Comment by eggoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggoa | Hacker News Reader

The paper is available at:

http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf

This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen.

"After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately 12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean fitness declines and the population drops (Fig. 2). When the population reaches very low levels, selection may return behavior towards the environmental optimum (as there are very few individuals in the population, and one who is incidentally blessed with suitable behavior, because of the error (σ) around the target behavior, can have many offspring and so change the mean behavior of the population)."

It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made fast enough to avoid major shakeups.

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