I’m not so sure about point 3 being irrelevant. Without that, what is the positive reason for caring about fertility? Just the innovation rate and aging population?
Those don’t seem to explain the really extreme importance people attach to this: talking about a “crisis”, talking about really large public expenditures, talking about coercive measures, talking about people’s stated preferences for their own lives being wrong to the point where they need to be ignored or overridden, etc… I mean, those are the sorts of things that people tend to reserve for Big Issues(TM).
I get the impression that some people just really, really care about having more humans purely for the sake of having more humans. And not just up to some set optimum number, but up to the absolute maximum number they can achieve subject to whatever other constraints they may recognize. Ceteris paribus, 10⁴⁷ people is better than 10⁴⁶ people and 10⁴⁸ is better still.
That view is actually explicit in long-termist circles that are Less-Wrong-adjacent. And it’s something I absolutely cannot figure out. I’ve been in long discussions about it on here, and I still can’t get inside people’s heads about it.
I mean, I just got a comment calling me “morally atrocious” for not wanting to increase the population without limit (at least so long as it didn’t make life worse for the existing population). I think that was meant to be independent of the part about extinction; maybe I’m wrong.
I think people who care about speed of innovation don’t just care about imposed population deadlines looming, but also about quality of life
… but if you have more people around in order to get penicillin invented, you equally have more people around to suffer before penicillin is invented. That seems to be true for innovation in general. More people may mean less time before an innovation happens, but it also means more people living before that innovation. Seems like a wash in terms of the impact of almost any innovation.
The only way I can get any sense out of it at all is to think that people want the innovations within their own lifetimes, or maybe the lifetimes of their children or people they actually know. But the impacts of these interventions are so far down the road that that’s not likely to happen without essentially indefinite life extension. Which is about the last scenario where you want to be artificially increasing fertility. [1]
… and all of that makes me wonder why people who are usually pretty skeptical and analytical would get behind the innovation argument. I will have to admit that I strongly suspect motivated cognition. I have a lot of trouble believing that the natalism arises from the innovation concern, and very little trouble believing it’s the other way around.
A big part of the “bizarreness” I’m talking about is the easy assignment of importance to that kind of weak argument about what would normally be a weak concern.
I think the people who worry about the fertility crisis would disagree with you about Point 4. I don’t think it’s obvious that “tech to deal with an older population” is actually easier than “tech to deal with a larger population”. It might be! Might not be.
Well, you’re right, you can never be sure. But the other part of point 4 was that we’re probably better able to deal with failing to get better old-population technology than with failing to get large-population technology. And at least we know what the consequences of failure would be, because we’ve seen aging before.
My intuitive sense is that assistive gadgets, industrial automation, and even outright anti-aging technology, are easier than changing where all the bulk raw materials come from, or even than changing the balance of energy sources, or how much material and energy gets used. That’s even more true if you count the very real difficulties in getting people to actually adopt changes even when you know how to make them technically. But even if I’m wrong, the downside risk of an older population seems obviously more limited than that of a larger population[2].
So why would people who are often very careful about other risks want to just plunge in and create more people? Even if they do think “larger technology” is easier than “older technology”, they could also be wrong… and there’s no backup plan.
Again, it seems weird and out of character and suspiciously like the behavior you’d expect from people who intuitively felt that higher fertility, and higher population, were axiomatically good almost regardless of risk, and were coloring their factual beliefs according to that feeling. Which takes me back to not understanding why anybody would feel that way, or expect others to agree to order the world around it.
… and in fact there are people in the world, maybe not on Less Wrong, who are against life extension because it might not be compatible with high fertility. Fertility axiomatically wins for those people. And they can be very fervent about it.
Also, in the end, if you ever stop growing your population, for any reason at all, you’ll still eventually have to deal with the population getting older. So after you do the large-population technology, you’ll still eventually have to do at least some of the old-population technology.
I think this makes a lot of sense. While I think you can make the case for “fertility crisis purely as a means of preventing economic slowdown and increasing innovation” I think your arguments are good that people don’t actually often make this argument, and a lot of it does stem from “more people = good”.
But I think if you start from “more people = good”, you don’t actually have motivated reasoning as much as you suspect re: innovation argument. I think it’s more that the innovation argument actually does just work if you accept that more people = good. Because if more people = good, that means more people were good before penicillin and then are even more good afterwards, and these two don’t actually cancel each other out.
In summary, I don’t think that “more people = good” motivates the “Life is generally good to have, actually” argument—I think if anything it’s the other way around. People who think life is good tend to be more likely to think it’s a moral good to give it to others. The argument doesn’t say it’s “axiomatically good” to add more people, it’s “axiomatically good conditional on life being net positive”.
As for understanding why people might feel that way—my best argument is this.
Let’s say you could choose to give birth to a child who would be born with a terribly painful and crippling disease. Would it be a bad thing to do that? Many people would say yes.
Now, let’s say you could choose to give birth to a child who would live a happy and healthy positive life? Would that be a good thing? It seems that, logically, if giving birth to a child who suffers is bad, giving birth to a child who enjoys life is good.
That, imo, is the best argument for being in favor of more people if you think life is positive.
Note that I don’t think this means people should be forced to have kids or that you’re a monster for choosing not to, even if those arguments were true. You can save a life for 5k USD after all, and raising a kid yourself takes far more resources than that. Realistically, if my vasectomy makes me a bad person then I’m also a bad person for not donating every spare dollar to the AMF instead of merely 10%, and if that’s a “bad person” then the word has no meaning.
