The arguments are interesting and not so usual, so always interesting to nourish reflexion, thanks (I was personally familiar with them).
A world with a large and growing population is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress.
The right conclusion though is “this is a very complicated subject, we have no idea if it’s better or worse to have more or less people”.
Hi concerned_dad,
I’m not a parent and have no knowledge or experience with drugs. I don’t think I qualify to directly answer your sensitive request. So I won’t, except by upvoting Ruby’s answer that sound pretty helpful.
However I would really like to salute your tone and overall approach. It sounds very caring and pretty open-minded. The good kind of caring, not ferociously over-protecting. Sure, you worry—who wouldn’t in this situation? People can be quick to lecture, judge, point out flaws and be a little too harsh on the internet (even well-meaning). It doesn’t mean anything wrong has been done, it’s expected and unavoidable. I hope it won’t affect you here.
Personally I’d bet that very few dads would listen so carefully to their sons, take that much caution to not betray their words, dare to look for advices in their sons community, and be so constructive in seeking a solution on such charged matters.
Much respect. Take care!
Thanks for sharing this !
Obviously you’ve put a lot of thinking and experimenting in it, congrats. Maybe so much so that (as you imagined) it’s a bit difficult, for me at least, to discuss the details of this method...
However, from the general tone and exploration, I believe you’d really appreciate reading more about CBT. The version you’ve been told sounds immensely reductive and misses the point.
A variant of CBT that I’ve found more approachable to begin with was ACT. There are accessible books for general audience such as The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris that provide a valuable introduction.
The most interesting mention of ACT I’ve read on LW is : My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms (but it’s quite advanced)
Your thoughts also remind me of The Curse Of The Counterfactual
Cheers!
If you want to go further, “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux is basically a book on “creating full alternative stacks”.
He tried to compile examples of organizations working with this mindset. He tries to build intuition on why these are successful and how to reproduce their success. It goes into practical details of internal processes / tools adapted to this new way of working.
My take is that it’s hard. But probably worth trying because there isn’t any better alternatives.
If you’re seriously interested in finding a way out of bad equilibria, this book surprisingly clarifies a lot of unsuspected options. I highly recommend it.
This paper felt significant and promising, but 8 years later, there seem to be no real follow-up. Do we know why? Am I missing something?
I wish too. This is an extraordinary bold claim though. There’s no logical reasoning from “here a few, sparse, mostly theoretical ideas” to “so this is how this immensely complex systems involving billions of humans and organisations with agency we have no idea how to model should behave if we changed some major factor by a few orders of magnitude”.
You can only make the jump with vibes or politics. And fine, since we have no idea, I’d rather make an optimistic jump too! I hope you manage to distill some nuanced faith in the future, sincere thanks for trying!