12 KiB
How rational are Larry Niven's "Pak", really?
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Author: u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3vxzme/how_rational_are_larry_nivens_pak_really/
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Score: 10
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Created: 2015-12-08T16:11:08
Post:
The overriding characteristic of the Pak is that their super-intelligence limits their free will, they automatically see the correct path and are more or less constrained to follow it... subject (of course) to their goals. In a way they're an archetype of the paperclip maximizer meme.
I haven't seen any real analysis other than Niven's own narration in Ringworld, Protector, and other works of whether this is realistic. It certainly seems plausible, but is it rational?
Comments:
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+6] Mouse Army (4 hours later)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/
Pak are pretty good at instrumental rationality, achieving their values. Those can be summed about like this:(ordered by priority):
- Keep own breeders alive
- Keep self alive (already subgoal of 1!)
- Kill everyone else (subgoal of 1!)
Want to escape a prison cell on an alien spaceship made of virtuially indestructible material? Done. Need to gather enough riiessources to escape a big global catastrophe? Done. One caveat though:
Unfortunately they have a serious problem with epistemic rationality... Their built-in extremely strong xenophobic reflex hinders them massively at seeing and reaping the benefits of pressing C in the universal galactiv prisoners dilemma. There is a sentence in the brennan books, from memory:
"nobody in the entire existence of pakhome had ever thought to make a picture of something that had no practical value, eg. blueprints or maps. So it was that Psshtphok only wondered at the odd depiction of a melting woman on the aliens spacesuit. Had he grasped the concept properly, the jump to preserving the smells of his breeders - and the secret to keep lonely protectors alive, by hacking the strong smell/will-to-live connection- wouldn't have been far."
So this is one giant benefit Pak miss out on, trading. This eg. also rules out trading with the outsiders, ergo FTL. Not very good for achieving their goal 1, eh?
This is also the reason the original Pak are all stuck in a giant cesspool of constant defections against each other, playing a giant zero sum game of breeders with the available planetary area of pakhome.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+4] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)
- Keep own breeders alive 2) Keep self alive (already subgoal of 1!) 3) Kill everyone else (subgoal of 1!)
#2 is not an independent goal: if #1 fails, unless the Protector can convince itself to rewrite that goal as "Keep the Pak species alive", it just stops eating.
#3 is probably an independent goal.
Human protectors seem to be a lot more flexible, but are still driven by the primary goal (see the actions of the Brennan-monster and the Protector-phase Teela Brown and Louis Wu).
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+2] Mouse Army (6 hours later)
It might be that #3 is an independent goal. We should probably also add a fourth paragraph, for a small subset of pak get the urge to:
- protect entire race
Homo sapiens protectors can lie to themselves good enough to kill breeders via enabling others; I think it was implied that that is something no habilis protector can do.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (6 hours later)
4 is really a replacement for 1.
If they can't find something to protect, they have no "keep self alive" goal.
Homo sapiens protectors can lie to themselves good enough to kill breeders via enabling others; I think it was implied that that is something no habilis protector can do.
Then there's all the oddball protectors on the Ringworld.
u/Farmerbob1 [+3] Level 1 author (21 hours later)
Eh, Pak are paperclip maximizers at best. They appear to be driven by two major goals - to aggressively provide resources and protection to their bloodline, and deny resources to others. This is not the same as improving their bloodline's prosperity.
There were two Pak I can think of that might have been far more rational than most.
Teela Brown ended up engineering her own death as she realized she was going to start making decisions she couldn't accept based on her remaining humanity. Before that, she worked to preserve the Ringworld.
The ghoul protector that appears in the third ringworld book appears to be more rational.
Pak in general, seem to be more rational if they come from more intelligent breeder stock. Vampires were unintelligent as compared to ghouls. (Bram was from vampire stock - I do not remember the name of the ghoul Pak, and it's not quickly findable on Wiki.) It's quite likely that the ghouls are on par with or more intelligent than Earth humans.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+5] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (22 hours later)
That's kind of my view.
Louis Wu managed to find a way to stop being a Protector, without dying. It's a pity Teela wasn't able to get hold of Carlos Wu's autodoc.
The kind of control over technology that the ARM have is pretty scary, by the way: they were able to hide Carlos Wu's autodoc 200 years before Ringworld, and nobody else came up with the same kind of obvious idea in the meantime. Technological development in Known Space must be pretty much stopped.
