The evolution of stupidity (and octopus intelligence)

Exactly, the lack of persistent storage was accounted for by societal structures, e.g. tribe elders.

You can pass some knowledge but it's limited. The more specialized you get the fewer knowledge bearer and if something happens to them you have to start from scratch again.

It takes one war to destroy centuries of oral tradition. Written works have this ability where they can be transported by individuals who cannot read them.

> Except oral traditions exist and have been passed down for thousands of years without writing.

What makes you think this? The initial tradition of $FOO probably changed to $BAR two generations later, nevermind thousands of years.

Not only this, but non-human social animals like whales and apes show locally unique and persistent technologies and adaptations that are usually called culture by the people studying them, all without writing.

Culture is certainly less enduring and more fragile without writing, but as long as knowledge can be transmitted from old to young by some means other than genetic encoding, it is also inevitable.

So the tradition goes, at least… without the comparing current written version to the ‘original’ version, it’s nearly impossible to tell how accurately our current understanding is after thousands of years.

Oral tradition is just a story, it’s not a record, the way writing is.

"the person who fell asleep on the couch of the house he was robbing (this one is common)." This is common? is it addicts nodding off? I'm picturing myself in this situation and imaging my anxiety how could someone possibly fall asleep? actually baffled

> Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual.

The one question that has kept me up at night the most (can’t recall who posed it) was; “What are we building? Ants build ant hills, beavers build dams, what is humanity building?”

I agree with the rest of the post, its hard to say one way or another if octopuses believe in conspiracy theories, and the conclusion drawn seems, at best, orthogonal to the data presented.

But I disagree with what you said here:

>But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)

Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation"

But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.

True. Maybe they're all a bunch of paranoid, misguided wing-nuts. Who knows? Genetics means nothing apart from an ability to chemically copy something. Am I smarter than a Chimpanzee, given that we share 99% of our DNA? Considering that I'm here and they're there, the answer is probably "yes". It's just an observation, but seems solid enough as a conclusion with the evidence I have. Are Octopuses smart? Who knows. But, I'm still here, and they're still there. Of course, nothing lasts forever. Maybe they're playing the long game. Same goes for whales, porpoises, dogs, ponies and elegant rocks. Were they all super smart, they'd be here and we'd be there.

I think the subtlety is that cephalopods/corvids/etc probably don’t hold false beliefs about the following:

a) things they care about

b) things they are cognitively capable of understanding to be false, and

c) things they can plausibly falsify for themselves by obtaining the relevant information.

So an octopus can have all sorts of misconceptions: indifferently making false assumptions about a cave they aren’t going to explore themselves; bizarre pseudo-magical explanations about human technology far beyond their understanding; incorrect guesses as to another octopus’s mental state. But what makes a conspiracy theory more than a mere misconception is the effort spent reinforcing the falsehood, using tools and methodologies which reflect a theoretical capability to understand why the conspiracy theory must be false[1]. (In particular the problem of people who cynically spread conspiracy theories without believing them.)

Conspiracy theories and other misconceptions motivated by politics or ideology are unique to humans because language + complex social organization + some intangible “humanness” means that abstract ideas and information can have great social power, and hence power in the real world, regardless of whether these ideas reflect reality.

[1] Note how many modern conspiracy theories are “backed up” by a slew of “evidence” which takes great analytical effort to refute line-by-line.

The actual DK study is far less assertive about it's conclusions, from what I can recall. People who think they don't suffer from it love to prove that they do by raising it almost to the level of physical law.

Octopi are intelligent, but we see them reacting to their environment the vast majority of the time. We do not see them engage in behaviors that result in bad outcomes. They seem to spin up a mental model to assist them in their day to day, which is very different than having a dogmatic belief that harms or even inconveniences them. They seem very direct. I'd want to see some documented behavior such as cyclical motions, or returning to a spot repeatedly, disregarding danger, that kind of thing. Our intelligence models the world imperfectly, via metaphors we encounter in the world itself. We use the mental space we gain from using a portion of our working memory, as well as our exectutive control functions to not react as we create our narratives, which we use to persuade others socially via language. Sociality is baked in.

Quite possbily octopi use their 9 brains in a genetic algorithm for problem solving. The camo they use gives them advanced signalling for free. The redundancy their multiple brains give them might let them just compute solutions who knows?

Finally, it's important to remember that people who never change their mind often propogate their worldview to more malliable people. That constancy is comforting to many, and the emotional machinery is millions of years older than the rational system we cobbled together out of our excecutive control function we got from our cortex. That's why advertising is not just somebody reading the benefits of a product.

After all, smart people get scammed just as easy and dumb ones. In fact, it's better. Once their emotions are subverted, the story they tell themselves will be utterly plausible.

You also don't need to be a genius to sense when somebody is manipulative, and contemptuous of you. So you stick together with your peeps and crowdsource a heuristic of distrust of the eggheads. You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?

When it comes to the term "Conspiracy Theory", the stupidity is baked in, as a theory is something proven, not assumed.

Hypothesis > (test) > Theory

The conspiracy among three Physicists, now known as the Manhattan Project, with hundreds of thousands of unknowing participants, with whole new sectors of industries, and supply chains, brought us new medicine, nuclear power, and peace through mutually assured destruction, yet people seem to think of conspiracy as some harebrained concept spun up by halfwits.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is auto-correlation. From the article:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

> The irony is that the situation is actually reversed. In their seminal paper, Dunning and Kruger are the ones broadcasting their (statistical) incompetence by conflating autocorrelation for a psychological effect. In this light, the paper’s title may still be appropriate. It’s just that it was the authors (not the test subjects) who were ‘unskilled and unaware of it’.

Sending envoys to the spagetthi del mare?

That was the point they made.

In their colorful thought experiment, if all our writing/printing ink faded in short time periods, all recognizable civilization would disappear. Seemingly small changes can result in radical impact.

Additionally, the notion that the DNA is the sole locus of diversity in organisms is now quite outdated. There is a lot going on epigenetically.

>Problem: coastline shape is a dependent variable. Amount of water is the independent. Looking at S.America and Africa only makes a jigsaw puzzle in modern times. During the ice ages, will those continents still look like a match?

This isn't quite correct. The continental shelf maintains the general shape of the land above it. Any amount of lowering from ice ages is still going to be within the shelf break and give the same outline.

> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.

I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same.

Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.

The problem, I think, is that a layperson is unaccustomed to systems like computer programs and DNA where 99% precision is laughably insufficient to specify the behavior.

If you baked some cookies and you adjusted the amount of any one ingredient by 1%... I'm not sure the average American cook has the measurement equipment to notice. With a good scale you might be able to tell. Built a shed and adjusted the measurements by 1%? It's still going to stand up just fine. Wrote an email and swapped 1 in 100 words? They might not seven notice a difference.

If you took out only the 1% that was the baking soda, or the 1% that is the nails in the rafters, or finished your email with "Screw that!" yeah, that might be hugely different...but that's exactly the kind of precision edits to critical details that computer programs and DNA require to change user-visible behavior in a huge way.

You could do much more damage than that. In poetry and Shakespeare especially, each word is used very carefully as a unit of very dense information. You could make Hamlet not related to his own father and fundamentally change any structural meaning behind the play. The resulting work would be named "Hamlet" but not be THE "Hamlet" at all.