Eliezer Yudkowsky

these populations restraining their own breeding so that groups of them would stay in harmony with the resources available.

And mostly the math never works out for that.

But if you actually apply the weird, strange conditions to get group selection that beats individual selection, what you get is female infanticide.

If you're like breeding on restrained populations.

And

So that's like the sort of... So this is not a smart optimization process.

Natural selection is like so incredibly stupid and simple that we can actually quantify how stupid it is if you like read the textbooks with the math.

Nonetheless, this is the sort of basic thing of you look at this alien optimization process and there's the thing that you...

hope it will produce.

And you have to learn to clear that out of your mind and just think about the underlying dynamics and where it finds the maximum from its standpoint that it's looking for, rather than how it finds that thing that leapt into your mind as the beautiful aesthetic solution that you hope it finds.

And this is something that has been fought out historically as the field of biology was coming to terms with evolutionary biology.

And you can look at them fighting it out as they get to terms with this very alien inhuman optimization process.

And indeed, something smarter than us would be also much like smarter than natural selection.

So it doesn't just automatically carry over.

But there's a lesson there.

There's a warning.

Well, it's kind of stupid.

It has to run hundreds of generations to notice that something is working.

It doesn't be like, oh, well, I tried this in one organism.

I saw it worked.