site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why larger animals need larger brains to get same intelligence?

In 1960s, Harry J Jerison collected and plotted data on brain size-body size on log scale. He also calculated different fit lines for mammals, birds and reptiles, and they have different slopes, though often slope 2/3 is used for convenience.

While difference between reptile slope and bird slope is probably insignificant, between birds and mammals probably is (about 0.580 vs 0.72 IIRC).

Extrapolating from this data, a 70kg bird might have same intelligence as human with only 400g brain instead of 1400g. A card which birds dinosaurs didn't get to put good use for.

There used to exist, until very recently, enormous flightless birds – bigger than human, indeed. There still are some, ostriches can get bigger than almost all humans. Yet ostriches have tiny brains and are dumb, far dumber than ravens or magpies or small parrots. Their ecological niche does not lend itself to higher cognition. But why haven't brainy, crafty ostriches evolved?

To be sure, there can be some other constraints. I suspect that one is oxygen exchange in the embryonic stage – standalone eggs can't compete with placentas, and high-performance brains consume a ton of oxygen, even in the womb; human fetuses have actively working brains for many months before birth. Maybe it's not only oxygen, raw energy input in the form of glucose and metabolite clearance can be bottlenecks as well.

Birds have more neurons in their prefrontal cortex than humans (relative to brain size).

I think birds have different cell types. Higher-level brain functions like cognition is associated with certain cortical cells which birds have to be able to sing and memorize songs and other complicated social processes. God might have wanted birds to sing us pleasant songs that'd be why he gave them their brains.

Maybe intelligence is just a really slow and finicky thing to evolve, and "add moar mass" is a natural fast shortcut that evolution takes if the animal can support the extra size. Birds could not, since they still need to be able to fly. Humans could do it, at least until our heads became so large we started having trouble being born. After we reached that limit we'd need to "optimize" the brain instead to become much smarter, but that simply haven't yet had sufficient time to happen.

Gonna take the chance to plug my own animal brain size graph. Brains need to fit the body therey're in (a larger body means more sensory data, more nerve terminations to manage, can supply more energy, &c), but most body structures don't scale linearly with the overall body size; it boils down to some variant of the square-cube law. I have some reflections on the data in that link; a brain can only become so small before it stops working at a brain at all, and presumably there are diminishing returns above a certain size.

That's a very nice graph!

AFAIK, two things come together to give birds small but powerful brains, and better mass/compute scaling:

  1. Cell size can vary between species, and birds have pressure to miniaturize to reduce weight.

  2. Smaller bodies have less stuff (skin, muscles, etc) that need a nervous connection and a part of the brain to process data from and/or issue commands to. See Encephalization quotient. Eg. Women have the same IQ as men, despite having, on average, 90% of the brain size.

EDIT: This post by Scott might be of interest.

There is another problem with 1, why would that pressure also lead to better mass/compute scaling, rather than uniform shrinking? Smaller slope is advantageous to large birds and disadvantageous to small ones (which are vast majority of bird species) which need to have bulkier brains than similarly small mammals.

  1. not all birds fly, and anyway birds have slop similar to those of reptiles.

  2. larger bodies have about same number of components as smaller ones, and very easily large animal might have less degrees of freedom than small (horse vs. rat or even snake). Snakes are small brained despite having more degrees of freedom than any mammal. And the only parts which larger bodies have more complex are gastrointestinal tract and lungs, are not individiually controlled by brain.

not all birds fly, and anyway birds have slop similar to those of reptiles.

Nor do species lose adaptations the moment the original reason they got them disappears, but I concede the point.

larger bodies have about same number of components as smaller ones [...] And the only parts which larger bodies have more complex are gastrointestinal tract and lungs

'Components' is an artificial category. The number of cells which sense are what matters (since the collected data needs to be processed, otherwise the cell is worse than useless). If you need to sense with the same precision on 1 mm^2 of skin and on 5 mm^2, you'd need more neurons for transport and processing for the larger patch of skin. Not necessarily 5 times more, you can compress the data or whatever, but you definitely need more than for the 1 mm^2 patch.

