Yes, you’d better have a risk/cost-model.
I avoided mentioning any specific Jubjub problems to try to minimize mind-killing effects. But since you’ve brought up climate change, which is usually coded as a left-wing issue in our political discourse, I’d just like to mention that there are also Jubjub problems with a very different political coding, e.g. dysgenic pressure, a reactionary right-wing issue.
Probably. But put me down for a last-ditch Butlerian Jihad.
I never meant to argue that there was no way you could not have children and come out ahead in the moral calculus. Your suggestion, for example, might well work, yes. The market for donated gametes is limited—but not necessarily saturated, as David Gerard keeps pointing out. So contributing there may well do a lot of good on the margin.
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.
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.
(Btw, I didn’t downvote you.)
Clearly, the karma as such is no problem. I just don’t want to annoy people by having them read a text which they are likely to find annoying and I don’t want to violate rules of etiquette I might not know about. But if it is normal procedure just to leave this as is, then, sure, let’s do it that way.
It is, of course, somewhat unpleasant to discover that something you wrote is disliked but it also affords an opportunity for learning. Next time I try to get LessWrongers to change diapers, I’ll approach it differently.
What are you supposed to do when you’ve nailed up a post that is generally disliked? I figured that once this got to −5 karma it would disappear from view and be forgotten. But it just keeps going down and it’s now at −12. This must mean that someone saw the title of it at −11 karma and thought “Sounds promising! Reading this now will be a good use of my time.” And then they read it and went: “Arrgh! This turned out to be a disappointing post. Less like this, please. I’d better downvote it to warn others.”
What does etiquette suggest I do here? Am I supposed to delete the post to keep people from falling into the trap of reading it? But I like the discussion it spawned and I’d like to preserve it. I’m at a loss and I can’t find relevant advice at the wiki.
Hmm. Right. I have a job I feel is fulfilling and purposeful and this may certainly contribute to why we see this issue differently. If having children would make your life fall apart then I don’t think you should.
We certainly agree that some people should have children and some people shouldn’t and that this depends on a lot of factors. So in some sense, we just disagree about details. What I’m arguing for in particular is that highly effective people who have the ability and resources to provide children with a good home should have children. What seems to particularly rub people the wrong way is my suggestion that this is morally obligatory. While my views have not shifted greatly I’ve learned enough from this trainwreck of a post to argue this position less stridently next time around.
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.
By all means work on cool projects to improve society. You can do that even if you have children. It’s a lot of work to raise a kid but it’s not a life-destroying amount of work.
Posting on Lesswrong is a leisure activity for myself. While engaging in it I do learn things that are relevant to high-minded project
Yes. You’d also learn relevant things from raising children and many aspects of the experience are even pleasant.
There are a lot of tasks that do contribute to high-minded projects that you can’t do in a way where it’s business/work and you get payed for it.
Exactly.
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?
I much rather focus on solving that issue than focusing on producing more kids.
People continue to speak as if having kids funges mostly against high-minded projects. For most people, even most LWers, I think it will funge mostly against leisure.
If you expect anti-aging technology to be so near that no more new humans at all are necessary for civilization to continue, then yes.
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.
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.
Yeah, no kidding. My wife has rheumatoid arthritis which seems to have been triggered by the hormones involved.
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.
Ah, the fallacy of gray. When any particular person evaluates any particular issue, the details are going to matter. That doesn’t mean it’s a fallacy to identify two generic approaches to problems like this.