Not teleology, I'm still talking about an emergent system. It's just a question of what sort of characteristics end up having a lower chance of ending up as dead ends. Adaptability, including characteristics that improve evolutionary adaptability is a characteristic that helps avoid dead ends. The simple, middle-school version of evolution basically has a model where mutations occur at random. However we already know of systems where organisms have evolved so that at least certain mutations are promoted. For example, spots on animals actually happen through standard mutations that happen at particular ratios. Basically, the organism evolved so that some of its cells always mutate in certain ways. Basically genetic instability and mosaicism, and those characteristics are evolved. That's just a sideshow to what I'm talking about though, and it turns out that the word for what I'm talking about is evolvability. So, things like stress evolved mutagenisis (beyond just epigenetic factors). Some species are prone to chromosomal crossover during gamete combination from sexual reproduction. There's also evolved tolerances to the effects of gene duplication. There's another neat one I just learned about during this discussion, heat shock proteins.

Anyway, you are right that lots of things that are not biological evolution get conflated with it. Of course, that's very tricky because biological evolution is a reaction to environment, and social systems, for example, provide selection pressure, so these systems can co-evolve. A parting thought about Lamarckian "evolution" of course is that, as wrong as he was in general, in some specific ways, his ideas actually do work (for example stress related epigenetic factors that pass on down through generations) in very limited ways. Also, it's very clear that the famous mouse experiment could have actually worked in the end (though it was actually conducted to disprove him). The reason for this is that the experiment went on for 22 generations (though some sources say just 5). The thing that always bothered me about that is that mice have 5 to 8 pups per litter. Even just 5 generations is hundreds of mice, but 22 generations would be what, quadrillions? So, obviously mice would be discarded from every generation, and human bias would be almost impossible. If the bias was based on tail length the tails might actually get longer or shorter depending on the specific bias. In the actual experiment though, apparently the selection protocol was for health, vigor, and fertility. So, even if it didn't affect the tails, it almost certainly would have been selection pressure for other traits. Not to mention that he was almost certainly inbreeding, so that would have had effects as well. Of course, I should note that most criteria for health that would be used in such an experiment would probably increase overall size, which probably would mean that tails would grow proportionately.

Anyway, sorry to ramble, but the potential unintended consequences of those experiments has always been fascinating. Just in general how difficult it is to actually predict every outcome of playing around with emergent processes like evolution/natural selection.

OK. Good point. There is a problem, but it's not the cut bananas going brown too quickly.

And yet, Starship has taken more than twice (more than three times by some estimates, depending on how you define the starting point) as long as the Saturn V to actually get to orbit.

As it stands, even without the lemon juice, the bananas I seem to get from the supermarket these days pretty much don't seem to brown very quickly anyway. As long as they don't have to sit in a fruit salad for too long, there isn't really a problem.

I think we're pretty much on the same page with this. I think what we need to always remember about evolution/natural selection is that even the process itself is subject to natural selection. Adaptive behavior is itself a trait that can evolve like any other trait. Even to the degree that, while Lamarck wasn't exactly right, it actually really is the case that some environmental pressures will cause hereditary changes through generations through what I think we're still calling epigenetic factors. Usually these are where stress factors like prolonged food shortages can lead to, for example multiple generations of smaller individuals despite nutrition levels rebounding. Or, even in a single extant individual, prolonged exposure to environmental conditions can lead to long-term physiological adaptation such as lots of exposure to the cold reversing the behavior of blood flow to extremities from restricting blood flow to conserve heat while sacrificing the extremities to increasing blood flow to protect the extremities. Being able to change to adapt to an environment is usually an advantage, so it makes sense that organisms would not only evolve, but that evolving to evolve would make sense from the "selfish gene" perspective.

I mean, Milton Friedman died 20 years ago at the age of 94 so...

The problem with a plan for taxation "every time money changes hands" is that if you take it too literally, two people handing a $100 bill back and forth with a 20% tax can end up owing more than $99.99 after 42 passes. Or, if you're rounding up to whole dollars at 50 cents, the whole $100 after 26 passes. You can say that example is absurd and that you didn't mean it literally, but the point is that all kinds of absurdities like that can, indeed happen. The problem is that any scheme like taxation can run into something like the shoreline problem. If you're unfamiliar, that's where the length of a shoreline has a minimum value, measured in a straight line from point to point, but if you actually follow the contours, the length tends towards infinity the smaller your measurement increments are. With small enough increments, you're measuring the contour of every grain of sand down to the atomic level and below. Obviously in the real world there are limits like brownian motion, the level of microscopy, the time involved, eventually the Planck length, etc. but even in the real world, the shoreline length can vary by orders of magnitude. So, to actually compare shorelines by length, you have to be using the same standards to measure each and recognize that in come cases, the comparison will change a lot if you change those base standards.

