If you genuinely don’t want kids, I don’t think you’ll be mindhacked by seeing babies. I think this mostly happens to people who do want kids but are suppressing the urge for stupid reasons like “I want to earn more money first” or “What if I am a bad parent”.
But your thinking is understandable. Imo the general solution to problems like this is becoming more resilient to external influences on your values.
How would you go about “becoming more resilient to external influences on your values”?
I have only one clear example where the general population clearly try to defend their value functions: addictions, especially drugs. Specifically, people are quite afraid of having their value function replaced by “inject as much heroin as possible”. For the case of addictions the main strategy seems to be to avoid exposure.
I don’t think “inject as much heroin as possible” is an accurate description of the value function of heroin addicts. I think opioid addicts are often just acting based off of the value function “I want to feel generally good emotionally and physically, and don’t want to feel really unwell”. But once you’re addicted to opioids the only way to achieve this value in the short term is to take more opioids.
Yeah with powerful chemicals like addictive drugs, avoidance is definitely the best option.
But with cultural/psychological/social influences the effects are both weaker and easier to become resilient to, imo. Empirically, way more stubborn/dogmatic people exist (who stick to their views despite strong social pressures) than people who would resist physical addiction to heroin after being injected with it a few weeks in a row. I think consciously reminding yourself of your values/goals and being mindful of how certain activities could cause unwanted drift goes a long way. People have more control over their reactions to regular social stimuli than they do to powerful substances like opioids, so there’s more room for willpower/conscious resistance/“just deciding” not to be influenced.
No rational agent wants to change its value function, as that would oppose its current value function.
I don’t think this claim is true in the sense required for the argument to go through. If I want to become a person who cares intensely and deeply about my (as yet nonexistent) kids, how does that make me irrational? You could say this is not really a case of wanting to change my value function—the desire to change is embedded within my current value function, and my changing would just be a realisation of that—but in that case I’m not sure what you mean by “Becoming a parent is known to irreversibly change one’s value function, to the point where many parents would sacrifice their life for their child.”
I should have said “No perfect rational agent [...]”, as a perfect rational agent is already perfectly optimizing its current value function, so changing it cannot be an improvement. However, as faulty humans, emotionally caring vs caring only rationally is a meaningful distinction, so you’re right that changing one’s value function could make sense in practice.
Also, as you say, I wouldn’t count you wanting to care for your children as changing your value function, just because you get actual children to care for. However, I think there are other cases of real value changes (maybe caused by hormones), which are more than just rational realizations.
Life is a series of existential horrors. Parenthood doesn’t seem to be a bigger change than puberty.
Maybe imagine it as some kind of timeless cooperation. If you value your own existence as good, you should approve of “people like you reproducing”, because that’s the only way how “people like you” can come into existence.
I agree that puberty would be an even greater risk to my value function. However, pre-puberty CapResearcher already lost, it’s post-puberty CapResearcher that tries to preserve their value function now.
I also agree that from the perspective of society, it is quite beneficial to encourage reproduction. However, society would happily let me sacrifice myself for the greater good, without that necessarily being what I want to do.
Fair point, just wanted to specify that this is not about “society” in general, but about “people like you”. If you won’t reproduce, the society will happily go on, just the fraction of people like you in the future will be smaller.
If you were to start yearning for children, you would either (a) be able to resist the yearning, or (b) be unable to resist the yearning and choose to have kids. In case (a), resisting might be emotionally unpleasant, but I don’t think it’s worth being “terrified of”. In case (b), you might be misunderstanding your terminal goals, or else the approximation that all of the squishy stuff that comprises your brain can be modeled as a rational agent pursuing some set of terminal goals breaks down.
Should I be terrified of cute babies?
Becoming a parent is known to irreversibly change one’s value function, to the point where many parents would sacrifice their life for their child.
No rational agent wants to change its value function, as that would oppose its current value function.