'Components' is an artificial category.

Are separate muscles and bones artifical categories?

If you need to sense with the same precision on 1 mm^2 of skin and on 5 mm^2

The premise is false.

you can compress the data or whatever

If you send intensity and location of averaged spot, then it's slow-growing O(log(Area))

But larger men don't have lower iq than smaller men despite similar sized brains, if anything the relationship goes the other way.

Larger men also have larger heads, and thus larger brains.

There are a lot of relationships in biology that generally hold across species but not within a species. For instance, mammal size is associated with longer lifespan across species, but intra-species it doesn't hold and can even be the opposite, e.g. in dogs.

Eg. Women have the same IQ as men, despite having, on average, 90% of the brain size.

There's no "despite"; IQ tests are calibrated such that men and women get the same scores by design.

Sounds like fraud to me. Make the test double blind then score how women and men do vs eachother, breakdowns by age and education etc.

There's a monstrously large amount of complexity in between 'size of brain', all the mechanisms of the brain, and actual intelligence, most of which we still don't understand. This isn't a great analogy, brain size does matter, but - imagine comparing transistor density to chip speed, or transistor number to chip speed, or the technology used to chip speed. These are important, but not enough to extrapolate the intelligence of a '70kg bird with only 400g brain', any more than a chip with 1 angstrom wide transistors, a car with a 10 ton engine, etc. On the other hand, many similar things can scale up simply ("a mammal with a car-sized heart", "a flying car with a 50k pound engine").

imagine comparing transistor density to chip speed, or transistor number to chip speed

???

There are wide classes of "Embarrassingly parallel" tasks where relationship is nearly linear

Yeah, I forgot to actually make the point, was doing something else while writing that comment - whoops. The idea was that transistor density ~ things as a contingent result of a large amount of human activity, and in ways that's changed over time. like this - you can't just predict that clock speed will scale indefinitely. it hasn't! the main difference between birdbrain and humanbrain is all the stuff other than size that made humans smarter than monkeys, not size. and given the intelligence variation between similarly-brained humans, and the clear gap in human brain mechanisms and chips, there's so much technical complexity in between 'brain size' and 'intelligence', in a similar way that there is between 'transistor density' and 'some downstream effect', that it's just missing the point to say 'a 400g brain makes a bird as smart as a human'.

'wide classes' isn't 'all classes' at all, single core speed plateaued a while ago and lots of weird techniques have to be used to make single cores faster. Algorithms have to be designed for the use case parallel - GPUs use large floating point matrix multiplies because we can do those fast. One can't take, like, a web browser from 2010, and multiply by changes transistor density, and get 'how good the browser today is'. That's what doing a scaling curve between brain size and intelligence across far-separated species feels like. The things the neurons are doing are much more important than the size.

Maybe smaller animals have more efficiently evolved so their brains don't have much 'unnecessary' space. If you google about human brain sizes, it seems many sources say they've been shrinking for 3000+ years (though some sources say otherwise). If human brain sizes are shrinking, and presumably we've been getting more intelligent over the past 3000+ years, then maybe we're getting rid of 'unnecessary' space. Though maybe a large brain with 'unnecessary' space is necessary for having the excess capacity needed to develop higher level intelligence. But as we evolve and converge upon the most efficient brain size (which might be 400g?), we'll essentially become frozen as a species. We might even be more prone to devolve than anything else, as various groups don't 'use' particular parts of their brain.

Maybe a lot of our brain capacity was geared towards surviving in the natural world, used for religious/spiritual connections, socializing at a level beyond our comprehension, being connected to our environment. In our modern world, as we see the breakdown of families and people becoming more and more introverted, maybe we'll see the part of our brain that deals with socialization begin to shrink. Maybe it already has. Notice how the average Very Online type seems to be incapable of understanding sarcasm (even in person), they take entertainment media and jokes literally, they need to express their feelings vocally and require others to, seemingly unable to pick up on subtle cues.

