[HN Gopher] Is human behavior just elaborate running and tumbling?
___________________________________________________________________
Is human behavior just elaborate running and tumbling?
Author : iroh2727
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-01-17 22:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nathanieltravis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nathanieltravis.com)
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| The major problem with this argument that it relies on a very
| important (yet questionable) assumption: the reward hypothesis,
| the idea that the maximization of the expected sum of a single
| signal variable describes the organism's behavior (http://incompl
| eteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhy...). First we need
| to be careful defining what an "organism" actually is (because we
| are actually made out of billions of systems interacting with
| each other at the same time), but it is also hard to believe that
| all those interlocked systems move towards a single purpose of
| maximizing one variable, whether it be by chance or by
| coordination. The other problem is that the researchers might all
| be performing the error of defining the reward function based on
| our own narrow views and try to shoehorn it on other species as a
| process of pattern-matching. The third is that, as shown in the
| bacteria example, the organism and the environment are not
| independent from each other, and what we call "intelligent
| behavior" is not an inherent aspect of a creature's "algorithm"
| and cannot be studied independently in isolation from the
| environment. (These can all be extended as a critique of
| evolutionism as a useful scientific theory; the problem is not
| that it's wrong, but that it becomes more of a tautological
| statement as you bury yourself deeper into it, so its usefulness
| as a theory needs to be questioned.)
|
| A bit more tangential, but the article _really_ falls apart when
| the author starts talking about examples related to humans, using
| the careerism of current middle class society as an example (The
| notion of a "career" is actually pretty recent from an
| anthropological perspective! Those anecdotes about hierarchical
| milestones and pushing ourselves for career advancement has more
| to do with the culture and ideology of today's world than any
| other weird evolutionary /neurological reason!)
| purplerabbit wrote:
| not going to get into the latter part of your comment, but in
| response to the former part, I haven't found a way to disprove
| the hypothesis that organisms' behaviors are all described by
| the attempt at maximizing the single variable of "number of
| possible future states" ala
| https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...
| andi999 wrote:
| So you think your CNS and liver might disagree about the amount
| of alcohol to drink on the weekend? Part of me agrees with that
| assessment.
| lanstin wrote:
| Pretty sure even different subsystems of my CNS will push in
| different directions on that one. One just waits for the
| networks to settle and see what your choice is this time.
| Possibly biasing the outcomes with thoughts like, "what a
| week" or "I was looking forward to meditating"
| abeppu wrote:
| I kept expecting the phrase "reinforcement learning" to show up,
| but even after mentioning a Bellman-style time-decayed sum over
| future rewards, it doesn't appear, which seems odd to me. And
| roughly, I think "runs" == "exploitation", "tumbles" ==
| "exploration" in terms other people use.
|
| A thing that the author glosses past is the relationship between
| having a model of the world and maximizing rewards. It's taken as
| given that a model-based approach leads to better predictions
| about rewards ... but when we try to get systems to actually
| solve problems, this often isn't the case. Learning policies
| which yield high rewards is often easier than learning a model
| which actually describes the environment. I think of value
| iteration as learning "I feel this is a good state", policy
| iteration as "I feel this is a good action", and a real model as
| implicitly providing "I think this is a good action because I
| expect that ..."
|
| If artificial systems have the greatest successes with model-free
| approaches following algorithms very similar to the one the
| author describes, but humans seem to have a rich model _and_ do
| better than those artificial systems (at least accounting for
| data efficiency), doesn't that at least suggest that we're
| thinking differently?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think it really just suggests the models are being trained
| improperly. We just don't train alogorithms on data as complex
| as the real world. So, it's not surprising that simpler (less
| correct) models win out over more accurate nuanced ones.
| abeppu wrote:
| My take is more that the framing of maximizing an externally
| provided reward describing a single task only helps an agent
| who can rely on the rules of that task remaining fixed.
| Humans don't just try to do one task well; we switch between
| tasks. We don't have episodes that reset really; we have one
| long episode, and our actions decades ago can have bearing on
| our well-being today. What is a good state or a good policy
| varies substantially over time. The concept of the value of a
| state or (state, action) is ambiguous, because who knows what
| you'll want tomorrow? If the definition of value shifts, but
| the rules of the world don't, then a modeling becomes more
| "valuable".
| skybrian wrote:
| Model-free systems are easier to build, but researchers are
| working on model-based approaches to reinforcement learning and
| I remember seeing blog posts last year describing some
| promising results.
|
| It sounded like it was still reinforcement learning, though.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is interesting for its breadth, but they are abstracting a
| huge set of gradient-climbing behaviors that I'm not sure are of
| the same class. Also, this has been known forever (since before I
| was born) in game theory / repeated games as "exploration vs
| exploitation".
