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> Imagine you have a box of Lego, and you build a house, and you keep it. And you keep making new houses, and never breaking the old ones. What happens? "The bo

• msamwald 11y ago
  It might be consoling to some, but it is hardly accurate.
  • asimuvPR 11y ago
    How would you accurately explain death to a toddler? It is a good analogy that takes the toddler's feelings into account. Daddy ran out of Legos but he loves you. Quite beautiful actually.
    • anexprogrammer 11y ago
      downvotes? I'm not sure how this rates those. Accuracy isn't really helpful to a five year old who doesn't yet have all the concepts needed. The tooth fairy isn't accurate either. Accuracy will get you an endless cycle of "but why dad?"
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        That's called being a responsible parent. It's either that, or your child's future partner will have to deal with them losing faith in their parents, after so many things they were told turned out to be bullshit said to shut them up.
        • emodendroket 11y ago
          If you'd resent your parents for explaining death to you when you were five by an analogy without technical accuracy you probably have other issues.
          • cname 11y ago
            Right. Issues that were caused by people distorting the truth instead of giving it to you straight.
            • emodendroket 11y ago
              That's not what I meant but I think you know that.
      • aninhumer 11y ago
        > Accuracy will get you an endless cycle of "but why dad?" So keep answering until you can't, and then say "I don't know". Curiosity is something to be fostered, not shutdown with lies.
        • anexprogrammer 11y ago
          Have you had an inconsolable five year old who lost a close relative or even pet? I prefer to use analogies and explanations they can understand and accept to help them understand the reality. It's not the same as presuming they have no concept of death. That's a very long way from shutting them down with lies, avoiding the topic, or "protecting" them from it. It's trying to be age-appropriate. I make no claims to be a perfect parent however. When they're a little older and have more capacity to understand a fuller, more accurate, discussion is possible.
          • asimuvPR 11y ago
            I lost a brother who has two girls. They were very young when it happened. It was a sudden death. Gone in less than a day. You never get an answer to the why. The Lego analogy works because it tells the child that life ends. It doesn't explain why. Just the fact. And that's ok. Why did my brother die? Everyday I ask myself that very same question and have yet come to an answer. His daughters have asked me why too. I never answer and hug them. Life is but a gift. It's not logical. But makes sense in a way. Worth living and worth dying for. Only thing I can come up with is to wish everybody health and a long life.
            • aninhumer 11y ago
              >It doesn't explain why. The aspect of it that people are objecting to is that it does try to explain why. It says "Your father needs to go back in the box so we can make other people", which simply isn't true.
              • asimuvPR 11y ago
                I do understand that and I'm not making a religious statement. Merely stating facts with Legos. The matter we are made up of are the Legos. We are the sum of the parts. When we die those parts go on to be part of other things. Now why that happens is that science has not yet caught up :)
      • EugeneOZ 11y ago
        Maybe they want to explain their kids all details of the illness, all details of dying and suffering - maybe they think it's acceptable for toddlers. Or maybe they are just too young/stupid/naive to understand it.
    • alsomaht 11y ago
      Accurately: Our bodies undergo wear-and-tear, like the mailbox we had to fix last week. Only, in the case of our bodies, we don't yet have a way to fix or replace most of our parts. After a while, too many parts get worn down until they are no longer able to continue, and everything about us - the parts that allow us to think, the parts that allow us to feel - just stops. Sadly, fixing our biology is harder than fixing mailboxes, and while we're learning more and more about how to do it every decade, we won't be able to fix everything for the foreseeable future. --- Too accurately: So why aren't we trying harder to fix it? You see, son, society has been dealing with death for many thousands of years, and people have developed coping mechanisms to deal with its apparent inevitability. The majority of people simply don't think about it. Public figures have even rationalized death as a good thing, and boy have they said the darndest things. For example, I've recently read of someone comparing our bodies to legos in a fixed sandbox - as if people literally need to be disassembled before others can be born - and no one bats an eye! Another person pointed out that scientific progress would be slowed down without the older generation of scientists dying - sure, billions of non-scientists may die every few decades, but hey, science is a bit faster as a result! The point is, society has created a culture of either ignoring or accepting death, and it shapes the very way we think. Sure, that culture might have been harmless back when we really had no chance of combating problems like old age, but now? The vast majority of researchers, of funders, don't even bother to think about what should be some of the most important problems of our generation. Until we have progressed to the point where it becomes blatantly obvious that the technology to combat old age exists, it is unlikely anyone will even notice it. In other words, we're all screwed and you were born a few hundred years too early.
