Engineering Kids
There are roughly 3 reasons an engineer might want to make babies:
- Fun project, hedonism, ego, likes building, meaningful purpose.
- Propagating values through the universe after death, i.e. legacy.
- Pattern matching: other people always see upside post facto.
An engineer does not want to consider:
- perhaps he is a hunter gatherer ape, not a tool-maker. the farm needs more hands, but the engineer in 2026 is very averse to "slavery" and "child labor". it's also "age-ism" and a minor detail that the kid will be the one wiping the senior citizen's butt with more tenderness than a random nurse in the old home.
- perhaps he is doing something he doesn't know the full implications of. he prefers to weigh the pros and cons. many founders say they wouldn't build their first company in retrospect "if only they had known" etc. epistemic humility can be a burden, so it's easier to avoid embodying it.
- perhaps society has brainwashed him. self-reflection can be quite painful, especially for those of us with smaller concept of self, who see things more objectively. perhaps we are on the spectrum so "society" isn't even a well-formed concept yet in our heads, etc. education systems are hard.
- perhaps there's a better way. this is the primary and ongoing social brainwash. it's simply very taboo to do a Pavel Durov: "yes i want to make babies, but i also want to smash new babes on the daily, so i shall sperm donate for 100 mini-me's who never meet me. this solves DNA so i can focus on my work, which is effectively 'value propagation' to the next generation anyhow. the kids can learn from my influence on the internet, and history."
- regression to the mean. this is the math we conveniently ignore with parental pride. Pavel Durov doesn't ignore math. He also has retained a brother who can tell him the math.
I am not an engineer, nor am I Pavel.
To be very clear, even though I may have graduated as an MIT Engineer from college, I mostly consider myself a "sales guy" especially after Scale AI placed me onto the GTM side of the org (following my 3rd interview attempt in 2019, whew)!
The above analysis can read in many different ways to many different people. I tried not to prescribe a conclusion from those premises.
As for me, a people person, I am very much on the fence about whether or not I truly want to have children of my own someday. I think I will legitimately die happier having had kids. But I don't know if I'm willing to put up with diapers, and I certainly don't have the income or general stability right now to "do it right" as I'd like.
But the macro is most interesting. As we hurtle toward the Computer Future, I think the value prop is less clear than before. Pavel has some good points.
Re-frames that i'm playing with today:
- there's better ways i can more directly have fun than raising kids. i already teach people quite actively and intimately, for example through this blog or &U grants. i adopted Phu for a bit and view grantees as spiritual kiddos.
- value propagation is not necessarily human any longer. leverage lies directly in ideas. we can all be Buffett-like elves with agentic systems (AI) doing our bidding. websites don't just have to live on the internet archive after the author dies. Ben Franklin + crypto (DAOs) was just the beginning.
- other people are often fools. at least that's how it appears on certain dimensions, specifically those in which one is capable of observing regression to the mean.