[SEQ RERUN] Conjuring an Evolution to Serve You
post by MinibearRex · 2011-10-31T01:18:17.035Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 1 commentsToday's post, Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You was originally published on 19 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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. Sounds logical, right? But this selection may actually favor the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Such breeding programs produce hens that must be housed in individual cages, or they will peck each other to death. Jeff Skilling of Enron fancied himself an evolution-conjurer - summoning the awesome power of evolution to work for him - and so, every year, every Enron employee's performance would be evaluated, and the bottom 10% would get fired, and the top performers would get huge raises and bonuses...
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Simple Math of Everything, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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