The other thing that seems a bit iffy is that once you're intelligent enough you can see one correct path and you have to follow it. The "intelligence = lack of free will" thing is a constant theme running through the series.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (a day later)
Yes, it was canon in the universe that technological advancement was pretty much stopped, even repressed, due to fear of applications being used for war. It took the first Man Kzin war to make ARM release older, obscured technologies.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
Within the Sol System, yes, but other worlds had their own governments. The Institute of Knowledge on Jinx produce Boosterspice, for example, and I'm pretty sure the ARM would have frowned on that, and Gregory Pelton's grandmother was able to invent the Transfer Booth (Flatlander).
Basically, during the Man-Kzin war period (The Warriors through The Soft Weapon), there's 300 years (approximately 2300 to the early 2600s) where the ARM were put on the back burner.
Beowulf Schaffer's stories start in the mid 2600s. The ARM have some influence outside Sol (Neutron Star, Borderlands of Sol, Procrustes) but the other worlds are still sovereign nations and the Belters are still thumbing their nose at Earth (Borderlands of Sol).
Things are clearly very different by the time of Ringworld, 200 years later. Even on Canyon Louis Wu has to go into deep hiding to stay clear of the ARM, and technology was basically the same as it had been in his father's day.
u/Nepene [+3] (11 hours later)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer_of_Worlds_%28novel%29
I haven't read it but they're apparently generating fleets. That would indicate their rationality, how well they form armies. The basic mark of an effective species is that they can pool their efforts to create a powerful army that is more than the sum of its individuals. As happened, say, in HPMOR.
They are, in general, not very rational. Constant warfare isn't a good mark of intellect- powerful individuals should be banding together to crush all opposition and teching up so they can support more breeders. Cooperation is just so much more powerful than fighting as an individual that it should be popular.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (22 hours later)
I haven't read it but they're apparently generating fleets.
That was already known in Protector - Niven hadn't introduced the core explosion back then (that shows up at the end of the Man-Kzin war period when they send Bey Schaeffer in as a publicity stunt), but Brennan does speculate that something might have happened in the core.
Anyway, the fleets are assumed to have been created by the Librarians, after they had basically disrupted the whole Pak culture to send Psstphok out to rescue the colony on Earth. The Librarians were basically a cult of childless Protectors who had effectively adopted the whole Pak species as their descendants. Normal Protectors, with living breeders to protect, don't seem capable of cooperation.
u/Nepene [+2] (22 hours later)
Then no, they're not very rational.
A rational group would see external threats like a protector with a large group of breeders and band up with companions to fight such threats making some agreement like "We agree to work together to fight off the big bad and if any of us defect we all agree to kill that individual and all of their breeders." Some would be successful, and kill the bigger and badder enemies and take their territory and breeders. They'd then likely expand their group with the threat of mutual violence holding them together. Over time their groups would interbreed, giving them stronger ties.
Edit. Like the blue eyes did in that story maybe. They could even form a religion to enforce their beliefs.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (22 hours later)
They do make short-term treaties with other clans, but they don't last. The clans themselves are already loose alliances to begin with, because the Protector is driven to protect its descendants, the ones that smell right. Its actually the scent of the breeders that keeps them alive and eating.
This is shown in Psstphok's dreams/reveries of his life on Pak during the approach to Sol before he lets Brennan kill him.
u/Nepene [+1] (22 hours later)
Indeed, and that shows their lack of rationality. If you have four times the army then that means that your troops have less than a 4th of the risk. By forming long term alliances you massively decrease the risk to your descendants, and with people you know to be intelligent and focused on their goals who are easy to predict.
They are behaving in an irrational manner that hurts their descendants.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
Protectors don't really have troops. Each one is a Randian Superman.
u/Nepene [+0] (a day later)
If they're intelligent they can engineer joinings between their people. Get some food and bribe them to come together, say.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
Niven's point is that intelligence is a tool used in pursuit of goals, and the wrong goals can lead to less than optimal results.
u/Nepene [+0] (a day later)
That's his point, and to answer your question, their intelligence or author fiat is blinding them to rational action.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (4 hours later)
They are not "perfectly" rational. But they are pretty intelligent. The key reason I say this is the pax are punctuated by periods of cooperation followed by unproductive warfare.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)
Apart from the Librarians, who have rewritten their primary goal from "protect my offspring" to "protect the Pak species", cooperation with other lines seems to be purely strategic. Outside the Library warfare seems more or less continuous.