|
| But, it's not surprising to me that a mathematically simple, yet
| provably convergent algorithm appears over and over. For example,
| reward maximization in repeated bayesian games looks a lot like
| "Run and tumble", once you add this critical step (from OP):
|
| > When a "tumble" occurs, rather than sampling a new direction
| from a uniformly random distribution, we sample according to the
| distribution of expected rewards
|
| You may want to read the book Algorithms to Live By, also.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Too reductionist.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sadly not at my gross tonnage and displacement
| Barrin92 wrote:
| If you want to compare humans moving through decision space to
| bacteria tumbling through physical space I suppose it's one way
| to think about how humans act but honestly that's a lot of text
| for a trivial kind of system that you can apply to almost
| anything. You can probably look at cars in traffic like this as
| well.
|
| It's so vague and general of an idea that it's almost a truism. I
| don't think it provides anything meaningful in regards to
| figuring out the actual complexity of human behavior both
| individually or collectively.
|
| And I think this kind of over-generalization that is a little bit
| vapid has been a trend because there's simply not been a lot of
| theoretical progress when it comes to the functioning of the
| human mind.
|
| When people use this kind of thinking to apply it to artificial
| intelligence I always think, why not just ditch intelligence and
| build a physics simulator? Clearly intelligence is somewhere in
| the subspace of simulating the physical world, so why bother? It
| doesn't add much to understanding anything in particular.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Anything can be "just" anything else if you simplify it enough.
|
| The idea that humans are goalseeking systems motivated through a
| single parameter of dopamine response seems like it might be
| reasonable enough, but that then just moves the problem around:
| _how_ is a particular set of stimuli + past stimuli linked to a
| dopamine response?
|
| Furthermore, are they intending to force all behavior analysis
| through a control system with a single parameter? Can we ask
| questions like "what is the frequency response of the dopamine
| system?"
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The danger of people falling in love with an analogy. In
| simpler systems (cellular), it may be straightforward. In mice,
| you can say that their movement follows algorithmic predictions
| when only one goal is present (food), but I am sure that if you
| enter a second goal (avoid predator), and a third (procreate)
| into the same experiment, you will find that the algorithm will
| be insufficient...at least insufficient until you have some
| data reduction technique on the problem space.
| datameta wrote:
| Another question is - what stimuli, changes in environment, or
| thought patterns affect dopamine levels and reuptake, and how?
| Also how do other neurotransmitters attenuate or floor/ceiling
| our behavior gamut in a way which modifies how we react to or
| are informed by dopamine levels and their rate of change.
|
| Essentially, if dopamine can be boiled down to a single lever,
| then I think that lever has as many buttons as a Formula 1
| steering wheel.
| kortex wrote:
| It's definitely not a single parameter. I've been down this
| rabbit hole a bunch.
|
| There's actually 5 main subtypes of the dopamine receptor. They
| express in different concentrations in different brain regions,
| and have different functions.
|
| DRD2 is kind of the heavy lifter when it comes to goal seeking.
| If you had to boil it down to one idea, I'd call it "go/no go".
| It might be tempting to try to map D2 to something like a
| coefficient, perhaps even the "run coefficient" in run and
| tumble. But it's not at all like that, even on its own. It's
| very nonlinear. Furthermore, the action of D1 modulates D2 in a
| concentration-dependent way. So you have not just D2 signaling,
| D1 signalling, but also the differential signal as well. We
| don't know exactly how it maps out, but we know it plays a roll
| in weighing risk/reward ratios. Screwing with this pathway
| often results in "low risk low reward" mild manner folks
| switching to "high risk high reward", often going into
| gambling, manic spending, hypersexuality, and grandiose
| thinking. This can be seen occasionally with e.g. Parkinson's
| drugs such as L-DOPA.
|
| Actually my headcannon is there are some parallels between
| Parkinson's and control theory. Net loss of dopaminergic
| neurons results in lower bandwidth on your control loop. In PID
| loops, one of the symptoms of insufficient I/D gain is ringing,
| where the controller constantly hunts for the setpoint and
| overshoots. Tremor is a common symptom of Parkinson's (though
| it affects much more than just tremor), but if you notice, it's
| usually not a continuous tremor, it's only when trying to
| execute motor control, especially fine motor control. The body
| knows kinematically where it wants to be in space, but the
| feedback loop rings constantly as it isn't able to get
| sufficient bandwidth to error correct.
|
| Anyway, I think the point of TFA is not to suggest that this
| loop is a single parameter, it's just to model it as such. It's
| a spherical cow reduction. That kind of reduction lets you
| build practicable theories and test hypotheses. Such as: if
| Parkinson's is the result of reduced bandwith, can we treat the
| symptoms by increasing dopamine gain? And in fact, we can, that
| checks out.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to tie dopamine to physical movement
| and analogize that to "movement" in the ludicrously high
| dimensional and topologically weird "space" of all possible
| actions, including but not limited to job interviews. If a space
| analogy still works after all the complexity we've added to our
| "run and tumble" algorithms, I think that's probably a
| coincidence.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Makes me think of this book
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valen...
| zanecodes wrote:
| Run-and-tumble sounds an awful lot like stochastic gradient
| descent
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yep, the author is describing gradient descent over state-space
| - which is the driving force behind basically all adaptive
| systems*, though varying in both state-space complexity and
| descent algorithm.