      • Neslit 11y ago
        Ha :/ Too real. > we're all screwed and you were born a few hundred years too early. It's not a great option, but cryonics seems way better than nothing. (Under the assumptions that the preservation is reasonably high-quality, the storage facilities stay operational, humanity doesn't destroy itself, and advanced medical technology gets developed; see waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html ) An example of someone who wanted to live a long time but was genuinely screwed and was born a couple hundred years too early: The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity! -Benjamin Franklin
  • Angostura 11y ago
    In what way is it inaccurate? It seems a fairly decent summary of the Carbon cycle.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      The inaccuracy is that in reality, the box of Legos is huge and nowhere near running out of bricks. If suddenly all humans on Earth stopped dying, the carbon cycle wouldn't even notice it for centuries or more (the things we'd be doing to control overpopulation are another topic though).
      • coldpie 11y ago
        Why are you assuming the analogy is to physical resources instead of "population slots," for lack of a better term? The old have to die for the young to move forward, which is one thing that gives me pause about immortality research.
        • TeMPOraL 11y ago
          Because the analogy is about Lego box and making new houses, as opposed to e.g. fitting new houses on a finite Lego base plate[0]. I don't buy the "population slots". 100 years ago, the "population slots" were limited to at most 2 billion, back before Harber-Bosch[1]. There's a lot of space to use - we can live under the sea, we'll finally have an economic reason for that Mars colony. And we can stop making children so much too. Those things are actually easier than beating death, so - with added incentive to actually making them happen - you can expect them coming before people actually get immortal. [0] - http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-X-Large-Gray-Baseplate-628/dp/B00000JIVV http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-X-Large-Gray-Baseplate-628/dp/B00... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
        • Practicality 11y ago
          "The old have to die for the young to move forward" - This seems like a baseless assumption. If immortality research succeeds, surely we can also fix the problem of older people being stubborn. A lot of the stubborness comes from facing death. When you think in terms of forever, it helps you to think a lot bigger than petty personal politics. Or, at least, it should.
  • azazqadir 11y ago
    The point is, it doesn't have to be accurate. It just have to make sense to a child.
    • Neslit 11y ago
      To put it bluntly, I can think of a number of other cases where (1) people say things to children because it is more pleasant or convenient, not because it is true, and (2) these misleading statements have negative effects later. In this case, it seems potentially worthwhile to keep in view that death is actually not a good thing, and that it would better if there weren't death, and that we want to keep an eye out for opportunities to prevent death. "You do not make peace with darkness!"
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I can not understand this approach to parenting. I had the luck of my parents never lying to me to shut me up. Even the "hard topics" of sex were handled properly even before I started asking about it myself. > (2) these misleading statements have negative effects later. Yes. And I had to fix that damage in people too. You know, sharing an interesting tidbit of information with a person close to me only for her to suddenly realize it was another thing her father mislead her about. Lying to children is like placing relationship landmines - your kids will step on them many years later and it will damage your relationship with them.
      • emodendroket 11y ago
        It seems like if every person who has ever lived were still alive today we'd had some issues.
        • Neslit 11y ago
          Do you mean because of limited resources like food and space? Sure, but (1) these look like difficult but quite solvable problems (we are engineers, after all) and (2) the alternative is having every person who has ever lived also be dead, which sounds bad to me. There might be more clever options, like cryopreserve everyone who dies; this does not consume many resources (the only recurring cost is liquid nitrogen, which is pretty cheap). Then we can wait to revive everyone until we have the medicine and the resources to support everyone, avoiding overpopulation.
