The ‘p’ is silent, as in “ptarmigan”, “psalm”, “phthisis”, or “pshrimp”.
pjohn
Karma: 166
Oh yes, you’re right about the formula! Copy-paste error, sorry—I copied the formula from the earlier example and changed the values before solving it, and just missed out changing that value.
What this −148 figure is saying is that the contraceptives provide negative utility in this case because even an unpleasant life, where you spend your formative years fully dependent on parents who would prefer that you were never born, is still better than no life at all.
I’m sure this is true for some people who can overcome the incredible handicap of this upbringing and go on to live overall-happy lives—but personally I think this is pretty rare and that in the general case it’d probably be better to just not be born than to be raised by parents who don’t want you, and thus I would argue for lower quality-of-life values than the 3 and 6 I rigorously plucked out of thin air for the childhood and adulthood, respectively.
EDIT: Do contraceptives even prevent people from being born?! I find myself wondering whether people who use contraceptives rigourously might have roughly the same number of children as people who use them haphazardly (or not at all) - perhaps they just have the children at 26 when they actually want to instead of at 16 by accident? If so there wouldn’t be negative utility for using them because the contraceptives, instead of stopping children from being born entirely, just convert unwanted children into wanted children...
For your point 2 - fair criticism! If they’re not even trying to estimate this, they probably should be.
For your point 1 - I think I am counting the life-years lost from the child who died? If AMF are counting the same way as I, I think we’re both doing this?
When I do 700*3 - (100 + 500*2) = 1000 QALYs, I’m doing “QALYs of normal family—QALYs of family with dead child = QALYs lost owing to child death”. If we temporarily strip-out the parents from this calculation we get 700 − 100 = 600 QALYs. Isn’t this just another way of saying that 600 QALYs, or 6/7ths of a quality-adjusted normal lifetime, are lost owing to child death?
(nb. I’m sticking with the arbitrary 1 ordinary life-year = 10 QALYs figure I plucked from thin air here, not your order-of-magnitude more correct 1 ordinary life-year = 1 QALY, just for consistency)
Thanks for the reply! I think we’re in agreement here about both the lack of contradiction for the given value-system and about the limitations of QALYs as a measure of utility—but I disagree with this section:
So one of two things must be true:
1. Against Malaria Foundation much less cost-effective than people say it is
2. family planning is much less cost-effective than people say it is
So, I’m going to try to rescue the high effectiveness of both of these interventions without having to either introduce a contradiction or give up QALY-sytle measurement!
For example, what if we:
A) Broaden the definition of “quality” in our QALYs (which I gather generally only measures “quality-of-life” from a purely medical perspective) so that we can count such things as “preventing somebody from having to live through the premature death of their child” as an increase in their quality-of-life, and
B) Broaden the comparison of interventions to evaluate not just delta-QALYs for the immediate patient but for any immediate family touched by the intervention?
Plugging-in some arbitrary made-up numbers just to illustrate the effects of broadening the way QALYs are counted (not because the numbers themselves are accurate/necessary):
Let’s say living a perfectly ordinary lifetime counts as 10 quality-of-life * 70 years = 700 lifetime QALYs
Dying of malaria at age 10: 10 quality-of-life * 10 years = 100 lifetime QALYs
Watching your child die of malaria when you are age 30: 10 quality-of-life * 30 years + 5 quality-of-life * 40 years = 500 lifetime QALYs
Being obliged to raise a child you don’t want to raise and would have preferred to never have been born, starting at age 20: 10 quality-of-life * 20 years + 3 quality-of-life * 16 years + 10 quality-of-life * 34 years = 588 lifetime QALYs
Being raised by and fully dependent upon parents who wish you weren’t born and would have preferred you to never exist: 3 quality-of-life * 16 years + 6 quality-of-life * 54 years = 372 lifetime QALYs
For a family consisting of two parents and one child, the malaria nets get us 700*3 - (100 + 500*2) = 1000 QALYs and the contraceptives get us 700*3 - (372 + 588*2) = 552 QALYs: that’s 1.4 extra [700-QALY] quality-adjusted lives and 0.8 extra quality-adjusted lives respectively. This seems like a lot!