|
| This should be expected though, as neural net ML practices are
| a direct descendant of cybernetics, and are essentially an
| attempt to digitise natural adaptive control systems.
|
| * you can reasonably analogise a single sensor/effector control
| loop as gradient descent against a 1d state.
| lanstin wrote:
| Do we assume that searching in real physical space for a
| literal 3d smooth gradient max corresponds mathematically to
| maximizing the output of a planned exertion model that is
| internal to the computing world and probably responding
| itself to the neurotransmitters?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| If I understand the second half of your comment correctly,
| then yes - optimising an n-vector fitness value over a
| state space (for example 2 floats from 0-1 would form a 2d
| cartesian state space from 0,0 to 1,1 with a continuous
| output value at all points), is basically the same as
| finding the tallest sand dune in a desert by walking
| around, only able to know your current elevation and the
| angle of the slope underfoot. Of course this is an
| evaluation where x and z are inputs to our fitness function
| and y is the output, so this is a 2d space - but this is
| directly equivalent to say, trying to optimise heat and
| humidity for maximising yield for a species of plant. You
| could add further variables like soil acidity or
| atmospheric CO2 concentration to increase the
| dimensionality of the state space.
|
| I may have some of the exact terminology wrong here
| (whether 2in-1out is considered 2d or 3d for instance) - my
| interest is in cybernetics generally not gradient descent
| specifically - but hopefully you get the gist.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Well, basically all the author did was rediscover reinforcement
| learning, but with a bit of additional heuristics in how to do
| epsilon-greedy exploration. I bet 50/50 that the algorithm will
| work with some tuning and training time, but I doubt what the
| author said can be extended to anything much more complex than
| those these simple OpenAI Gym experiments.
|
| The problem I have with their argument is a lot more
| philosophical: it all boils down to the validity of the reward
| hypothesis (http://incompleteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI
| /rewardhy...), and how we even define "intelligent" behavior.
| I've written another comment somewhere in this thread for more
| detail.
| abeppu wrote:
| I don't think the author rediscovered reinforcement learning
| -- they just didn't use that phrase or cite much of the prior
| work there. But they do mention a Bellman-style decayed sum
| of rewards, and they use the terms 'state' and 'action' and
| associated notation which follow the conventions in in RL, so
| I'm pretty sure they're aware of that field.
| iroh2727 wrote:
| Correct. I'm very familiar with RL, but I didn't see how
| referring to RL literature fit in to my particular argument
| (and I'm not intimately familiar with that literature).
| That said, I'd suspect there are fruitful connections to
| make there, especially considering that this model
| completely glosses over _learning,_ which is a pretty
| crucial element...
|
| The K&A paper does mention the connection with RL: "Here,
| we consider the function of the circuit from the point of
| view of navigation, a connection anticipated by early work
| on TD learning (Montague et al, 1995)" (specifically,
| Montague et al found this connection when building a model
| of bee foraging).
| eutectic wrote:
| If this can be turned into mechanistic theory, then implement a
| version of it that can solve CartPole (as an easy first test).
| Otherwise, it's just hand waving and conjecture.
| StopTheWorld wrote:
| > Why do some "gym rats" build their muscles well past the point
| of being a way to attract potential mates?
|
| > Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains
| despite the danger?
|
| > Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order to
| pursue career goals?
|
| > Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel
| and extraterrestrials?
|
| > There are no doubt potential evolutionary explanations for each
| of these phenomena.
|
| No doubt?
|
| > But, from a purely evolutionary standpoint, these phenomena are
| at least (a) not obviously explained or (b) seemingly irrational.
|
| Correct.
|
| Many phenomena have an evolutionary explanation. However some
| phenomena do not - random mutations happen and things pop into
| existence without much connection to mating, survival etc. Trying
| to shoehorn evolutionary narratives onto them is not letting the
| evidence fit the theory, but instead trying to get facts to fit
| some preexisting theory.
|
| Some traits just pop up due to random mutations, and trying to
| find an evolutionary mating/survival/etc. narrative for each of
| them does not make sense.
| neutronicus wrote:
| The thing about evolution by natural selection is that
| selection stops when you get to "good enough"
|
| Past that point you just get whatever random sexual selection
| criteria emerge, and the ensuing feedback loops
|
| Same reason the world is full of brightly colored loud-ass
| birds
| telxosser wrote:
| hah I love the brightly colored loud-ass bird point. That is
| spot on.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Some traits just pop up due to random mutations_
|
| This seems like an extraordinary claim. I can get behind the
| idea that it's _possible_ for a random mutation to impact
| personality traits. It is entirely different to turn to this as
| a general purpose mechanism for things that are hard to
| explain. It seems overwhelmingly likely that _most_ traits are
| in some way selected for, because useful traits are naturally
| more likely to propagate than random useless (which will pass
| on, or not, at random)
| goatlover wrote:
| But are those traits behavioral, or are they the mechanism
| that give rise to flexible behavior? Let's take language.
| Imagine saying that linguistic components are naturally
| selected for in the genome. It's the wrong level. Language
| happens at the level of brains and societies, not genes.