The same applies to taxation. On its face, systems like what you propose seem simple, and therefore fair, but in fact that model is only simple when reality is very simple to match. The reality is that many perfectly legitimate ways of doing business would lead to ridiculously high taxation using the model you propose. going back to the shoreline example, your model works perfectly if all landmasses are perfect Platonic polygons and you're measuring just one edge. As soon as they turn into real world objects though, your system fails and you end up needing all kinds of rules to try to reach some semblance of reason and fairness.

All that said, the rules end up with massive numbers of loopholes, either accidental or intentional and are also simply chaotic and messy based on their nature and the fact that they can't account for all situations. They also definitely take advantage of the little guy. However, the proper response is vigilance by people who understand the ins and outs of the problem, not simplistic rules. For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

This makes more sense if it's laid out in something like timeline order and with some more clarity on the parties involved.

WB makes the movie for $70 million, but shelves for whatever reason and treat the $70 million as a loss. On that loss, they get a $30 million tax writeoff.

Movie sits in "vault" for a while.

Ketchup, a distinct entity, not a WB shell company, buys the movie and distribution rights entirely from WB for $50 million. This forces WB to give back the $30 million tax writeoff, meaning that for WB it's minus $70 million, plus $30 million, plus $50 million, minus $30 million. So they end up with $20 million more than they had with the tax writeoff, but also ended up $20 million in the hole. Ketchup meanwhile, has a clean slate with a complete movie they got for $50 million.

Ketchup then takes their $50 million dollar movie and spends an additional $10 million on it for marketing, making their total cost $60 million. To make that up, they only have to make $60 million dollars, not $120 million. However, they don't own the movie theaters. Essentially, the cost to them for having the movie shown in the theater is half the box office price. So, in theaters, every dollar of ticket revenue is fifty cents for them. So, movie theaters need to make $120 million for Ketchup to get back their $60 million. However, to complicate things, Ketchup owns the complete distribution rights, so they can also make money on other media, streaming, disks, television, etc. not to mention that they also sold some of the foreign distribution rights for $20 million up front. Then there's the complicated question of merchandising. Ketchup owns distribution rights, but I don't know what their merchandising deal is. WB still owns the character copyrights and trademarks outside of the fixed forms for the movie, while Ketchup clearly has promotion rights. In theory they have a profit sharing agreement for merchandise based specifically on the movie, but it might get complicated where merchandising and promotion collide. Like T-Shirts, or happy meals, etc. While the lawyers probably hammered things out in minute detail, I still would not be surprised if we see a lawsuit over this at some point down the road. In any case, the extra demand for merchandise from WB that the movie will create will probably also make back WB's $20 million loss as well.

In any case, at its current pace, it is pretty much guaranteed to make $120 million at the box office, making it at least break even in theaters, then it will receive additional profit in other media.

That does lead to the question of whether WB would have made a profit since it cost them $70 million to make it. So if they had then spent say $14 million on marketing it for a total of $84 million, they would have need $168 million in box office sales to reach break even. So there's the question of whether they could have turned a profit. It looks like the movie is going to hit right at around $120 million at the box office, but with the extra they would have spent on promotion, it's possible it would have also gone further. Then of course there's other media. Ultimately, in the long run, it probably would have at least gotten close to break even. That might lead some to say that WB was right to not release it. Except that meant only taking a $30 million dollar writeoff, when it still would have brought in much more than that. On the other hand, when they consider competition at the box office, they are also competing against themselves, so they probably also consider whether they think they will get more of a pie slice (if they think of it as a zero sum game) if people go to see another movie and its one of theirs. So, their reasons may have been complex.

Ideally of course, for comparative rating, the ratings themselves will be meta-rated for reviewer bias. For example the guy in the summary who intentionally chooses the answers he thinks will hurt the model most. Then of course there's the issue of audience selection bias and self-selection. The employees who work doing this probably come from a various demographic subsets, but probably trending towards mostly male and towards the terminally online. Then there's also the question of whether audience preference for results is actually desirable, which depends on your goals for the AI. Consider, for example, if your goal is education. In an educational setting, material progresses and becomes more challenging, but if you go by what the class prefers, the lessons will trend towards the lowest common denominator and you'll never get to higher levels.
I'm sure theorists working at these AI companies have thought about all of this of course. It doesn't necessarily mean they're currently doing it though.

