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Comment by gom_jabbar | Hacker News Reader

I have also always respected Land's intellectual honesty. I think the closest primary source to your point about the cybernetic OODA loop and competition is Land's text Against Orthogonality:

"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality

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> "Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever

This is bunk, and only works when there's one variable that controls who wins, and there are no diminishing returns. Its sounds as naive as "Any athlete that uses X to improve themself will outcompete one that directs themselves towards any other goals whatsoever"

The point of Land is that there is an underlying reality. Systems that make use of that reality most effectively are those that will propagate and dominate that reality. Landian intelligence isn't about scoring high on the SAT (which, obviously, won't make someone a star basketball player), but instead about how a system can react to reality to propagate itself. Almost tautologically, systems that make better use of reality outcompete those that make worse use of reality.

I said "X" instead of intelligence, strength, mass, reaction time, precise control, spatial awareness, or any other single characteristic because the best athletes have to be great on multiple dimensions - not just one. The same goes for "intelligence", unless it's used by Land as a catch-all phrase for multiple attributes, and if so, the statement becomes pointlessly vague, and papers over the fact that some of these attributes have physical limits and can't be changed by the self-improving intelligence, this limits are present in any medium e.g. latency, bandwidth, signal attenuation

I'm quite a fan of that piece as well. I don't think I agree with it exactly as stated, the claim feels like it can be usefully weakened - but it's crisp, so I like it the same way I like Nietzsche.

Is retrochronic yours? Nice project, if so. So much of his work is scattered across defunct blogs.

Yes, it's my project - thanks for the feedback! Tracking down the source material has been a real challenge since it's so scattered and often offline, but I'm hoping it makes things easier for anyone wanting to dive deep into the primary sources behind Land's main thesis.

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