| Genes are used to build proteins which are used to build
| brains, but brains interact and learn from their
| environments, and even shape their environments, causing
| feedback loops.
| dpark wrote:
| > _But are those traits behavioral, or are they the
| mechanism that give rise to flexible behavior?_
|
| I don't know what you mean here. The specific traits
| mentioned (building muscle past the point of
| attractiveness, climbing deadly mountains)? Traits in
| general? Something else?
|
| > _Imagine saying that linguistic components are naturally
| selected for in the genome. It 's the wrong level. Language
| happens at the level of brains and societies, not genes._
|
| It's not the wrong level. From what we can tell, other
| animals are literally incapable of complex language. That's
| genetic. Language traits literally have been selected for
| in the human genome. We have a brain that can process
| language and a tongue structure capable of making complex
| sounds that other animals can't apparently replicate.
|
| Certainly language also has environmental/societal
| components. But it's inaccurate to say that it's not also
| genetic.
|
| Unless you mean that literal language are not genetic, in
| which case, sure. There's nothing in the human genome that
| encodes English. There's also nothing in the human genome
| that encodes the taste for yogurt, or the drive to be the
| fastest runner, or the Catholic wedding ceremony. And yet
| genetic components still certainly underly those in a
| meaningful way. It's worthwhile understanding the genetic
| components even if they cannot explain the entire
| phenomenon.
| echelon wrote:
| I think our species is post-genome for a lot of the complex
| behavior you see in society. Cultural and ideological memes
| use us as information carriers. We fixate on certain ideals
| and values, and some of us make them our entire lives.
|
| Preferring Pokemon over Halo doesn't entirely reduce to one's
| genes. Being too busy to have kids is situational and part of
| a complicated modern life. There is genetic contribution to
| these outcomes, but we're well past the point of genes being
| the most complicated factor. Now you have to model society
| and a person's random walk through it.
| dpark wrote:
| I agree with most of what you said except for this notion
| that we're "post genome". We are absolutely not.
|
| What you described is just "nature vs nurture". Genes don't
| make anyone prefer Pokemon over Halo directly, but the
| mechanism was built by evolution. A person who makes
| friends playing Pokemon is certainly likely to develop a
| fondness for Pokemon, because having friends is beneficial
| to survival and reproduction.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Modern computing is "post hardware". That doesn't mean
| the hardware doesn't matter, or that changes to the
| hardware don't make a difference; it means describing the
| hardware is insufficient to describe computers, whereas
| describing the software is mostly sufficient.
| dpark wrote:
| This is a meaningless distinction, though. Of course you
| can't describe a human's behavior purely in terms of
| genome. Essentially no one holds the position that this
| is possible. You can't even describe a bacteria's
| behavior purely in genomic terms. Behavior is
| inextricably linked to the environment. The environment
| for humans is incredibly complex so the interactions
| between environment and genome are even more complex. You
| cannot describe human behavior in terms of just
| environment either.
|
| Maybe this is an interesting position for software,
| because modern CPUs are explicitly intended to be general
| purpose and as such are all theoretically equivalent.
| Even there the abstraction falls apart pretty regularly,
| though, as Intel gets destroyed by M1 battery life and
| attacks like rowhammer affect some hardware far more than
| others. It's only post Harare as long as the hardware
| it's good enough for the purpose.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Of course you can't describe a human's behavior purely
| in terms of genome._
|
| Phenotype, whatever.
|
| > _It's only post Harare as long as the hardware it's
| good enough for the purpose._
|
| Most human brains and bodies are good enough for most
| human purposes. Sure, there's large variation between
| humans, but the variation between populations isn't great
| enough to be significant, as far as I'm aware.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Most human brains and bodies are good enough for most
| human purposes._
|
| The difference is that we know how general purpose
| computers work. We literally know exactly how they work
| due to the fact that we built them, but also we have
| developed very useful abstractions for how to use them.
| We do not have an equivalent understanding of human
| behavior.
|
| Humans are not general purpose computing devices that we
| know how to program. Humans are extremely complex systems
| that are already running software and _we don't
| understand that software_. We're engaged in black box
| debugging and we are nowhere close to actually
| understanding the software running on the box (and we're
| little closer to understanding the hardware).
| visarga wrote:
| Well said.
|
| I'd like to add (a bit off topic) that humans are not
| necessarily capable of causal reasoning, at least not
| alone. It's a cultural process where the true causes are
| separated from correlations in time, with lots of
| experimentation. Only with special training and in specific
| domains can we reason causally, and most population just
| learns the surface never getting to real understanding. In
| that regard we're like language models.
|
| So part of what makes us so smart is not in the brain, it's
| culture itself. If you observe feral people - they never
| get far on their own.
| pontifier wrote:
| Great insight here. I wonder how changing culture could
| effect reasoning ability in the future. Perhaps there are
| critical aspects that might be important to protect or
| eliminate in order to avoid a return to feral nature.
|
| Could this be one of the great filters that we, as a
| species, still need to pass?