Moreover, since both malaria nets and contraceptives are very cheap, both of these interventions probably work-out at lots of QALYs per unit currency. I think, therefore, that it’s perfectly possible for malaria nets and contraceptives to both be very cost-effective ways of improving the world.
I guess it all depends on the type of illegal activity! For spam—certainly. But for hacking, covertly developing malicious software, covertly developing bioweapons, covertly training AIs on scraped/pirated intellectual property*, conducting research in banned fields/topics, etc. I imagine probably not?
(* I have no idea whether this is even a crime—and if it is I’m not entirely convinced it should be! - but if it’s not I’m sure there are other things you could do with an AI that don’t have to leave the datacentre to be illegal)
“I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?”
Difficult question! I suppose I’d have to say something like “we’d need to figure-out how much work it takes (for the economy as a whole) to support all concurrently-living generations at a decent standard of living and then develop social policies aiming for roughly that number of children”. I realise there are lots of problems with this, including:
If the economic output (measured in person-lifestyles) per capita is below 1 it’s physically impossible
If the economic output per capita is close to 1 we run into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation
I’m assuming that “a decent standard of living” is definable
I’m assuming that “economic output” is fungible, can be amortised across any number of people, etc.
I’m assuming there are points of diminishing returns where adding more work (and/or sharing output between fewer people) fails to yield correspondingly higher standards-of-living and thus there is some optimum point where the curves intersect (this seems likely to me but of course might not be true)
Even if this all hangs together, it doesn’t say anything about what policies might get us to this right number of people! Many such policies might move us in the right direction population-wise but be extremely harmful for other reasons (eg. “if population gets too high, drop bombs on cities at random” or “if population gets too low, establish quarterly unprotected-sex quotas”)
Despite all these problems, I think it’s the best I can do! I definitely don’t think we should be having children purely because we want them for biological reasons, or because they will make us happy, or whatever, without also having strong reasons to think we can actually give them a good quality-of-life: it would be preferable to me for us to suffer than for us to create children without being confident they can have a good quality of life.
I agree with you! You’re mostly describing the outcomes of choices (viz. “people could make certain choices that hurt their future selves and other future people”) whereas I was mostly describing the mechanics of how such harmful choices are possible (viz. “people could make certain choices because they’re programmed to do so by nature, not because the choices will actually benefit anybody”) - but ultimately I think our descriptions are compatible and even mutually-supportive
The primary effect of malaria nets is that they prevent the deaths of young children.
Family planning interventions reduce population growth—making existing family members better off, reducing Malthusian competition, etc.
These are super-easy to reconcile! The claimed contradiction seems to come from an assumption that the main effects of dying of malaria and of contraception use are changes to the rate of population growth: this seems like a pretty weird (natalist?) position—most people care very strongly about both of these things for reasons entirely separate to their effect on overall population growth rates!
For example, let’s say that rather than aiming for some population-growth set-point, one is trying to minimise suffering: if you want to raise children but they die of malaria that seems very distressing for your family, and if you don’t want children but are obliged to spend the next 18-odd years raising some anyway that also seems pretty distressing for your family. For people that want/love their children nobody seriously believes that the improved financial position from having the children die of malaria makes up for the misery caused by their deaths, and for people who don’t want children nobody seriously believes that the social/hedonistic/whatever benefits (if indeed benefits there be..!) of extra children makes up for the misery caused by obliging people to look after children they don’t want to look after (and for obliging children to be fully dependent on adults who would prefer them to not exist). Even though they have the opposite-direction effects on population growth, which might-or-might-not be loosely correlated with suffering, malaria nets and contraceptives have same-direction effects on suffering, the thing we actually care about (rather than just a loose potential correlate), and so there’s no contradiction here.
