Comment by jagrsw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagrsw | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the interview in June, and was following Joscha's twitter feed since.

Although a lot of good stuff, some of his views are a bit perplexing:

* If his offspring would turn homosexual, he'd be sad about them being "evolutionary dead-end" (tho, he'd still support them in any way possible) - cannot find the tweet now, he probably deleted it

* He expresses a dim view of US' future (its institutions) esp. in the light of current events. It's sometimes visible in his tweets and speeches. But he's so vague in his predictions, that 10 years down the road I wouldn't be able to tell if he have been right or wrong no matter what the situation will be

tangent point: the company he currently works for - AI Foundation - had some deal/interaction with our dear Deepak Chopra - who is as anti-intellectual as a public persona can be - so my question is 'why' - tho this could be before Joscha's tenure there... but still it feels bad (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191205005164/en/Dee...) (https://aifoundation.com/author/lars_butler/)

But he loves Stanislaw Lem, and according to the interview he was the first author that he felt was worth reading his books had profound impact on him when he was young, so that's nice, b/c Lem is a genius - who is also a bit underrated in the western world - as opposed to the former eastern block :)

Why do you find him expressing sadness about him not being able to pass on his genetics, perplexing? Its a primal evolutionary imperative. While possible the rate of child having is very low in same sex relationships in comparrison to the hetro relationships is higher.

Mostly because he the object which creates the ideas and interacting with us is not his genes/body/brain but on the most abstract level it's his neural system, and the imperative you're talking about is imposed by his genes on his neural system (via brain wiring + hormones).

Since Joscha says that being adult means taking control of your emotions (I guess, to a point), so they serve your goals, and you're not at their whim, I wonder why he succumbs so easily to this specific emotion. Since having offspring has nothing to do with goals of his neural system (say... discovering the nature, advancing knowledge, exchanging ideas).

Goals of your genes != goals of your neural system (brain), and for the purpose of this conversation you are for me the latter.

I'm pretty sure that's not what Joscha meant by taking control of your emotions. His point was certainly more in the direction of not unnecessarily suffering or creating harm by following your emotions.

Following your emotions regarding kids, helping them to raise and become good people, feeling fulfilled doing it, I can't see anything wrong with that. You could even see kids as advancing the knowledge through them. And if you feel that way about your kids, I can also see why someone would be sad not having grand children.

I wouldn't even call this sadness to be mainstream, because I think quite a few people don't allow themselves to feel that way or even condemn themselves. So it's quite honest to be open about such a sadness and shows a good understanding of yourself.

Yup, I agree with 'advancing the knowledge' through your offspring esp. if you consider your neural net capable and well conditioned (but again, who doesn't?:) and genetically+behaviorally inheritable, but he was talking more about grandchildren there (i.e. lack of them), and the effects will be much more limited in the third generation

But children aren't obligated to pass on their genes in order to appease their parents. Parents only get to pass on genes for one generation, and get no further control over the process. To worry about having children because they might not have grandchildren is to be unfairly controlling over the future of children.

Feeling sad about it doesn't mean you're going to force your children having children.

You can have feelings without acting on them, but just perceive them. When Joscha talks about controlling your emotions this certainly would go into this direction.

In one of his appearances (maybe on the Fridman's show) he gave an example of being overly attached to outcomes of elections wrt to success of your favorite political party (being frustrated and sad when the party/president is not in power). His idea was that such feeling are not conductive to your wellbeing, and you should maybe do something about them, (just guessing: rationalizing it, meditating it out or somesuch).

I don't think being sad about reproduction choices of your children is beneficial, therefore I'd also suggest dealing with it. In the end it's just influence of your genes saying 'go, do something, talk to them, we need to be replicated'

> I don't think being sad about reproduction choices of your children is beneficial, therefore I'd also suggest dealing with it.

Feeling sad about something, doesn't mean you're sad about it all the time, that's suffering. You just can't control every emotion in you and there's also no need for it, it's just part of being human. Trying to control every emotion is certainly more harmful than accepting them.

> In the end it's just influence of your genes saying 'go, do something, talk to them, we need to be replicated'

Do you really think that why Joscha works in AI and his desire to expand the knowledge has nothing to do with his genes?

I have a favor to ask for participants of this thread. I'm genuinely curious, and I don't care my about my karma points.

What would be the primary reason for the proponents of the POV 'being sad about your grandchildren being gay b/c cessation of own genetic lineage isn't the best of approaches' being downvoted (like my every entry, and most others)?

I believe it's an interesting conversation, and both side of it exchanged some interesting ideas debating in good faith, being reasonably calm and avoiding common fallacies, so I suspect some factors that are not obvious to me, like maybe the interlocutors are worrying that even discussing such topic might be a danger to their future rights of having offspring it all, or somesuch similar (just a guess, probably not even close to the real reason)?

I'm trying to figure out what I'm being told, since downvotes don't come with comments/reasoning.

It's a recognized flag for a specific and rather imperial memeplex that is spreading rapidly. It also seems like a motte argument for the bailey of antinatalism, which is another strong and particularly distasteful -- for those who are not antinationalist I mean -- flag for this set of ideas that seems to come together or at least have an extremely tight correlation.

Because he is a human being.