| iroh2727 wrote:
| Thanks for quoting this part of the paper. It's probably the
| most interesting part.
|
| To add to what you said, though, I don't think of these
| phenomena in terms of random mutations. In other words, I don't
| think of these people as anomalies that do anomalous things;
| moreso, I think of it as following our growth imperative (i.e.
| the expected reward gradient), which, if we follow it long and
| hard enough, can lead to behaviors that appear anomalous.
|
| One commenter below (kortex) really hit on what is at least my
| interpretation when he said "we are basically seeing an
| implementation detail come to light."
| snek_case wrote:
| I would say the evolutionary explanation for each of these is
| actually pretty straightforward. We live in an environment
| that's very different than the one we were in for most of our
| evolution. Our evolution hasn't had nearly enough time to
| account for the modern environment.
|
| > Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order
| to pursue career goals?
|
| The obvious explanation here is that there wasn't really birth
| control when humans lived as hunter-gatherers. You couldn't
| make that kind of sacrifice for the most part. There also
| weren't really careers in the modern day sense. Evolution
| hasn't had a chance to account for birth control yet. It's only
| been around for 60 years or so.
|
| > Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel
| and extraterrestrials?
|
| Because all life has some instinctive drive to explore and
| spread. By exploring, you have an opportunity to find new
| resources and territory, which is essential for survival or to
| outcompete other life.
|
| > Why do some "gym rats" build their muscles well past the
| point of being a way to attract potential mates?
|
| When humans lived as hunter-gatherers, there were no gyms and
| no muscle building magazines, no cult of bodybuilding. For the
| most part, you got as fit as you needed to be to hunt animals,
| to fight, and build whatever you needed to build.
|
| However, I think the part about being "well past the point of
| being a way to attract potential mates?" is a value judgment.
| In actuality, growing a lot of muscle mass is a way of showing
| off your determination and fitness and standing out. Male
| bobybuilders probably have a much easier time attracting mates
| than the average joe.
|
| > Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains
| despite the danger?
|
| Evolutionary drive to explore. Evolutionary drive to show off
| prowess to attract mates and gain status. It's a high risk,
| high reward strategy.
| analyte123 wrote:
| Also, giving _other_ people career goals and birth control
| makes them have fewer children.
| [deleted]
| kortex wrote:
| I think these "overdriven goals" might be the result of leaky
| abstraction. We are basically seeing an implementation detail
| come to light. As TFA points out, there is really just one
| reward-taxis algorithm. Everything drive-related is a
| variation on it. Meaning there is no "obtain visual appeal
| via body building until sufficiently attractive" algorithm.
|
| There is a top-level algorithm of "find mate and reproduce",
| which is enjoyable. How does it boost the odds? By doing
| things to be more attractive, for example. But how does one
| "know" one is on the right path? Activities which we learn
| increase attractiveness are enjoyable. There's a gradient we
| follow. More attractive = more enjoyable. So you end up with
| complex behaviors that basically become self-hoisting; the
| activity itself becomes the reward.
|
| Basically, games and hobbies. Something becomes enjoyable vis
| a vis various learned reward functions, so we just pursue the
| enjoyable thing.
|
| There's also a meta-loop wherein staying mentally stimulated
| and curious is itself a useful fitness, so we do things which
| are interesting, because it's enjoyable to do that.
| snek_case wrote:
| I agree with your idea of leaky abstractions and overdriven
| goals.
|
| I think one thing to remember here is that while for sure
| attracting mates must play a role in the appeal of
| bodybuilding, there's also a competitive game aspect. You
| can compete against yourself and your peers. This can
| appeal to instinctive drives to compete and gain status,
| maybe again past the point where it's reasonable in some
| cases (are you really winning at life, gaining something
| meaningful by doing this?).
|
| If we just talk about the attracting mates aspect of
| bodybuilding, we also have to remember that if a man is
| trying to attract women by gaining muscle mass, his idea of
| what women in general might find attractive is just an
| approximation. Maybe this man found that he was gaining
| more attention from women when he started to gain muscle
| mass, so he just keeps doing more of that. Eventually he
| might gain even more attention for other reasons (improved
| self-confidence), but it gets hard to tease apart the real
| causal factors.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Evolution hasn't had a chance to account for birth control
| yet. It's only been around for 60 years or so.
|
| I'm no anthropologist, but I'm pretty sure various forms of
| birth control have existed for at least several hundred, if
| not several thousands of years. Granted, the invention of the
| birth control pill was a pretty big milestone, but it's not
| like nobody had ever thought of ways to fuck without getting
| pregnant before then.
| watwut wrote:
| Imo, high muscles are more about impressing other giys then
| women. Most women do not prefer huge guys, really. They just
| ... don't look attractive.
|
| Entertainment for boys has way more muscles in it then
| entertainment for teenage girls. Boy bands tend to be those
| thin, slim dudes too.
| telxosser wrote:
| If anything though the speed we are able to adapt is what is
| interesting.
|
| In my own life I think of the sitcom "Head of the Class" as a
| kid. Basically, painted "nerds" and computer geeks as highly
| sexually undesirable. All signaling was that this is what not
| to do to get laid.
