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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

The I think about it is like this: Code is read and maintained by humans, so it is under selection pressure to be comprehensible by human minds.

Reality has no such constraint. If the biological processes of some animal lead to inscrutable irreducibly complex "spaghetti code" but the animal is slightly more likely to produce offspring... the complexity wins. The natural world doesn't care whether or not we can understand it.

(There is, of course, a natural selection pressure going the other direction. Brains that understand the natural world do seem to often be generally more likely to produce offspring, so there's evolutionary pressure for minds to understand the world, but not for the world to be understood by minds.)

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>Code is read and maintained by humans, so it is under selection pressure to be comprehensible by human minds.

I think the opposite is actually true for code that lives in long-running projects that change hands relatively often. It seems like the safest state for code to be in is actually to be incomprehensible, so it's too "scary" for any developer to refactor. All the comprehensible code can meanwhile be safely moved around until it's eventually incomprehensible as well.

Speaking from complete naivete about biology, I wonder if there's a similar game going on with viruses and cell machinery. If the cell's processes are too "legible", then presumably they're easier for a virus to evolve to hijack.

The evolutionary pressure is a root here, but the problem isn't readability, it's the lack of abstraction.

The central dogma is DNA -> RNA -> protein, except that: 1. RNA can fold into a functional molecule 2. RNA can be spliced differently to make several different proteins 3. RNA can bind with proteins to create other functional units 4. The availability of amino acids and TRNA units within the cell affects the speed at which a protein is translated from RNA, which can affect its structure, which affects its function 5. The codon language is not guaranteed identical between organisms, which means the same RNA sequence can encode for different amino acid sequences in different organisms

And that's just in the transcription/translation machinery. That's what I mean when I say there's no abstraction: biology is a physical system, which means molecular & atomic interactions influence every level of every process.

> The natural world doesn't care

I always find this kind of phrasing problematic due to its implicit anthrophomorphic metaphors.

Whether spaguetti code or not, I think that people often just assume that we have the capacity to understand it give the period of time between now and when humans disappear (because of evolution, a meteorite, climate change or human intervention). I am highly skeptical. Maybe, whatever species emerges after us, might have a better chance but to them we might be no different than a homo erectus is to us homo sapients.

In some way, neural networks and newer ML models seem to be going in this direction. We are starting to get faster/better results with black boxes than with if-else style code

Yes! Optimal designs may not be "elegant" from the human perspective. Reminds me of these complex computer generated airframe designs https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181129-the-ai-transform....

> Brains that understand the natural world do seem to often be generally more likely to produce offspring

I would argue that the evolutionary pressure only applies to a limited level of understanding of the physical world. Think how many kids people like Stephen Hawkings have and how many poorly educated people have.

On the other hand I would argue that evolutionary pressure works differently for modern humans in the 20th century and beyond than it did for the majority of human evolution.

Sure uneducated people now often have more kids due to less contraception options/knowledge and as old age insurance. But then again rich people have more kids than middle class because of well more money and everything that comes with it.

In any case all of this is anecdotal and emotion based because there is not much good data on this. Or maybe there is?

> rich people have more kids than middle class

Do they? I am pretty sure that the vast majority of the human population is poor and not just "I can't afford an iPhone poor" but "I have no food on the table" poverty. The rich are but a tiny minority. In terms of reproduction, poor people win easily. Last time I check, rich people are more likely to be highly educated compare to anyone else and education is a predictor of reproduction rate (more education and less reproduction and less education and more reproduction).

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