways. Your teachers have caused you to restrict your thinking by that point. But really, that's true across centuries? Is that true across many different unique cultures around the world? That's true in both cultures from the East and cultures from the West? That seems unlikely to me. A much simpler explanation is that for whatever reason, our fluid intelligence is roughly maximized at the time where the population size during human evolution was maximal. If you had to pick an age at which fluid intelligence was selected most strongly for, it's probably around 25 or 30. That's probably about the age of the adults in the large populations that were being selected for during most of evolution. There's a lot of reason here to think that there's interplay between many features of modern humans and how long we were living, and how that dictates some of the features that occur that rise and fall throughout our lives.…

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