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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

> It's like if sperm/eggs went around making all of the important decisions and only bothered to spin up a human briefly for reproductive purposes.

That's very close to the thesis of Richard Dawkins' seminal book, the Selfish Gene--we're just machines constructed by genes to replicate them. It's literally true, of course, but we don't often take that perspective; yet many things in biology aren't intuitive unless and until we do.[1]

[1] OTOH, some things in biology become inexplicable when we do take that perspective, such as non-kin altruism. IIRC, Dawkins admits as much in the book. (Contra some subsequent sociopolitical interpretations, Dawkins never used his "selfish gene" model to refute the possibility of non-kin altruism, just that the model in isolation was insufficient to explain non-kin altruism, the existence of which he seemed to take for granted, at least in humans.)

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Isn't non kin altruism just prisoners dilemma part of the evolution? E.g. groups that work together will survive and genes of these groups will get passed on. So the desire is to help any friendly individuals, but it also works globally because this hasn't really even been part of evolution to be so globalized.

Not exactly, but also yes. There is a game being played where there are local optimums of a ratio of cooperating/betraying and evolutionary pressure against the “wrong” ratios. There is also the problem of it being difficult or too resource intensive to have perfect knowledge of what other individuals actually share your genes and by how much and some group altruism is explained by evolution taking shortcuts that work well enough.

The point of the book is that the mechanism explaining such things shouldn’t stop at “because it’s good for the group” instead digging down into why what’s good for the genes must explain the higher order behavior.

>seminal book

Don't think that we don't see this.

Reminds me of a Tweet circa 2021 where someone asked if they should stop using the word seminal because it might micro-harm people.

I've seen people sensor themself on the word "retarded" in a physics context. Which.... Is absurd.

A company I was at renamed master to main to avoid implications of human slavery when committing to source control.

On the flip side, there are also cases where some changes to the language make things more obvious and simple. As a non-native English speaker, allowlist/denylist make more sense to me than whitelist/blacklist, since allow/deny describe the purpose well, as opposed to white/black.

As for having a "main" branch or other things like that, I don't really mind the change much. Admittedly, both the claims about implications surrounding slavery and counter-arguments regarding names like having a "master record" seem overblown to me (on one side, why care about some obscure software term instead of trying to effect actual change? on the other, why push back against a trivial change so much, it's not like using a different term is so hard if it pleases a lot of people?), although perhaps due to me not having the heritage of the people in the US, so I just quiet down and do the sensible thing.

I didn’t push back or complain, but I don’t really get the victory they think they achieved there. Definitely nothing that helped an actual living person improve their life - donating the equivalent in salary spent working on the change to local families would have been more effective at making the world a better place imho. There were no theoretically impacted people championing or asking for the change. It was just some people looking for something to do, and they even had a celebration at the end like they really achieved something.

Because it’s the same group of people who want to, on a whim, decide that “homeless” is now “houseless” and that it’s offensive to homeless people to call them anything else. It’s language authoritarianism used to arbitrarily paint people as bad for utilizing common verbiage and for the dictators to feel they’re some revolutionaries all while never doing anything to actually help the people they claim to be fighting for.

The changing of the word "homeless" isn't to prevent offence, but to make people view them differently, for a time.

It’s divisive. Almost nobody involved in this kinda stuff is at all curious how actual slaves thought about language.

People just want an in group and an out group. And there’s an endless parade of grifters willing to provide that.

I've experienced similar. Sure, words matter. But so does context, at least it should.

And yet I bet those you make the suggestion still say "master bedroom" (which actual is a direct reference to slavery).

In San Francisco, when I was looking for a new place to rent in 2022, the realtor would use the phrase "primary bedroom" instead, remarking that apparently people in the field are moving away here from "master" because of the connotation.

Personally, my favourite is this Github repo https://github.com/queer/boxxy

The primary branch is called "mistress". haha, that's good

American home ownership is so loaded with plantation era subtle subjugation in the form of linguistic convention. If master bedroom were the worst it would get attention.

I switched to originating new repos as main instead of master personally, reinforcing the concept of “commuting to” or code “being committed” to “master”, seems diametrically opposed to progress.

Sensor themeselves? I’m incensed. :P

Yea there was a lot of that going around

Pie’s Law still holds strong

non-kin altruism could just be a mistake. A behaviour intended to be applied to ones own species, but ends up applied to others because of the detectors used to identify another agent not being scrutinous enough.

Just because you get diabetes doesnt mean its the intended behaviour of evolution. Could be a spandrel, or an artifact, or aliasing, or a plain mistake.

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