  • slavik81 11y ago
    There would be over a hundred billion people today if nobody ever died, and that's only counting the humans. The practical reality of the world since the dawn of life has been that if you want to shake up the genetic Lego box and create new creatures, the old creatures have to die. Eventually. The analogy is not perfect. To create new Lego creations you have to destroy the old ones first. But analogies are never perfect. They're just a starting point to get a rough understanding.
    • Neslit 11y ago
      Does this seem like a desirable state of affairs? I think I'd rather not have anyone die involuntarily. If we put our minds to it, I bet we could figure out how to not have anyone die who didn't want to. There's no physical law that says you can't have billions or trillions of humans live awesome lives for a very long time (though maybe not literally forever).
      • lintiness 11y ago
        what? accidents kill people and all living things all the time.
        • Neslit 11y ago
          Well, yeah :P This is a strong argument for trying to prevent fatal accidents!
        • saalweachter 11y ago
          Something else to fix! The human body has many enviable traits over a machine: self repair, remarkable efficiency, etc etc. But there's one really awesome aspect of machines we should get to work on: a machine, if broken, will sit indefinitely until repaired. Imagine! You are rent limb from limb in a horrific accident, your body ... stops. A good Samaritan happens upon it later, stitches it back together, puts in some fresh blood, gives it a bit of a kick-start, and away you go! Screw cryonics: I want to keep indefinitely at room temperature, with no special (post-mortem) treatment.
      • 11y ago
  • wging 11y ago
    It's an explanation of conservation of mass. Maybe not the only reason we die, but if no one ever did die, we'd eventually run into problems, er, assembling the next generation. In fact all you need to assume in order to run up against these problems is that population growth continues.
    • Neslit 11y ago
      Uh, there's a whole lot of mass in the universe; this isn't really a limiting factor, and won't be for quite a long time.
    • sp332 11y ago
      The earth's population has skyrocketed recently. Global poverty is down over the same time. There might be such a limit somewhere, but we're not close enough to it that we have to maintain an equilibrium in births and deaths!
• random_upvoter 11y ago
  What's so horrible about confessing to your kid that you don't have all the answers?
• Udo 10y ago
  > I am stealing this. You shouldn't. I have seen this ideology come up on HN a lot (strangely almost never anywhere else), as an argument against human life extension. If this is your ideology, it's of course not productive to argue against it, but if your mind isn't made up yet, allow me to very briefly present some bullet point-like counter arguments: Returning a couple of kilograms of mostly-carbon to the environmental cycle isn't critically important to nature. In the grand scheme of things, never breaking the old legos is probably not a net loss in a universe filled to the brim with more lego bricks. It's hard to make a compelling argument that our mental or cultural landscape would improve if this specific person was removed. Individual minds do have an intrinsic value that is lost when death happens, with little-to-no balancing benefit on the other side. If your primary motivation for a "death is good" paradigm comes from the perception that it's the only antidote to overpopulation, there is even more to talk about than would be prudent in this thread, but suffice it to say that over-procreation is due to a faulty feedback loop, and not an inevitable fact of human existence. Of course, you may - and probably do - disagree with this opinion, but it's at least something to consider.
  • flashman 10y ago
    My primary motivation is to explain death at a four-year-old's level.
    • Udo 10y ago
      I know, but I worry about giving children misleading information. Especially given the possibility that they might grow into a world where radical life extension may become available for the first time, I believe we shouldn't give them our thousands-year-old mantra of "dead is good" with all the fantasies and rationalisations that entails. In my experience, children want to know very specific things about death, and I think we can answer them more truthfully and let them make up their own minds about the other things as they grow older. They usually want to know two things: why we die and what death will feel like for a person, which are totally reasonable questions. The why can be answered by explaining that all things break, and when living beings break, they are no longer alive. When my nephew recently asked what it's like being dead, I said to him for the people who died it's exactly like the time before they were born. That seemed to satisfy his concerns, and I hope this way of thinking will spare him the literal nightmares I had about death when I was 4, where people had told me I would spend eternity somewhere without a body.