less sex, more brains!

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 17:44:12 MDT

Vanessa Novaeris wrote:
> spike wrote:
>
> <<Do you remember how you were immediately distracted from your studies,
> agonizing over this girl or that, how you had to worry about dating, getting
> a car, perhaps mopping floors at the local Burger Barn to support your car,
> to support your social life? Do you remember that you were suddenly very
> distracted with all manner of pointless exercises, drawn away from your
> studies in perhaps the middle of the most critical developmental years? Did
> you not waste your effort? (Hint: Yes. You did.)>>
>
> So sex to me, since I don't plan on procreating EVER, seems essentially
> pointless & without any real purpose. It seems like kind of a waste when I
> think how that is time I could be spending productively to actually accomplish
> something.

Hear hear. I espouse roughly this philosophy myself; I'm okay with the
concept of romance/parenting after the Singularity, but I'm not going to
  activate that part of my life before then until I hear a rational, not
rationalized, account of how this would advance the Singularity.

Interestingly, reactions to this seem to fall into one of two
categories; either:

1) "You poor fool, depriving yourself of one of the essential joys of
life! You can't live without love!"

2) "Yes! Stick to that! Don't go near yon haunted planet! I wish I'd
thought of that before I got sucked in!" 

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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