Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

Because sex is a short-term goal, and the more heavily you optimize for it, the less you'll optimize for being accountable to the long term side-effects of dishonesty.

View on HN

You risk getting bad reputation if you don't care about your offspring and social environment. People care about their reputation to be socially included (because that enables access to sex, among other reward signals of course, but sex is the strongest).

People could take vows of celibacy, and you'd probably just say they were really, deep down, only doing it to have more sex. And I'll certainly call you a liar, if only because you are so willing to brand everyone else with that label.

Our brains evolved to make decisions. Yes, they were constrained by a need to survive and reproduce. But those two goals are not the same thing. And the existence of those constraints does not actually preclude any other mode of operation.

You're being absurdly reductive when you conflate any motivation with a need to reproduce.

I think it's accurate. There is no doubt about it. I also don't see that there is anything is wrong with it. I think you have simply internalized modesty memes, but that ultimately makes you ignore fundamental motivations which in turn leads to dysregulation.

That's why we invented birth control. So we could be better at reproducing. When human decision making and the need to reproduce come head-to-head, reproduction is always the motivation, even if it results in less reproduction.

This is why your argument is nonsense. You're basically trying to define everything as sex. You're playing a silly word game so you can feel smug about this directionless and immature insight.

I'm not smug. I'm concerned about dysregulation due to ignorance of basic motivational drives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com