Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.
The price I’m quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on “the conventional route to immortality” which, by the way, isn’t that. What it is is creating persons.
There’s a p(success) needed in this argument. The cost of raising kids is not up for debate here—we all have access to a lot of information about that.
I concede that your (and my) life choices are not relevant to establishing the “cost” side of the equation. I mistakenly assumed you were comparing the unweighted costs.
If we want to reason about p(success), we have to define clearly what “success” means. We’re comparing apples to oranges if we multiply the cost of a child by p(immortality through children) on one side, and the cost of funding suspension by p(immortality through not dying) on the other.
One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.
I don’t care about gene copies, I care about persons. And I care about not dying. Uploading counts as a success as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t love my kids for their genes. I don’t raise my kids for their genes. If I did, I would try to marry them off right after puberty, and hold it as moral to do so, and damn their education and all that. Breed them like rabbits; count that as success. So much for obvious and simple; more like obvious, simple and wrong.
What I value about my kids is the persons they are, and my pride in them and love for them is bound up in the fact that their personhood is a joint project, a creation of myself, my wife and each of them.
(EDIT: shoot, I ought to move this thread from here where it doesn’t belong. Any idea where it does belong?)
I was presenting what you get if you model people as fitness maximisers. That is a nice, simple and neat model. Feel free to calculate results using a different model if you like.
I am rather puzzled by your description of how you think a fitnesss maximiser would behave in a modern society. This is assuming you are not constrained by contractual obligations to your wife, I take it. Even then, are you sure that is best? In particular: if everyone else in society is following a K-selected strategy, is an r-selected strategy really very likely to work?
None of that is really very relevant to a thread which itself started out off-topic. (I’ll just note that my question upthread which offended you so much does turn out to have some relevance.)
If and when we get around to discussing which, of immortality through children or immortality through not dying, someone ought to want, we can take up r/K again in one of the leaf nodes. For now, I’m signing out.
Right, so: the ad hominen section. I hope you have fun probing into my personal life.
Meanwhile, perhaps try to remember to address the actual arguments while you are at it.
Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.
The price I’m quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on “the conventional route to immortality” which, by the way, isn’t that. What it is is creating persons.
There’s a p(success) needed in this argument. The cost of raising kids is not up for debate here—we all have access to a lot of information about that.
For genetic immortality, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality#Physical
I concede that your (and my) life choices are not relevant to establishing the “cost” side of the equation. I mistakenly assumed you were comparing the unweighted costs.
If we want to reason about p(success), we have to define clearly what “success” means. We’re comparing apples to oranges if we multiply the cost of a child by p(immortality through children) on one side, and the cost of funding suspension by p(immortality through not dying) on the other.
One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.
If we believe the salesman’s figures, http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html gives 0.15 and 0.0023 as optimistic and pessimistic estimates. I figure kids would win either way under many circumstances.
I don’t care about gene copies, I care about persons. And I care about not dying. Uploading counts as a success as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t love my kids for their genes. I don’t raise my kids for their genes. If I did, I would try to marry them off right after puberty, and hold it as moral to do so, and damn their education and all that. Breed them like rabbits; count that as success. So much for obvious and simple; more like obvious, simple and wrong.
What I value about my kids is the persons they are, and my pride in them and love for them is bound up in the fact that their personhood is a joint project, a creation of myself, my wife and each of them.
(EDIT: shoot, I ought to move this thread from here where it doesn’t belong. Any idea where it does belong?)
I was presenting what you get if you model people as fitness maximisers. That is a nice, simple and neat model. Feel free to calculate results using a different model if you like.
I am rather puzzled by your description of how you think a fitnesss maximiser would behave in a modern society. This is assuming you are not constrained by contractual obligations to your wife, I take it. Even then, are you sure that is best? In particular: if everyone else in society is following a K-selected strategy, is an r-selected strategy really very likely to work?
None of that is really very relevant to a thread which itself started out off-topic. (I’ll just note that my question upthread which offended you so much does turn out to have some relevance.)
If and when we get around to discussing which, of immortality through children or immortality through not dying, someone ought to want, we can take up r/K again in one of the leaf nodes. For now, I’m signing out.