Evolution And Seeing Reality

Scott Adams linked to this:

Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.

Hoffman’s been making a lot of news in recent months with these claims. His March 2015 TED talk went viral, gaining more than 2 million views…

So, what exactly is Hoffman’s big radical idea? He begins with a precisely formulated theorem:

“Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness.”

So let’s unpack Hoffman’s theorem for a moment…

So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment’s, fitness function. The second creature couldn’t care less about what’s really going on in reality. What Hoffman’s theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.

” … an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality.”

Basically this is exactly what we have been maintaining is the case with the r-strategist. In r-selection, seeing threat, engaging threat, hitting pause, and doing the hard thing are all bad for your reproductive rate. You insist on ease and safety, you flee threat, you expect free resources, you mate as if disease does not exist, you eat anything, and you do it all as fast as possible with no hesitation.

It requires a certain type of brain with a certain type of programming. Take that psychology, and drop it into a world where resources are limited, and you naturally get dysfunction, starting with an unusually high level of angst, and finishing with urges that cannot be controlled, even if they are suicidal and contrary to reproduction.

Liberals forever see a world which is usually not there, and end up very unhappy because of it. We see a world which is usually there, and are only unhappy for brief moments in time, as our opposition’s world becomes a reality, and we find ourselves baffled by their ascension.

The only constant, and our salvation, is Apocalypse.