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Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You — LessWrong

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GreyThumb.blog offers an interesting analogue between research on animal breeding and the fall of Enron. Before 1995, the way animal breeding worked was that you would take the top individual performers in each generation and breed from them, or their parents. A cockerel doesn't lay eggs, so you have to observe daughter hens to determine which cockerels to breed. Sounds logical, right? If you take the hens who lay the most eggs in each generation, and breed from them, you should get hens who lay more and more eggs. Behold the awesome power of making evolution work for you! The power that made butterflies - now constrained to your own purposes! And it worked, too. Per-cow milk output in the US doubled between 1905 and 1965, and has doubled again since then. Yet conjuring Azathoth oft has unintended consequences, as some researchers realized in the 1990s. In the real world, sometimes you have more than animal per farm. You see the problem, right? If you don't, you should probab

x Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You — LessWrong Evolution Eldritch Analogies Frontpage 78 Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You by Eliezer Yudkowsky 19th Nov 2007 4 min read 26 78 GreyThumb.blog offers an interesting analogue between research on animal breeding and the fall of Enron. Before 1995, the way animal breeding worked was that you would take the top individual performers in each generation and breed from them, or their parents. A cockerel doesn't lay eggs, so you have to observe daughter hens to determine which cockerels to breed. Sounds logical, right? If you take the hens who lay th

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