Your views were called “morally atrocious” because you stated that human extinction would not necessarily be bad. Seems very clear from the context in the comment frankly.
I think your summary’s reasonable.
I’m not so sure about point 3 being irrelevant. Without that, what is the positive reason for caring about fertility? Just the innovation rate and aging population?
Those don’t seem to explain the really extreme importance people attach to this: talking about a “crisis”, talking about really large public expenditures, talking about coercive measures, talking about people’s stated preferences for their own lives being wrong to the point where they need to be ignored or overridden, etc… I mean, those are the sorts of things that people tend to reserve for Big Issues(TM).
I get the impression that some people just really, really care about having more humans purely for the sake of having more humans. And not just up to some set optimum number, but up to the absolute maximum number they can achieve subject to whatever other constraints they may recognize. Ceteris paribus, 10⁴⁷ people is better than 10⁴⁶ people and 10⁴⁸ is better still.
That view is actually explicit in long-termist circles that are Less-Wrong-adjacent. And it’s something I absolutely cannot figure out. I’ve been in long discussions about it on here, and I still can’t get inside people’s heads about it.
I mean, I just got a comment calling me “morally atrocious” for not wanting to increase the population without limit (at least so long as it didn’t make life worse for the existing population). I think that was meant to be independent of the part about extinction; maybe I’m wrong.
… but if you have more people around in order to get penicillin invented, you equally have more people around to suffer before penicillin is invented. That seems to be true for innovation in general. More people may mean less time before an innovation happens, but it also means more people living before that innovation. Seems like a wash in terms of the impact of almost any innovation.
The only way I can get any sense out of it at all is to think that people want the innovations within their own lifetimes, or maybe the lifetimes of their children or people they actually know. But the impacts of these interventions are so far down the road that that’s not likely to happen without essentially indefinite life extension. Which is about the last scenario where you want to be artificially increasing fertility. [1]
… and all of that makes me wonder why people who are usually pretty skeptical and analytical would get behind the innovation argument. I will have to admit that I strongly suspect motivated cognition. I have a lot of trouble believing that the natalism arises from the innovation concern, and very little trouble believing it’s the other way around.
A big part of the “bizarreness” I’m talking about is the easy assignment of importance to that kind of weak argument about what would normally be a weak concern.
Well, you’re right, you can never be sure. But the other part of point 4 was that we’re probably better able to deal with failing to get better old-population technology than with failing to get large-population technology. And at least we know what the consequences of failure would be, because we’ve seen aging before.
My intuitive sense is that assistive gadgets, industrial automation, and even outright anti-aging technology, are easier than changing where all the bulk raw materials come from, or even than changing the balance of energy sources, or how much material and energy gets used. That’s even more true if you count the very real difficulties in getting people to actually adopt changes even when you know how to make them technically. But even if I’m wrong, the downside risk of an older population seems obviously more limited than that of a larger population[2].
So why would people who are often very careful about other risks want to just plunge in and create more people? Even if they do think “larger technology” is easier than “older technology”, they could also be wrong… and there’s no backup plan.
Again, it seems weird and out of character and suspiciously like the behavior you’d expect from people who intuitively felt that higher fertility, and higher population, were axiomatically good almost regardless of risk, and were coloring their factual beliefs according to that feeling. Which takes me back to not understanding why anybody would feel that way, or expect others to agree to order the world around it.
… and in fact there are people in the world, maybe not on Less Wrong, who are against life extension because it might not be compatible with high fertility. Fertility axiomatically wins for those people. And they can be very fervent about it.
Also, in the end, if you ever stop growing your population, for any reason at all, you’ll still eventually have to deal with the population getting older. So after you do the large-population technology, you’ll still eventually have to do at least some of the old-population technology.
I think this makes a lot of sense. While I think you can make the case for “fertility crisis purely as a means of preventing economic slowdown and increasing innovation” I think your arguments are good that people don’t actually often make this argument, and a lot of it does stem from “more people = good”.
But I think if you start from “more people = good”, you don’t actually have motivated reasoning as much as you suspect re: innovation argument. I think it’s more that the innovation argument actually does just work if you accept that more people = good. Because if more people = good, that means more people were good before penicillin and then are even more good afterwards, and these two don’t actually cancel each other out.
In summary, I don’t think that “more people = good” motivates the “Life is generally good to have, actually” argument—I think if anything it’s the other way around. People who think life is good tend to be more likely to think it’s a moral good to give it to others. The argument doesn’t say it’s “axiomatically good” to add more people, it’s “axiomatically good conditional on life being net positive”.
As for understanding why people might feel that way—my best argument is this.
Let’s say you could choose to give birth to a child who would be born with a terribly painful and crippling disease. Would it be a bad thing to do that? Many people would say yes.
Now, let’s say you could choose to give birth to a child who would live a happy and healthy positive life? Would that be a good thing? It seems that, logically, if giving birth to a child who suffers is bad, giving birth to a child who enjoys life is good.
That, imo, is the best argument for being in favor of more people if you think life is positive.
Note that I don’t think this means people should be forced to have kids or that you’re a monster for choosing not to, even if those arguments were true. You can save a life for 5k USD after all, and raising a kid yourself takes far more resources than that. Realistically, if my vasectomy makes me a bad person then I’m also a bad person for not donating every spare dollar to the AMF instead of merely 10%, and if that’s a “bad person” then the word has no meaning.
Your views were called “morally atrocious” because you stated that human extinction would not necessarily be bad. Seems very clear from the context in the comment frankly.