YouSaid · the spoken record

Jacob Kimmel

lines on the record: 109
first: 2025-08-21
most recent: 2025-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The third piece is basically optimization constraints. So I think this is where another ML analogy is helpful, which is something like, well, actually a two-layer neural network is technically a universal approximator, but we can never actually fit them in such a way. And why does that occur? People will wave their hands, but it basically comes down to we don't really know how to optimize them, even if you can prove out in a formal sense that they are universal approximators. And so I think we have similar optimization challenges with our genome as the parameters and evolution as the optimization algorithm. And one of those is that your mutation rate basically bounds the step size you can take. So if you imagine that at each generation you get some number of inputs, you can select for some number of alleles. Well, the max number of variations in the genome is set by a mutation rate. If you dial your mutation rate up to high, you probably get a bunch of cancers, so you're selected against if you have it too low, you can't really adapt to anything. So you end up with this happy medium, but that limits your total step size. And then the number of variants you can screen in parallel is basically limited by your population size. And so for most of evolution,”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then the next piece of the evolutionary story is like is there anything selecting against longevity? Like, okay, let's just pretend everything I said was wrong. Can I still make an argument that maybe evolution hasn't maximally optimized RFR longevity? One argument that comes up, and I'll caveat and say, I don't know how strong some of the mathematical models that people put together here are. You can find people using the same idea to argue for and against. But there's this notion of what's called”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Alexander von Hummold, one of the most famous scientists in history, is kind of forgotten now. But he had this one expedition to South America where he climbed Mount Chimborazzo at a time when very few Europeans had done that. And so he was able to observe various ecological layers that were repeated across latitudes and across altitudes. And it caused him to formulate an understanding of how selection was operating on plants at different layers in the ecosystem. And that one expedition was the basis of his entire career. And so when you see something named Hummel, just to give you a sense of how famous this guy is, it's usually Alexander von Hummel. It's not like this is some massive, prosperous German family name that just happens to be really common. It's this one guy. And so really it was like this singular year in which he conceived a lot of our modern understanding of botany and selective pressure.”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans and how long we were living and how that dictates some of the features that occur that rise and fall throughout our lives.”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throughout lifespans. So there are some famous results where, for instance, I'm going to get the exact age a little bit wrong, but in mathematics, most great discoveries happen roughly before 30. Why should that be true? That doesn't make sense. You can sort of put down a bunch of societal reasons for it. Oh, maybe you sort of become state in your ways. Your teachers have caused you to restrict your thinking by that point. But really, that's true across centuries. That's true across many different unique cultures around the world. That's true in both cultures from the East and cultures from the West. That seems unlikely to me. I think a much simpler explanation is that for whatever reason, our fluid intelligence is roughly maximized at the time where the population size during human evolution was maximal. If you had to pick an age at which fluid intelligence was selected most strongly for, it's probably around 25 or 30. That's probably about the age of the adults in the large populations that were being selected for during most of evolution. And so I think there's a lot of reason here to think that actually there's interplay between many features of modern”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I entirely agree with that particular thesis. I think in biology in general, when you're trying to engineer a given property, be it being healthy or longer, be it making something more intelligent. And this is true even at the micro level of trying to engineer a system to manufacture a protein at high efficiency. You always have to start by asking yourself, did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this? If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard. If no, potentially there are some low-hanging fruit. And so I think this is a good argument for why potentially intelligence wasn't strongly selected for. And I think actually the lifespan argument plays back into intelligence to a degree. You start to ask, okay, if I have intelligence that's able to compound over time and I can develop, for instance, in some hypothetical universe, my fluid intelligence lasts much longer into my lifespan, if the number of people who are reaching something like 65 is very small in a population, you're not necessarily going to select for alleles that lead to fluid intelligence preservation late into life. This is actually part of my own pet hypothesis around some of the interesting phenomenology in when discoveries are made.”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to contribute resources back to the group. You can't just be a freeloader. You need to gash calories, go out in the jungle, get some berries.”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What were the conditions under which a person would actually live long enough for that phenotype to be selected for and how often would that occur? And so this brings us back to some very hypothetical questions, things like what was the baseline hazard rate during the majority of human and private evolution. The hazard rate is simply, what is the likelihood you're going to die on any given day? And that integrates everything. That's like diseases from aging. That's getting eaten by a tiger. That's falling off a cliff. That's like scraping your foot on a rock and getting an infection and dying from that. And so from the best evidence we have, the baseline hazard rate was very, very high. And so even absent aging, you're unlikely to actually reach those outer limits of possible health where aging is one of the main limitations. And so the number of individuals in the population that are going to make it later in that lifespan where using some of your evolutionary updates to try and actually push your lifespan upward is relatively limited. So the amount of gradient signal flowing back to the genome then is.”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think there are a couple different ways one can tackle this. One is you have to think about what's the selective pressure that would make one live longer and encode for higher health over longer durations. Do you have that selective pressure present? There's another, which is, are there any anti-selective pressures that are actually pushing against that? And there's a third piece of this, which is something like the constraints of your optimizer. If we think about the genome as a set of parameters and the optimizer is natural selection, then you've got some constraints on how that actually works. You can only do so many mutations at a time, you have to kind of spend your steps that update your genome in certain ways. So tackling those from a few different directions, like what would the positive possible selection be? As you highlighted, it might be something like, well, if I'm able to extend the lifespan of an individual, they can have more children, they can care for those children more effectively, that genome should propagate more readily into the population. And so one of the challenges then, if you're trying to think back and sort of a thought experiment style of evolutionary simulation here, would be”
2025-08-21 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source