Dwarkesh Patel
speaker
19,288 appearances
62 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 17 Sep
Dwarkesh Patel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
a common story.
And the common story is that hunter-gatherers actually had much more stable diets because they were more varied.
And so they weren't reliant on a single cereal or a single crop for their calories.
And if one game went away, they had other things that they could scout for, they could move locations more easily because they weren't tied down to the land.
And so they were more food stable.
But in fact, if there's been selection against storage of body fat, that suggests that
As unstable and as common as famines might have been in agricultural societies, it's at least more stable than what the hunter-gatherers had.
A kind of random question I have is if you were mentioning, look, as compared to these other things which matter much more for fitness and the ancestral environment, the immune system, especially after the Bronze Age, all these other things have mattered more than intelligence.
And so they've been under much more selective pressure than intelligence.
Right.
That makes you wonder whether there's much more room at the top for intelligence.
As in, if humans had been selected, especially for intelligence, they could have been much smarter.
And the reason that's relevant is...
We're currently building AI systems, which we're trying to make as smart as possible.
And in fact, the only goal of the training process is intelligence.
We don't have to worry about also at the same time making their immune systems powerful.
And at the same time, making sure they're not schizophrenic.
I guess we kind of have to worry about that.
But if intelligence has not been the dominant trait under selection for humans over the last 10, 20, 100,000 years, does that mean that there's more room at the top for this trait?
So all of this evolution since out of Africa is acting on alleles that already existed in the pool of human variants from that first group, which we were talking about last time, on the order of 10,000 people that exploded out of Africa.
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