|
| Didn't even take 25 years for that to essentially be reversed
| to the point of a computer geek being a type of peacock
| feather to flaunt and strut around.
|
| IMO the point we are maladjusted for the environment we live
| in is highly overblown.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| What? I work at a FANG and I can guarantee you there are
| very few peacocks there. I've had success on the dating
| market specifically through how I'm differentiated from my
| coworkers(into sports/outdoors, not obsessed with
| scifi/marvel movies, goes to the gym)
| yifanl wrote:
| Is that because those points have negative appeal or is
| it just because they don't serve as distinguishing
| features since they're so common?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Randomness is also evolutionary. It's wrong to equate evolution
| with optimization
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Why do some "gym rats" build their muscles well past the
| point of being a way to attract potential mates?
|
| Being a gym rat is not a heritable trait, but the ape who keeps
| doing whatever they were doing that made them strong and
| sexually desirable could be much more evolutionarily successful
| than the ape who stopped and became weak and undesirable. More
| generally, a positive feedback loop for beneficial behaviors is
| a desirable trait.
|
| > Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains
| despite the danger?
|
| Being a free solo climber is not a heritable trait, but
| exploring your environment and incrementally pushing one's
| limits are both desirable traits. The ape that doesn't know
| which rocks he can climb falls to his death, the one who knows
| where to place their hands survives to reproduce.
|
| > Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order
| to pursue career goals?
|
| Corporate ladder climbing is not a heritable trait, but
| investing more resources in fewer offspring is advantageous
| when the odds of those offspring surviving are high. Even with
| no kids of your own, you pass on your genes through nieces,
| nephews, etc. The desire for resources has obvious evolutionary
| benefit.
|
| > Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel
| and extraterrestrials?
|
| Neither being a tech billionaire nor being interested in space
| is a heritable trait, but the desire to explore is undoubtedly
| a desireable trait. The apes that expand into virgin territory
| can acquire more resources and become more resistant to local
| catastrophe than the apes who remain in one location. Elon Musk
| just has much better odds of becoming king of mars than I do.
| 500 years ago this may have manifested as building big ships
| instead of big rockets.
|
| Of course random mutations happen, but those random mutations
| get eliminated quickly if they are harmful and spread quickly
| if they are helpful. Saying something is just due to random
| mutation is not only an unsatisfying answer, it is the answer
| to the wrong question: it doesn't matter why we started doing
| it, why do we still do it? Evolution doesn't create any trait,
| it merely perpetuates or fails to perpetuate them.
|
| Not all behaviors are hardcoded into our DNA, certainly not at
| the level of specific actions we typically take day to day - my
| ancestors did not pass on their genes more successfully because
| of their affinity for arguing on the internet - but those
| traits which are heritable are unavoidably influenced by
| evolution. Evolution is the null hypothesis - if a system left
| to its own devices would do something without any external
| intervention, why invoke any additional explanation? It is
| those saying that something is genetic but which has somehow
| defied evolutionary pressure which are asserting a narrative,
| and who must show evidence in support of that narrative. Some
| narratives are legitimate, for example the traits of
| domesticated plants and animals aren't explained by natural
| selection; but oftentimes it is just "magnets, you can't
| explain that!"
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Evolutionary explanation? There's a whole missing level of
| analysis here. Evolution doesn't operate directly on behaviors.
| It operates on physiology.
| kmonad wrote:
| Of note, evolution is not equal to natural selection. "random
| mutations" are causes of evolution, drift (random) or selection
| (fitness benefit) are both mechanisms by which mutation can
| manifest in a population.
| arbuge wrote:
| Let me give it a shot...
|
| > Why do some "gym rats" build their muscles well past the
| point of being a way to attract potential mates?
|
| Margin of safety. Many would probably disagree with the
| author's assessment that they're well past that point.
|
| > Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains
| despite the danger?
|
| Conquering new land is deeply embedded into our psyches for
| evolutionary reasons. The species that's not afraid to do that
| will probably be more successful in the long run. Conquest of
| more land is generally correlated with better survival chances.
|
| > Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order
| to pursue career goals?
|
| Perhaps many, like myself, are aware of how expensive kids are
| but unaware of how difficult having kids gets later in life. So
| they optimize this wrong. I wish I had started earlier, but I
| put it off until later because I thought I'd be able to provide
| for them better. This thinking was correct, but having them
| earlier would still have been better, for me at least. The
| point is, it's certainly not due to a lack of evolutionary
| interest in having kids.
|
| > Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel
| and extraterrestrials?
|
| See conquest of land above...
| watwut wrote:
| > Conquering new land is deeply embedded into our psyches for
| evolutionary reasons. The species that's not afraid to do
| that will probably be more successful in the long run.
| Conquest of more land is generally correlated with better
| survival chances.
|
| Overwhelming majority of people stay where they are.
| Generally humans need huge practical motivation to conquer
| lands.
|
| Plus, interpreting climbing as conquering lands is super odd.
| It has more to do with any other sport achievemt then
| anything else.