And from a pure short sentence, you can't read anything out of it.

something being a primal evolutionary imperative doesn't make it any more meaningful. In fact it's kind of a stupid thing to care about because reproduction in that sense is truly mindless and circular.

Raising a kid is a meaningful experience, but the kids haircolor doesn't matter much.

The fact that the kid will have another kid and bring you grandchildren is though.

You can be gay and raise kids these days. That is to say Joscha Bach can given that he hails from Germany and the US, in some very conservative countries I guess that's an issue, but anyway that's not his point.

You can certainly be gay and raise children, but they’re at best half you and your partners’ biological offspring.

If I told you that you can never eat chocolate again for the rest of your life, and you expressed sadness for not being able to experience the pleasures of eating chocolate, would that be equally perplexing?

Just because our desire for chocolate is a primal evolutionary imperative, doesn't mean that it's wrong to develop an attachment to it. Why is it ok to express sadness over missing out on physical pleasures, but not psychological pleasures.

because that's not the same thing. You can have the pleasure and meaningful experience of raising a child (which I remarked in my post), there is no actual pleasure or meaning to the idea of reproduction as such.

The actual comparison would be for me to express sadness about the fact that I cannot pass on my desire for chocolate to the next generation, which to be honest I couldn't care less about.

He did pass on his "genetics" - he had children.

If he feels sad about them not having children, which is not really something a parent has a say in.

The game of evolution isn't to pass on your genes one generation, its to have your genes persist indefinitely. If his son chooses not to have kids then it counts as an evolutionary "failure" of the parent. It's why we choose attractive partners who will help us have evolutionarily fit children.

> The game of evolution isn't to pass on your genes one generation, its to have your genes persist indefinitely.

I think that's a maladaptive way to think about this. Attaching value and emotion to the long term fate of your particular genes is odd, given that they are almost completely identical to everyone else's. Whats the point in feeling sadness about this?

And evolution isn't a game. It doesn't have a point, or an outcome. It's just what happens when you have replicators in a free energy medium. Genes don't win or lose, they just make copies of themselves. It's nothing to do with _us_. Its just biochemistry.

>I think that's a maladaptive way to think about this.

It's by definition very pro-adaptive. Many if not most of our emotions and behavior is merely in service to passing on our genes (at some higher-order analysis), which you seem to claim is pointless. If being concerned about your lineage is pointless, so is everything else you presumably have no objection to, e.g. feeling sadness from being rejected by a romantic interest.

>And evolution isn't a game.

I'm sure you've heard of a metaphor before.

>they're almost identical to everyone else's

Do you really believe this argument? It seems like a strange one to make. Our genes are almost entirely identical, so why worry about diversity, then?

Besides, people like you will, all else being equal, surely get outbred by people who do care about their progeny. So why worry? The tendency to hold your point of view will wipe itself out...

> people like you will, all else being equal, surely get outbred by people who do care about their progeny. So why worry? The tendency to hold your point of view will wipe itself out...

That could be true (though, atheism is on the rise, despite religious people having more children than non-believers on avg). But it's also orthogonal to the question at hand. Existence or non-existence of proponents of a given POV at a given point it time doesn't say much about the validity of the POV itself.

The POV's perfectly valid, because it's a set of values, which can't really be invalid per se.

But if I had the chance to pick my own values, I wouldn't want to have ones that were antimemetic.

> so why worry about diversity, then

Of course I'm concerned about that. Lack of diversity and the discrimination that goes with it causes real harm to real people.

> Besides, people like you will, all else being equal, surely get outbred by people who do care about their progeny. So why worry? The tendency to hold your point of view will wipe itself out...

So. Why should I care about that? If these people want to hold that view then that's up to them. What am I supposed to do: try to compete with them?

Whats the issue here?

In one tweet he suggested the rise of social justice was in part fabricated to demolish the political left in light of Occupy Wall Street,[0] and that much of U.S. politics is about hiding who is actually in control. Funnily, he was indirectly funded by Harvey Weinstein.[1] Overall I think, he is extremely courageous and has perfected the virtue of telling the truth, like telling entire established buildings of philosophy that they are full of it. In my opinion, we need more of guys like him who simply tell the truth instead of chasing the latest political applause light.

[0] http://archive.is/wip/kvjGp

[1] https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14814

Given my comment above, I would completely disagree in this point. I agreed however, it seemed similar to me before the funding stories were published.

Oops, I meant Jeffrey Epstein. I wrote "funny" because of the ties to that U.S. elite and because he actually dares to indirectly question them all the time (but not via the fabricated social justice angle, of course). Also, the entire Weinstein/Epstein drama is an instance of sexuality having become absurdly politicized to the degree that mainstream knowledge on it is outright false.

What is perplexing about it? Genuine curiosity - where I live those views would probably be considered mundane mainstream.

I replied on this in another subthread, a minute ago or so.

But as for the 'mainstream', Joscha exactly doesn't want to be mainstream - see his TT stream: :)

"In a playground where most people can neither come up with ideas of their own.." and various other tweets and presos related to the harm of conforming to societal norms of thinking.

If your views happen to align with the mainstream, that still isn't a reason to change them in and of itself. Being ruled and controlled by the mainstream is bad, because the mainstream makes mistakes; but that doesn't mean that the right path is just to try and be as much the opposite of the mainstream as possible.

There's no disagreement in here.

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