Maybe westerners are going to lose that, our brains will shrink in a few more generations as we 'evolve'. We'll feel really smart since we can use our words to communicate, while the savages in far off lands read facial expressions like tea leaves. "lol, these idiots think they can tell when someone is angry, lying, happy, just from looking at their face. Just like bigots think they can tell who is a man or woman by sight. How can anybody possibly know what's going on in my head without me specifically telling them? Mind reading is pseudoscience." Then when those savages seem to be able to actually read minds, the enlightened will get spooked, call them witches, and burn them at the stake.

Kind of like how psychopaths seem to be able to manipulate people, as if they can see things the average person cannot. They can play people like an instrument. But maybe they just have an older brain, with a capacity to socialize at a higher level, and to them the rest of us seem like retarded children crying over spilled milk. We call it lack of empathy, but from their perspective, our ordinary problems are far below their horizon.

Though maybe a large brain with 'unnecessary' space is necessary for having the excess capacity needed to develop higher level intelligence. But as we evolve and converge upon the most efficient brain size (which might be 400g?), we'll essentially become frozen as a species. We might even be more prone to devolve than anything else, as various groups don't 'use' particular parts of their brain.

This is a highly speculative tangent that probably makes me sound like a kook, but I always think about this scenario in the context of AI and automation - tasks that would select for fitness in humans are increasingly being outsourced to external agents. Let's say we stumble upon AGI and eventually ASI, and somehow we manage to make a "friendly" one and let it take over the tasks which are relevant to the functioning of society, like the creation and distribution of resources, policing and maintaining peace, etc. What selection pressures would exist to protect us from the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the genome and suffering a severe decline in our physical prowess and cognitive faculties? Even mate choice won't necessarily maintain these things, these behaviours and preferences can and will be disposed of when your child will fare equally well regardless of if they are a genius or a handicapped moron. All you really need to be is a prolific replicator, capability of your offspring be damned.

I suppose if we're at that point we'd likely also have the ability to genetically modify ourselves, which would probably allow us to stave that off indefinitely. But still, it's an unsettling idea that the traits we possess are conditional on them having use, and that a world where we no longer fight for existence might in and of itself pose a different, more insidious type of threat.

these behaviours and preferences can and will be disposed of when your child will fare equally well regardless

This will take time, and probably we will enter next phase of Malthusian cycle before these self-enforcing behaviors drop.

There are two general points of contention I have with this.

1: ASI would result in huge leaps and bounds in technology that would push the Malthusian condition very far out into our future. For example, we would not be restricted to our resources and energy on Earth. There's always the rest of our solar system, and huge amounts of energy could be harnessed via Dyson swarm. Additionally, an ASI might crack the problem of interstellar travel - manned trips to our neighbouring star systems don't seem undoable for an ASI, and we could spread outward from there. A Malthusian condition would certainly rear its head eventually (especially considering that our reachable universe is limited), but this would take a very long time, likely enough for humans to radically change before we hit it.

2: When we hit a Malthusian limit, in this case this doesn't necessarily mean that the loss of traits just stops. It just means that the ASI will have to engage in some form of population control to manage it. That doesn't change the fact that the AI as caretaker is distributing us all of our resources without any work necessary on our part, and policing us to make sure we don't steal from each other's allotments so we can get more than our fair share (presumably that would be undesirable). This essentially makes it so that the pressures that maintain physical and cognitive ability as well as mate preferences based on physical and cognitive ability are now gone. Some of us might not get to breed under a Malthusian condition, or we might all breed less, but in this scenario the ones that do breed are likely not doing so because of their intelligence or capability. It doesn't effectively screen out the deleterious mutations that cause loss of functioning.

state-issued ASI-mandated girlfriends?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats