I think there is much more to be done improving (from the standpoint of the future of humanity) the children of others than creating new ones yourself.
Sometimes the non-child-creators justify their decision by suggesting that the projects they are working on are especially socially valuable and thus they can spend time on them in preference to child-creation without violating their duty to society. While it is possible that this argument goes through in some cases, it seems suspiciously self-serving. What is especially worth taking into account is that if the humans in question really are so highly valuable, they would statistically have highly valuable offspring. Thus, it seems doubtful in the general case that high-value people refraining from procreating is a net gain for society.
Actually, your argument seems suspiciously own-gene serving. And it is the optimization power and direction of genes from which our ability for self-deception comes. You said yourself “A duty to society is typically not the only or primary reason for why people decide to have children.” Could it be that the instincts that have driven you to procreate make having children enjoyable enough to justify being “knee-deep” in poop in your mind, and you are portraying it as self-sacrifice just to look virtuous?
If procreation to create especially valuable-to-society children for the good of humanity is such an important goal that you feel fit to criticize people for sitting out as “freeloaders”, then have you and your mate used your own sperm/eggs to create these children, or have you bought sperm/eggs with the best genes available? The answer will reveal which agent is really holding the reigns here. (If the former, either you and your mate have the best genes available (from the standpoint of the future of humanity, which is unlikely) or it’s your genes holding the reigns, and this idea that you’re selflessly giving up your freedom for the good of humanity is the creepy goatee’d advisor standing next to the king saying “A most judicious choice, sire!”).
To add to this, there is nothing mandating that the same number of humans that exist now are required in the future for human civilization to work. Especially, as productivity has gone up in recent decades, humanity could now probably exist at the same level of prosperity of the latter 20th century with half the population it has now.
And of course, the whole premise of this site is that AIs have the capability to render this entire argument moot. In principle, if a FAI can be created, we can all rest peacefully and retire, and no longer will a younger generation be required. Of course things get complicated in practice. That’s why you can’t make the argument ‘we need more children!’
To add to this, there is nothing mandating that the same number of humans that exist now are required in the future for human civilization to work. Especially, as productivity has gone up in recent decades, humanity could now probably exist at the same level of prosperity of the latter 20th century with half the population it has now.
Maybe we decide each couple should ideally have 1.7 children, maybe 2.3. The point still stands that some children need to be reared and it is, all things being equal, your duty to do your part in this.
all things being equal, your duty to do your part in this.
One can ‘do their duty’ by being a good person and contributing to society, thus helping other people’s children grow up. But then, most people already do try to contribute to society, and in wealthy countries (which your criticism seems to be aimed at) the system appears to be working well and allowing the support of new children as it stands, so it’s not like any extra effort is needed on society’s part.
By the way, just to clarify, I’m not saying people should work so that other people can have kids. All I’m saying is that this is a hole in your argument. Someone who doesn’t bear children is not necessarily a freeloader.
One can ‘do their duty’ by being a good person and contributing to society, thus helping other people’s children grow up.
This is like saying “I’m going to evade paying taxes, I’ll just contribute to society in other ways”. This might work, you might even come out ahead, but you are prima facie being a freeloader.
I don’t see how this would be any different from any of the billion other possible game-theoretic freeloader problems.
By this logic, all the possible freeloader things that you’re doing (i.e. the contributions you’re not giving that some large number of other people are giving) are also worth consideration relative to their potential or possible value to society. Have you watered a plant today? Have you walked to work instead of using a car today? Have you saved someone’s life today? Have you taught someone something useful today? Have you marginally assisted in future scientific and technological advances today? Or all of those things this hour? This minute? No? Because there’s a lot of people out there who have, you freeloader! Sure, you might say you’re prioritizing other things, that you’re trying to contribute in other, better ways. This might work, you might even come out ahead, but you are prima facie a horrible being that causes all sorts of headaches for Game Theorists worldwide.
Now please proceed to ignore me and accuse people of freeloading on this particular problem that you think is more important than the other ones.
I have nothing against division of labor. Not everyone needs to be a farmer. But you can’t effectively farm children so we need most people to pitch in. This is a volunteer system very unlike growing plants. If you grow plants and sell them to me then I’m not a freeloader. But if you raise children then I don’t pay you for them, yet I still benefit. That’s where the freeloader part comes in.
Now please proceed to ignore me
Why? I’m assuming this is some sort of sarcasm rather than an honest request, but please clarify if this is not the case. If it was sarcasm, what was it motivated by?
Why? I’m assuming this is some sort of sarcasm rather than an honest request, but please clarify if this is not the case. If it was sarcasm, what was it motivated by?
The possible interpretation as sarcasm was intentional; the phrasing was intended to trigger a game board favorable to me in game-theoretic terms (i.e. provoke a “catch-22” where I win, in simple terms):
If you take my request seriously or otherwise do ignore me, I’m instinctively and emotionally content in the knowledge that I’ve uselessly thrown words at someone on the Internet I disagree with, which is something I’ve done many times before and am now comfortable with. The less reasonable parts of my brain are satisfied that you’ve done as I said, that I’m in control and not socially at risk. The more reasonable parts… well, acceptable expected utility gamble which happened to result in a minor negative outcome instead of a minor positive one, and I still got my initial entertainment and mental exercise from writing the comment.
If you take it as sarcasm or as some sort of challenge and decide to engage with me in an intellectual discussion about the game-theoretic issues, the cost analyses, or even just why you think these particular issues are more relevant and important and others can be discarded, then I’ve made progress and we’re now in a more interesting (for me) part of the discussion where I believe we are closer to a satisfying conclusion.
Of course, I was somewhat betting that one of those two would be chosen, at some risk of unexpected divergence. Possibly also at some cost to you in the form of ego hit or something. However, unexpected divergences include this one, where you ask me about my choice of words, and I believe this is of positive value. To be honest, writing the above was quite fun. Plus you simultaneously went for one of those favorable options. Quite a success.
Now on to the actual topic at hand:
Various use-of-words arguments could be made regarding the non-volunteer versus volunteer aspects of human-making and other socially-beneficial endeavors, but more interesting and is the point about effective children-farming: Effective to what metric?
My mental model of Quality-Adjusted New Humans takes a few high-quality humans randomly spawned in a large number of new humans all living in a ceteris paribus better environment to be far superior to a marginally higher high-low new human quality ratio in a lower quality environment. As such, I think it’s more efficient and beneficial to have experts focus on improving the environment at the expense of this low amount of potential parents being lost.
In practice, the above translates to: First-world, educated, high-quality people such as might be expected to participate on LW would benefit society more if they focus on creating a better society for the new humans to grow in, as opposed to adding a marginal number of high-expected-quality-adjusted-new-humans.
Which all probably relates to my priors about the impacts of Nature VS Nurture and my priors about the cost-benefits of one high-quality human versus many low-quality humans.
And on the other end of the inference chain, this leads to my conclusion that we should not recommend that LW participants and other audience members focus on producing children, with the corollary (but separate) points about where I do think they should focus their efforts.
That was an awesome answer, which leaves me with very little to add. I’ll merely say that—as you’ve already implicitly predicted—what seems to be going on is that my nature/nurture priors are significantly different from yours and this leads us to such different conclusions.
.That was an awesome answer, which leaves me with very little to add. I’ll merely say that—as you’ve already implicitly predicted—what seems to be going on is that my nature/nurture priors are significantly different from yours and this leads us to such different conclusions.
And there’s the satisfying conclusion. Our priors are uneven, but we agree on the evidence and our predictions. We can now safely adjourn or move on to a more elaborate discussion about our respective priors.
As an important data point, my wordgaming experiments rarely work out this well, but so far have retained net positive expected utility (as do, unsurprisingly, most efforts at improving social skills). I’ll bump up this tactic a few notches on my mental list.
If procreation to create especially valuable-to-society children for the good of humanity is such an important goal that you feel fit to criticize people for sitting out as “freeloaders”
The part about especially valuable children was two sentences and meant as a response to a potential objection, not as my main point. Parents in general are getting the kudos in this story, not just parents raising some hypothetical super-babies.
then have you and your mate used your own sperm/eggs to create these children, or have you bought sperm/eggs with the best genes available?
As you have correctly surmised, my instincts badly rebel against the idea of raising other people’s children as if they were my own. Instincts like that could probably be surpressed with upbringing designed for that and maybe a utilitarian case could be made for such a policy. Or maybe not, I don’t know, there are some really complex questions in there. But really, this wasn’t supposed to be about eugenics—just about doing your part in some necessary work that we all benefit from.
the creepy goatee’d advisor standing next to the king saying “A most judicious choice, sire!”
That’s exactly the guy I want to be. I’d like to convince the reader that following his or her biological instincts on this happens to be the noble thing to do. I do think the intellectual case for this is strong.
The part about especially valuable children was two sentences and meant as a response to a potential objection, not as my main point. Parents in general are getting the kudos in this story, not just parents raising some hypothetical super-babies. [...] I do think the intellectual case for this is strong.
In a world where we worry about overpopulation the case you brought is extremely weak. If you look at a previous discussion on the issue on LW there are two sides: “(1) Overpopulation is one of the most important issues and we have to do more to fight it. (2) We can be confident that the problem solves itself over time.”
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why. The only way to fix this is to assume that you aren’t really meaning that you want more overpopulation and instead advocate that specific people should procreate.
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
You might say that the human population as a whole is already breeding at more than replacement level and so any suggestion that someone should have children is de facto an encouragement to overpopulate more. I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Alice: It would be nice if you drove to the store and picked up the cake for birthday.
Bob: You are basically claiming that we need more carbon in the atmosphere without providing arguments why. In a world where we worry about global warming the case you brought is extremely weak.
Alice: ???
Bob may well have a point but Alice is understandably confused.
When I wrote my post I anticipated the counterarguments against it and prepared answers for them. But no-one has even brought those counterarguments yet—everyone’s talking about other things. What I think has happened is that I severely underestimated the inferential distance between my position and that of the typical reader. The great illusionist strikes again. I’ll present this very differently next time.
There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
Policy are supposed to get judged by real world effects. If we want a certain number of new humans those people who want to go through the experience of childbearing should start producing children. In the present world those already produce too much children, so there no case of the people who don’t want to produce, to produce.
I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Giving that you do point to the quasi-racistic stuff you are basically holding the position that not everyone should get children but that the right people should as Mestroyer said.
In that case you just disagree with him about who the right people happen to be. He thinks it’s about being intelligent and the type of person who goes on lesswrong while you might also want more of stupid people that share your racial identification.
Without restricting the arguments to being about the right people getting more children the case is easily dismissed in a world with overpopulation. In the spirit of fixing the arguments of other people it makes sense to treat you as saying that you want the right people getting more children even if you don’t explicitly say so.
Gah, no, that’s not it at all. It feels like we’re moving farther, rather than closer, to understanding each other’s position.
I seem to have irreparably placed us on a wrong track with my post so I think I’ll stop trying to recover from it. To make progress it would be best to start again from the ground up with a completely different write-up of my core idea. But for now, at least, I’ll let this rest.
Could it be that the instincts that have driven you to procreate make having children enjoyable enough to justify being “knee-deep” in poop in your mind,
Yes, of course.
and you are portraying it as self-sacrifice just to look virtuous?
Meh. I could have made a much more convincing post to make myself look virtuous. Perhaps I should have. But I do want to encourage the reader to see childrearing as virtuous.
Actually, your argument seems suspiciously own-gene serving.
Well, I’m done having children—I’m hoping to induce other people to have children. Other people with genes somewhat similar to my own, you might say, and I won’t protest.
When I wrote this post I realized that it had the potential flaw of appearing like I was primarily interested in bragging or complaining about my own decisions/situation. Your comment reveals to me that this flaw was more serious than I had thought. A better strategy might have been to write about friends of mine who have children and compare their lives with that of acquaintances without children. That way I could have gotten in the poop stuff without the annoying holier-than-thou effect. Thank you. [Edit: I removed the personal part for now.]
My argument is more like: If our prior says almost everyone optimizes for Y, and few optimize for X, but many people like to say they optimize for X, and you point to an action A you have taken which increases X and say “Look how I’m optimizing for X!” and A increases Y as well, and there is an obvious alternative B which an X-optimizer would have noticed and which increases X more than A at the cost of not increasing Y, then we’ve just explained away A as evidence that you optimize for X and should stop privileging that hypothesis.
Edit: one more thing is important here, which is that A is something you’d do if you were optimizing Y, not just something you’d only do if you were jointly optimizing X and Y. You might be thinking “Well, just donate sperm/eggs!”. But that is not an option that the Y-agent controlling the Thread Starter really “considers”, because the selective forces that shape parental instincts did most of their work before the presence of that option.
Depending on how you define “care”, maybe you can care about X without optimizing for it, but that doesn’t really matter to me, as that kind of caring doesn’t do X any good.
I think there is much more to be done improving (from the standpoint of the future of humanity) the children of others than creating new ones yourself.
Actually, your argument seems suspiciously own-gene serving. And it is the optimization power and direction of genes from which our ability for self-deception comes. You said yourself “A duty to society is typically not the only or primary reason for why people decide to have children.” Could it be that the instincts that have driven you to procreate make having children enjoyable enough to justify being “knee-deep” in poop in your mind, and you are portraying it as self-sacrifice just to look virtuous?
If procreation to create especially valuable-to-society children for the good of humanity is such an important goal that you feel fit to criticize people for sitting out as “freeloaders”, then have you and your mate used your own sperm/eggs to create these children, or have you bought sperm/eggs with the best genes available? The answer will reveal which agent is really holding the reigns here. (If the former, either you and your mate have the best genes available (from the standpoint of the future of humanity, which is unlikely) or it’s your genes holding the reigns, and this idea that you’re selflessly giving up your freedom for the good of humanity is the creepy goatee’d advisor standing next to the king saying “A most judicious choice, sire!”).
To add to this, there is nothing mandating that the same number of humans that exist now are required in the future for human civilization to work. Especially, as productivity has gone up in recent decades, humanity could now probably exist at the same level of prosperity of the latter 20th century with half the population it has now.
And of course, the whole premise of this site is that AIs have the capability to render this entire argument moot. In principle, if a FAI can be created, we can all rest peacefully and retire, and no longer will a younger generation be required. Of course things get complicated in practice. That’s why you can’t make the argument ‘we need more children!’
Maybe we decide each couple should ideally have 1.7 children, maybe 2.3. The point still stands that some children need to be reared and it is, all things being equal, your duty to do your part in this.
One can ‘do their duty’ by being a good person and contributing to society, thus helping other people’s children grow up. But then, most people already do try to contribute to society, and in wealthy countries (which your criticism seems to be aimed at) the system appears to be working well and allowing the support of new children as it stands, so it’s not like any extra effort is needed on society’s part.
By the way, just to clarify, I’m not saying people should work so that other people can have kids. All I’m saying is that this is a hole in your argument. Someone who doesn’t bear children is not necessarily a freeloader.
This is like saying “I’m going to evade paying taxes, I’ll just contribute to society in other ways”. This might work, you might even come out ahead, but you are prima facie being a freeloader.
I don’t see how this would be any different from any of the billion other possible game-theoretic freeloader problems.
By this logic, all the possible freeloader things that you’re doing (i.e. the contributions you’re not giving that some large number of other people are giving) are also worth consideration relative to their potential or possible value to society. Have you watered a plant today? Have you walked to work instead of using a car today? Have you saved someone’s life today? Have you taught someone something useful today? Have you marginally assisted in future scientific and technological advances today? Or all of those things this hour? This minute? No? Because there’s a lot of people out there who have, you freeloader! Sure, you might say you’re prioritizing other things, that you’re trying to contribute in other, better ways. This might work, you might even come out ahead, but you are prima facie a horrible being that causes all sorts of headaches for Game Theorists worldwide.
Now please proceed to ignore me and accuse people of freeloading on this particular problem that you think is more important than the other ones.
I have nothing against division of labor. Not everyone needs to be a farmer. But you can’t effectively farm children so we need most people to pitch in. This is a volunteer system very unlike growing plants. If you grow plants and sell them to me then I’m not a freeloader. But if you raise children then I don’t pay you for them, yet I still benefit. That’s where the freeloader part comes in.
Why? I’m assuming this is some sort of sarcasm rather than an honest request, but please clarify if this is not the case. If it was sarcasm, what was it motivated by?
The possible interpretation as sarcasm was intentional; the phrasing was intended to trigger a game board favorable to me in game-theoretic terms (i.e. provoke a “catch-22” where I win, in simple terms):
If you take my request seriously or otherwise do ignore me, I’m instinctively and emotionally content in the knowledge that I’ve uselessly thrown words at someone on the Internet I disagree with, which is something I’ve done many times before and am now comfortable with. The less reasonable parts of my brain are satisfied that you’ve done as I said, that I’m in control and not socially at risk. The more reasonable parts… well, acceptable expected utility gamble which happened to result in a minor negative outcome instead of a minor positive one, and I still got my initial entertainment and mental exercise from writing the comment.
If you take it as sarcasm or as some sort of challenge and decide to engage with me in an intellectual discussion about the game-theoretic issues, the cost analyses, or even just why you think these particular issues are more relevant and important and others can be discarded, then I’ve made progress and we’re now in a more interesting (for me) part of the discussion where I believe we are closer to a satisfying conclusion.
Of course, I was somewhat betting that one of those two would be chosen, at some risk of unexpected divergence. Possibly also at some cost to you in the form of ego hit or something. However, unexpected divergences include this one, where you ask me about my choice of words, and I believe this is of positive value. To be honest, writing the above was quite fun. Plus you simultaneously went for one of those favorable options. Quite a success.
Now on to the actual topic at hand:
Various use-of-words arguments could be made regarding the non-volunteer versus volunteer aspects of human-making and other socially-beneficial endeavors, but more interesting and is the point about effective children-farming: Effective to what metric?
My mental model of Quality-Adjusted New Humans takes a few high-quality humans randomly spawned in a large number of new humans all living in a ceteris paribus better environment to be far superior to a marginally higher high-low new human quality ratio in a lower quality environment. As such, I think it’s more efficient and beneficial to have experts focus on improving the environment at the expense of this low amount of potential parents being lost.
In practice, the above translates to: First-world, educated, high-quality people such as might be expected to participate on LW would benefit society more if they focus on creating a better society for the new humans to grow in, as opposed to adding a marginal number of high-expected-quality-adjusted-new-humans.
Which all probably relates to my priors about the impacts of Nature VS Nurture and my priors about the cost-benefits of one high-quality human versus many low-quality humans.
And on the other end of the inference chain, this leads to my conclusion that we should not recommend that LW participants and other audience members focus on producing children, with the corollary (but separate) points about where I do think they should focus their efforts.
That was an awesome answer, which leaves me with very little to add. I’ll merely say that—as you’ve already implicitly predicted—what seems to be going on is that my nature/nurture priors are significantly different from yours and this leads us to such different conclusions.
And there’s the satisfying conclusion. Our priors are uneven, but we agree on the evidence and our predictions. We can now safely adjourn or move on to a more elaborate discussion about our respective priors.
As an important data point, my wordgaming experiments rarely work out this well, but so far have retained net positive expected utility (as do, unsurprisingly, most efforts at improving social skills). I’ll bump up this tactic a few notches on my mental list.
The part about especially valuable children was two sentences and meant as a response to a potential objection, not as my main point. Parents in general are getting the kudos in this story, not just parents raising some hypothetical super-babies.
As you have correctly surmised, my instincts badly rebel against the idea of raising other people’s children as if they were my own. Instincts like that could probably be surpressed with upbringing designed for that and maybe a utilitarian case could be made for such a policy. Or maybe not, I don’t know, there are some really complex questions in there. But really, this wasn’t supposed to be about eugenics—just about doing your part in some necessary work that we all benefit from.
That’s exactly the guy I want to be. I’d like to convince the reader that following his or her biological instincts on this happens to be the noble thing to do. I do think the intellectual case for this is strong.
In a world where we worry about overpopulation the case you brought is extremely weak. If you look at a previous discussion on the issue on LW there are two sides: “(1) Overpopulation is one of the most important issues and we have to do more to fight it. (2) We can be confident that the problem solves itself over time.”
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why. The only way to fix this is to assume that you aren’t really meaning that you want more overpopulation and instead advocate that specific people should procreate.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
You might say that the human population as a whole is already breeding at more than replacement level and so any suggestion that someone should have children is de facto an encouragement to overpopulate more. I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Alice: It would be nice if you drove to the store and picked up the cake for birthday. Bob: You are basically claiming that we need more carbon in the atmosphere without providing arguments why. In a world where we worry about global warming the case you brought is extremely weak. Alice: ???
Bob may well have a point but Alice is understandably confused.
When I wrote my post I anticipated the counterarguments against it and prepared answers for them. But no-one has even brought those counterarguments yet—everyone’s talking about other things. What I think has happened is that I severely underestimated the inferential distance between my position and that of the typical reader. The great illusionist strikes again. I’ll present this very differently next time.
(Btw, I didn’t downvote you.)
Policy are supposed to get judged by real world effects. If we want a certain number of new humans those people who want to go through the experience of childbearing should start producing children. In the present world those already produce too much children, so there no case of the people who don’t want to produce, to produce.
Giving that you do point to the quasi-racistic stuff you are basically holding the position that not everyone should get children but that the right people should as Mestroyer said.
In that case you just disagree with him about who the right people happen to be. He thinks it’s about being intelligent and the type of person who goes on lesswrong while you might also want more of stupid people that share your racial identification.
Without restricting the arguments to being about the right people getting more children the case is easily dismissed in a world with overpopulation. In the spirit of fixing the arguments of other people it makes sense to treat you as saying that you want the right people getting more children even if you don’t explicitly say so.
Gah, no, that’s not it at all. It feels like we’re moving farther, rather than closer, to understanding each other’s position.
I seem to have irreparably placed us on a wrong track with my post so I think I’ll stop trying to recover from it. To make progress it would be best to start again from the ground up with a completely different write-up of my core idea. But for now, at least, I’ll let this rest.
Yes, of course.
Meh. I could have made a much more convincing post to make myself look virtuous. Perhaps I should have. But I do want to encourage the reader to see childrearing as virtuous.
Well, I’m done having children—I’m hoping to induce other people to have children. Other people with genes somewhat similar to my own, you might say, and I won’t protest.
When I wrote this post I realized that it had the potential flaw of appearing like I was primarily interested in bragging or complaining about my own decisions/situation. Your comment reveals to me that this flaw was more serious than I had thought. A better strategy might have been to write about friends of mine who have children and compare their lives with that of acquaintances without children. That way I could have gotten in the poop stuff without the annoying holier-than-thou effect. Thank you. [Edit: I removed the personal part for now.]
Without taking a stance on the original proposition, this argument sounds like “If you don’t optimize perfectly for X, you don’t really care about X”.
My argument is more like: If our prior says almost everyone optimizes for Y, and few optimize for X, but many people like to say they optimize for X, and you point to an action A you have taken which increases X and say “Look how I’m optimizing for X!” and A increases Y as well, and there is an obvious alternative B which an X-optimizer would have noticed and which increases X more than A at the cost of not increasing Y, then we’ve just explained away A as evidence that you optimize for X and should stop privileging that hypothesis.
Edit: one more thing is important here, which is that A is something you’d do if you were optimizing Y, not just something you’d only do if you were jointly optimizing X and Y. You might be thinking “Well, just donate sperm/eggs!”. But that is not an option that the Y-agent controlling the Thread Starter really “considers”, because the selective forces that shape parental instincts did most of their work before the presence of that option.
Depending on how you define “care”, maybe you can care about X without optimizing for it, but that doesn’t really matter to me, as that kind of caring doesn’t do X any good.