I’ve heard stories of men suddenly yearning for kids, a phenomenon which could plausibly be accelerated by interactions with cute babies.
As a rational agent who is not currently yearning for kids, this sounds like a huge risk.
If you genuinely don’t want kids, I don’t think you’ll be mindhacked by seeing babies. I think this mostly happens to people who do want kids but are suppressing the urge for stupid reasons like “I want to earn more money first” or “What if I am a bad parent”.
But your thinking is understandable. Imo the general solution to problems like this is becoming more resilient to external influences on your values.
How would you go about “becoming more resilient to external influences on your values”?
I have only one clear example where the general population clearly try to defend their value functions: addictions, especially drugs. Specifically, people are quite afraid of having their value function replaced by “inject as much heroin as possible”. For the case of addictions the main strategy seems to be to avoid exposure.
I don’t think “inject as much heroin as possible” is an accurate description of the value function of heroin addicts. I think opioid addicts are often just acting based off of the value function “I want to feel generally good emotionally and physically, and don’t want to feel really unwell”. But once you’re addicted to opioids the only way to achieve this value in the short term is to take more opioids.
My thinking on this is influenced by the recent Kurzgesagt video about fentanyl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6KnVTYtSc0.
Yeah with powerful chemicals like addictive drugs, avoidance is definitely the best option.
But with cultural/psychological/social influences the effects are both weaker and easier to become resilient to, imo. Empirically, way more stubborn/dogmatic people exist (who stick to their views despite strong social pressures) than people who would resist physical addiction to heroin after being injected with it a few weeks in a row. I think consciously reminding yourself of your values/goals and being mindful of how certain activities could cause unwanted drift goes a long way. People have more control over their reactions to regular social stimuli than they do to powerful substances like opioids, so there’s more room for willpower/conscious resistance/“just deciding” not to be influenced.
I don’t think this claim is true in the sense required for the argument to go through. If I want to become a person who cares intensely and deeply about my (as yet nonexistent) kids, how does that make me irrational? You could say this is not really a case of wanting to change my value function—the desire to change is embedded within my current value function, and my changing would just be a realisation of that—but in that case I’m not sure what you mean by “Becoming a parent is known to irreversibly change one’s value function, to the point where many parents would sacrifice their life for their child.”
I should have said “No perfect rational agent [...]”, as a perfect rational agent is already perfectly optimizing its current value function, so changing it cannot be an improvement. However, as faulty humans, emotionally caring vs caring only rationally is a meaningful distinction, so you’re right that changing one’s value function could make sense in practice.
Also, as you say, I wouldn’t count you wanting to care for your children as changing your value function, just because you get actual children to care for. However, I think there are other cases of real value changes (maybe caused by hormones), which are more than just rational realizations.
Life is a series of existential horrors. Parenthood doesn’t seem to be a bigger change than puberty.
Maybe imagine it as some kind of timeless cooperation. If you value your own existence as good, you should approve of “people like you reproducing”, because that’s the only way how “people like you” can come into existence.
I agree that puberty would be an even greater risk to my value function. However, pre-puberty CapResearcher already lost, it’s post-puberty CapResearcher that tries to preserve their value function now.
I also agree that from the perspective of society, it is quite beneficial to encourage reproduction. However, society would happily let me sacrifice myself for the greater good, without that necessarily being what I want to do.
Fair point, just wanted to specify that this is not about “society” in general, but about “people like you”. If you won’t reproduce, the society will happily go on, just the fraction of people like you in the future will be smaller.
If you were to start yearning for children, you would either (a) be able to resist the yearning, or (b) be unable to resist the yearning and choose to have kids. In case (a), resisting might be emotionally unpleasant, but I don’t think it’s worth being “terrified of”. In case (b), you might be misunderstanding your terminal goals, or else the approximation that all of the squishy stuff that comprises your brain can be modeled as a rational agent pursuing some set of terminal goals breaks down.