| amelius wrote:
| > > Why do some "gym rats" build their muscles well past the
| point of being a way to attract potential mates?
|
| Probably because once they start building their muscles, they
| compete in their minds with other gym rats and it becomes a
| vicious cycle.
|
| And also: ads.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Gotta build those muscles for those sweet sweet
| impressions!
| coliveira wrote:
| Trying to find an evolutionary explanation in existing
| behaviors is putting the cart before the horse. Organisms can
| do many things that have nothing to do with evolution. However,
| evolution will take care that only some of them will survive.
| So, what was good for evolution can only be inferred from the
| past.
| spicybright wrote:
| Also, probably obvious, but us humans have been countering
| evolution for a while now. Medical science (both for sickness
| and fertility) + modern lifestyle keeps people alive that
| wouldn't otherwise be if we were still living in the woods.
|
| So (at least from my armchair) it's no wonder we see more
| "pointless" behaviors.
| lanstin wrote:
| This isn`t at all countering evolution. It is changing the
| fitness pressure. being able to parent effectively with
| smart phones and sedentary jobs and needing a lot of
| education is more fit than not having metabolic disorders
| or a weak immune system.
|
| If anything our tendency to not have reproductively
| isolated subgroups and large population is making
| speciation less likely. But rest assured our genome is
| slowly changing as we change our fitness landscape.
| achenatx wrote:
| any trait can be positive, negative, or neutral for
| evolutionary fitness. If a trait is neutral it can potentially
| survive and be passed down.
|
| There is evolutionary fitness at an individual level, but
| cultures have evolutionary fitness as well. A culture might
| preserve individuals that have low individual fitness because
| they create cultural fitness.
|
| For example the need to explore and expand the boundaries of
| knowledge may not be useful at an individual level, however a
| culture with those individuals might survive better than a
| culture without. All members of the culture that does not have
| those individuals may die, even if individuals are very fit.
|
| Sociopathy is likely conserved at a cultural level because
| cultures periodically need sociopaths to completely obliterate
| competition or ruthlessly compete to survive.
|
| Cultures also are constantly spawning mutations (civil rights,
| black lives matter, nazi ism, capitalism, democracy. social
| justice etc) those mutations can be positive, negative or
| neutral. Neutral traits can hang around if they carried
| alongside traits that do provide cultural fitness.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's tautological at this point to say that any behavior arose
| from an evolutionary standpoint.
|
| It's conveniently tautological because it's impossible to prove
| or disprove without time travel :)
|
| A more interesting conversation which is also impossible to
| prove/disprove is whether there is any behavior that isn't just
| behavior/instinct. It sure feels like it with consciousness,
| but if humans are weights and biases, it was inevitable that I
| typed this :)
| DarylZero wrote:
| Some behaviors or phenotypical features represent adaptations
| that have been selected for, others don't.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Everything gets squirrely and confusing when consciousness
| tries to look at itself. The recursion breaks everything.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's funny because I have been a "gym rat" much of my life and
| until very recently wasn't motivated by vanity, specifically,
| being attractive to the opposite sex. I've seen a burst of
| assertions lately from 20-somethings that seemed to deny anyone
| would have any other motivation for physical fitness.
|
| Oddly compared to my cohort I am both a nerd and a jock. I find
| intense exercise be it hiking or cardio or weights helps me
| keep my sanity in terms of sitting all day and the other
| stresses of my work. It's not like it is abstractly good for my
| health in the long term and I'm discovering now that it
| probably wasn't but that I feel better immediately in the short
| term from physical exercise.
| matwood wrote:
| I perform hard physical fitness for a lot of reasons, but the
| primary reason is simply that I enjoy it. If I skip a workout
| I miss it and don't feel well.
|
| _Atomic Habits_ touches on this. People think that I have
| all this discipline to get up and workout, but the reality is
| that I enjoy getting up early and working out. I enjoy
| training JiuJitsu and more often than not getting my ass
| kicked. I can 't really explain why, somewhere along the way
| I associated feeling good with hard physical work.
| [deleted]
| xarope wrote:
| Ditto. I think it's like doing gardening, or jugging, or
| riding a unicycle (waves at shannon). The change of mindset
| and switch in cognitive usage whilst still taking advantage
| of "success" attributes like discipline, organization,
| ability to project manage onself/setting milestones, allows
| me to actually focus better on my job, when I get back to it
| from my "hobbies".
|
| And I'm also sure many will also have encountered that moment
| when you have really focused and dug deep into a problem and
| hit an impasse, then force oneself to take a break and do
| something completely different, and in the midst of it all,
| "aha!"
| kenjackson wrote:
| I am 100% not motivated by vanity. When I was 25 years
| younger, yes, I was. But now its mostly to stay in shape to
| live longer and more comfortably. It's just that. At this
| point in my life, increasing my attractiveness to the
| opposite sex probably just adds problems to my life.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Why is it _not_ good in the long term?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/cardiovascular-
| dis...
|
| I wore a heart monitor for a month and we observed about 30
| seconds worth of AFib right at the very end. (Oddly I had
| experienced a very interesting setback in my personal life
| around then.)
|
| I had the signs described above. My doc said I should go on
| exercising but I shouldn't train more than 1 hour a day.
| (In a time when my life went to crap I had got into the 2
| hours a day habit to fight my depression.)
