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"optimized for the friends you meet along the way as the only goal?" sounds pretty unambiguous to me :D isomorphic to "friendly ambitious nerd" thing, which also centers friendship in a way I find rather alarming as the raison d'etre of life itself
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Replying to and
that's definitely true as well, but not what I'm flagging here. Even for very social friendly extrovert people who get a lot of energy from investing in friends, making that the *only* goal to optimize for is imo dangerous to the psyche, a kind of gollumizing one-ring effect
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C'mon this is like a cartoon darwinism version of solve-for-friendship 🤣 "Only the friendliest survive!" "Survival of the friendliest!" "Friendliness selection!" "Nature red in tooth, claw, and LinkedIn connections!" The airport pop-sci book titles write themselves
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I think what you and Visa are doing is more sophisticated than this cartoon, but I think you haven't yet found the right language for talking about it properly. So "solve for friendship" is almost a placeholder for something more interesting, which is why I restrain the jokes :D
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Replying to and
Re: Darwinism we did seem to group-evolve to select for sociability. I think what used to be a survival tool became a subliminal goal in the infinite game sense, yeah. Good data also on popularity / talent / success (bad news for disagreeable people like me 😋)
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I think any qualitative reduction of mechanics of evolution to a legible- stable objective function is basically not-even-wrong in the same way seeking "explainability" of AI is not-even-wrong. It's a narrative fallacy. There's no "hero trait" making evolution a hero's journey.
My point is, as a causal rather than telelogical process, evolution *can't* have goals... all there is is blind variation and differential survival. Anything beyond is a story we tell. Herbert Spencer caused the OG confusion by introducing the phrase "survival of the fittest."
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