“Optimisation: Selective versus Predictive” by Raymond Douglas

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: The entity's behaviour could be guided by predictions about how to achieve the outcome[1]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. --- First published: May 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GhhNswGB6butBhmE6/optimisation-selective-versus-predictive --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.