8 Comments
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RobinHanson's avatar

It is the over-imitation that is at stake here, not simple imitation.

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Peter David Jones's avatar

Atheists shake hands.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Glad I wasn't the only one who raised an eyebrow over the sentence "... as other animals do not". There is proof birds and whales have regional accents and great apes have regional nestbuilding and tool use methods.

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Kevin's avatar

I think animals have this behavior too. Think of a parrot that mimics phrases it hears. Often none of the phrases have any goal attached to them.

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Daniel Carrier's avatar

Is there a difference?

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Peter David Jones's avatar

This may be about learning social rituals rather than religious ones.

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RobinHanson's avatar

A nice additional data point.

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rtanen's avatar

Children with Autism do not Overimitate: http://download.cell.com/cu...

Maybe part of why autistics are overrepresented on LessWrong, although the lack of imitation "is also not driven by superior causal reasoning, because the children with ASC also performed worse on the rationality discrimination task," which was "rat[ing] each action on a five point scale from ‘sensible’ to ‘silly’. Rationality discrimination was calculated as the difference between a child’s rating of the unnecessary action and the necessary action from the same sequence". Then again, this could have been a bad measure if autistics correctly rated the unnecessary action as sillier than the necessary one, but had low confidence in their estimates.

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