Looking over my favourite posts, I notice that many of them are making specific versions of a more general claim, which is essentially: don’t confuse selective processes for predictive processes.

Here, I’m going to try to make that more general claim, rehash some examples in light of it, and end with a few ambient confusions I think this framework can help with, for the reader to ponder.

When you encounter an entity that is very good at achieving some outcome, there are two very different processes that could be going on under the hood:

1. The entity's behaviour could be guided by predictions about how to achieve the outcome[1]
2. The entity's behaviour could be selected to achieve that outcome

It's not a perfect binary, and often what you see is a mix of the two. In particular, all predictive optimisers have emerged from selective optimisation and often retain some fingerprint.

Selective

Predictive

Weird Mix

Bacteria developing antibiotic resistance

Hacker finding a way to penetrate a secure system

Humans evolving to be good at lying

Gradient descent on Atari games

Tree searching Connect Four

AlphaZero training a policy on its own rollouts

Flowers co-evolving with their pollinators

Humans genetically modifying [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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