That is definitely true, but also raises an interesting point, we have also never evolved a mechanism to ruthlessly remove it for the small energy advantage it would give us. Part of that is because the threshhold conditions are too small, but another is that holding onto some of that old stuff as potential future building blocks might be an advantage in future evolution. Having mechanisms that drive a species into a non-evolving monoculture is almost certainly a genetic dead-end.

Was it ever a theory? It's really just an observation. Although human embryos very definitely do have tails. I mean, you can call it something other than a tail if you want. Proto-tail, temporary tail, vestigial tail, etc. but it's clearly quite real and there. I think you might be conflating someone's exaggerated version of the concept with with the actual reality and rejecting the reality as a consequence kind of like people think that martial arts training doesn't make anyone a better fighter because they are confusing real life martial arts training with an action movie.

No one (mostly) is telling the people who actually study this stuff that they are wrong. They're saying that the headline is wrong about what has actually been shown here. The headline is just clickbait nonsense. The brain isn't suddenly revealed by science as two separate organs or any nonsense like that. There has just been an observation of structure during embryonic development.

Basically, it isn't fiction per se, but is pretty much meaningless. Nobody thinks that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is an "evolutionary advantage". It just demonstrates that we come from a process of evolution where we are changed forms of our direct evolutionary ancestor, they are a changed form of theirs, and so on back to our very earlier ancestors. If you take the tree of life and the set of nodes in it back all the way, that path through is our evolutionary line (mostly, anyway, there are other methods of getting DNA from other branches that mostly apply early on with single celled organisms, etc. but that can still potentially happen even later on). Within that evolutionary line, from node to node things get added, dropped, and modified from our genetics (including what are now called epigenetic factors). For our actual ontogeny (growth from a fertilized gamete to a full version of our species) that means that truncated forms of those ancestors necessarily get expressed in our development. We start as a blastula which is like a ball of cells, then turn into a sort of donut which elongates into a tube, which then develops into all of our internal organs, etc., we take on a vaguely fishlike, then infant amphibian-like form, while we develop a spine, arms and legs and a head, etc. with some of the features that started to express then vanishing (though sometimes not). This was observed early on and stated as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and even back when the term was coined, it was obvious that full ancestral forms weren't being fully expressed, just vestigal traces of them.

As for whether there actually is an evolutionary advantage or not, while no one is really claiming there is, it's not like there isn't potentially an advantage to retaining DNA for features we don't have as adults any more. Evolution through natural selection does happen through mutation, but sometimes that mutation is just activating dormant genes. In general, natural selection uses a toolkit of parts. Some of them ancient, some of them absolutely brand new, and some of them slight modifications of something ancient. An example we could consider are tails. Humans have DNA for tails, and we have then at a certain point in our ontogeny, and sometimes people are still born with them. It is entirely possible that, given time and the right selective pressures, some future descendant species from us could develop tails again from DNA we still have around. So, it could be argued that there's an advantage to the vestigial DNA for producing tails and that expressing it during ontogeny keeps it at the ready, so to speak, so that it can be useful. Mostly though natural selection tends to work on thresholds. For lots of these features, the simple fact is that there's no significant disadvantage to this old stuff hanging around so, even without a potential advantage to keeping it, there's no big disadvantage to it staying. That said, the advantage is that it's intertwined enough with our early development now that any mutations that get rid of it probably have high odds of leading to outright failure of development because, as mentioned, we have built up layers and layers and layers on top of this stuff.

You apparently asked stupid questions. No one was arguing that embryonic development passes through adult, fully formed versions of the traits of our evolutionary ancestors. Also, no one was arguing that it's some sort of evolutionary advantage. What it actually illustrates is that evolution is an iterative process of building on and modifying what has come before, which is well understood. It's like the idiotic "why haven't men evolved away nipples?" question. You jumped in to "debunk" something that no one was asserting and with what amounts to a silly semantic argument as well.

The department of education and various retardations like implicit and systemic bias being enshrined in the education system in the 90's are the two ways in which our education system was dumped in the shitter. When you refuse to suspend or expel the students who constantly disrupt class and intimidate other students and make fun of them for wanting to learn, the learning by students goes waaaayyyy down. Then of course there was, and in some districts still is the complete idiocy the composes common core math and whole word learning, which has utterly tanked reading and math ability with second order effects impacting everything else.