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| That sounds like it might just be correlation. But
| besides that, athletic training _can_ cause left
| ventricular hypertrophy but it hasn 't really been
| associated with disease state afaik
| psyc wrote:
| Ooof. There's my yearly reminder to go check if Alex Honnold is
| still alive. My heart skips a beat as Bing Search autocompletes
| "Alex Honn" to "Alex Honnold Death". But he's still alive! And
| he's married now.
|
| "Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-
| executers rather than as fitness-maximizers" -- John Tooby and
| Leda Cosmides
| matwood wrote:
| Watch The Alpinist on Netflix if you haven't yet.
| readams wrote:
| Even beyond random mutation, it also makes sense to think about
| behavior in totality. Curiosity and a willingness to do insane
| things seem to be tied up in an overall system that does very
| well in maximizing reproductive success. But this doesn't mean
| that literally every behavior that results in individually
| optimal at spreading genes.
|
| Human backs are maybe a good simple example of this: walking
| upright has been great overall, but has a lot of drawbacks that
| we suffer from such as difficult childbirth, back problems,
| etc. You could ask "what is the evolutionary advantage of lower
| back pain" and the answer of course is there's none, but there
| is still a broader explanation that makes sense when you
| consider the whole system.
| machinerychorus wrote:
| This is also ignoring a crucial aspect of human behavior: we
| have moved past simple evolutionary optimization. Our behaviors
| can now change very rapidly due to spoken and written language.
| In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins called this "memetics".
| E.O. Wilson also wrote about this, I think referring to it as
| "culture" (I don't remember in which book, sorry). Evolution is
| still necessary for understanding human behavior, but it is not
| sufficient by itself.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Simple explanation: those things can all be considered _play_ ,
| which is common among young mammals and a neotenous feature in
| human adults.
|
| Play is important for social cohesion.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| > Many phenomena have an evolutionary explanation. However some
| phenomena do not
|
| Some traits might just present themselves as {seemingly
| nonsensical activity} in an industrialised world. Where back in
| time, these same people might have an advantage in {seemingly
| sensible activity}.
|
| This does not preclude random traits being passed on, it is
| merely another way too look at things.
|
| > and trying to find an evolutionary mating/survival/etc.
| narrative for each of them does not make sense
|
| It is also a very lazy and uninteresting line of thought.
|
| Of course {trait} had en evolutionary advantage. Why else would
| it be here? And if it is indeed random, then it may be of
| slightly more interest, but tells me very little.
|
| We're observing shadows cast against a wall. Eagerly pointing
| out this and that pattern. When the interesting part is knowing
| the individual shapes that make up the dancing display.
| atlantas wrote:
| rini17 wrote:
| You completely ignored the "4e. What Space Are We Navigating?"
| and are thinking in terms of navigating evolutionary
| fitness/random mutation. I can see how our large brains create
| a new kind of virtual space we move around in, and it is unlike
| either of the above.
| visarga wrote:
| We're navigating "survival space", the space of all
| possibilities of existence in the future, under limited
| resources. It's pretty open-ended, we don't know what we
| could be, the peaks of evolution are clouded and we don't
| know if any particular path leads to it or is a detour. Only
| when you're close enough can you make progress by going
| directly towards the target.
| rini17 wrote:
| I see survival space like an outer hard boundary. Brain can
| and in reality often makes its own vaguely related space
| and we navigate it oblivious to the hard survival
| boundaries..till they hit us.
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, that's what I think happens. The more sheltered we
| are, the more divorced from reality our thinking can be.
| lanstin wrote:
| but being able to ignore food and predators enabled some
| folks to develop quantum field theory which is not now
| seen as divorced from reality?
| rini17 wrote:
| "can be" != "is"
| goodlinks wrote:
| is there not an additional level added with mental
| abstractions?
|
| e.g. i blast it at the gym (i dont actually but play along ;))
| and i build an abstraction of life that that is part of. the
| fact that the abstraction has limitations is irrelevant. we
| dont process the real world we process our learned
| abstracctions of it.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| This seems like something Buddhism attempts to address (from my
| understanding) > Desire is like an never-ending thirst > No
| amount of success ever will quench it > Their solution - Remove
| desire.
|
| The only way to get everything you'll ever want, is to want
| nothing.
| goatlover wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a desirable tradeoff.
| stabbles wrote:
| This is what Thomas Kuhn describes as "normal science": fitting
| observations into the current scientific paradigm.
| visarga wrote:
| Novel behavior and random mutations do have an explanation -
| they help explore possibilities and find better ways. Most of
| the time it's a loss, but it's still worth it in the long run.
| It's also a desirable sexual trait to have unusual abilities or
| achievements, to be the explorer or the conqueror (for men, for
| women there are other criteria).
| [deleted]
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