(I know I’m only engaging with the first example provided, not the overall argument—but if “malaria vs. contraception” was chosen as #1 because it’s the best, cleanest example available, personally I’m inclined to dismiss the argument at this point!)
“Many people hold views that [...] have strange implications that they wouldn’t endorse if they thought about it more”, “Do your views have counterintuitive implications that most people would dislike?”, “There are some ways to reconcile these views, but any attempted reconciliation produces new strange implications”, etc.
I think all these claims are entirely true—but not useful. I don’t think that there is any fully complete, perfectly-consistent ethical system: they all lead to contradictions, unacceptable edge-cases, etc., and therefore merely showing that some given set of ethical principles leads to this doesn’t really tell us anything about the quality of those principles or the people holding them.
Instead, to evaluate sets-of-principles I think we can either start from the assumption that they’re all just flawed heuristics and endeavour to show that some set of heuristics seems to work better in more common cases than some other set, or else we can try to do complicated ethical philosophy and build theories with ever-fewer flaws/contradictions than their preceding theories. Perhaps (and I admit I have no idea how realistic this is..) we can even try to do complicated metaethical philosophy and work out whether ethical theories are all incomplete because they relate to incomplete subsets of reality (like Relativity vs. Quantum Physics) or whether they’re incomplete for fundamental inescapable reasons (like Russell & Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica vs. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem)?
pjohn’s Shortform
God help me I’m back on @KatjaGrace’s Women should be able to open things. A lady friend recently asked me for help with some bricolage/DIY; as a prelude to the work we needed to move a bunch of random assorted household stuff (furniture, technology, objets d’art, etc.) from one place to another, and we discovered that she struggled to lift almost any of it but somehow I (a fairly typical unspecial cis male) could lift all of it.
This made me think of the jam jar thing! It seems strange to me that almost-all jars and almost-all my friend’s random possessions all fall into the gap between “typical female strength” and “typical male strength”? Back when the phenomenon seemed to be restricted to jars alone I figured perhaps one could write it off as “chauvinist jam-jar manufacturers tailor their lids for male strength”* - but it seems hard to argue for “chauvinist manufacturers of random household items tailor all the items’ weights for male strength”!
(*Though I was unsatisfied with this explanation, even then, for other reasons)
So, what’s going on? Could it just be that the gap between typical female strength and typical male strength is so huge that it’s statistically probable for many ordinary things to fall between the two? I’m unsatisfied by this explanation A) because it doesn’t really match my intuitive mental model of “typical male strength is probably around 1.25x typical female strength, not 3x it”, and B) because I’m not an especially strong guy whereas my friend used to be a power-lifter when she was in university so I’d expect our gap to be smaller than the typical male-female gap.
So now I don’t know what to think!
What are the implications of this for FLOSS? Might it mean lots of open-source projects stall because their volunteer developers can make software that perfectly meets their personal needs and so they no longer need the wider project? Or might it make no real difference (perhaps because not many volunteer developers would want to develop software only for themselves, or else perhaps enough FLOSS is actually developed by professional, employed devs)? Or might existing projects that have already achieved a critical mass carry-on okay, but we won’t see so many new ones starting-up any more? Or something else entirely?
″...you’ve been told the answer is to write a plugin, learn an obscure config language, or accept the way it is”
Writing plugins and figuring-out obscure config languages seem like the sorts of things AI could make much quicker and easier, too! I would suppose that AI would reduce the barrier to these (and to forking existing software) far more than it reduces the barrier to writing software from scratch.
(That being said—the idea of having programs re-written in pure Rust without twenty years of cruft is rather appealing!)
So: a robot-assisted encyclopedia project that might prevent the collapse of civilisation. This may well be the most Asimovian idea I’ve ever heard....
Can this particular objection not be gotten-around by using the person’s prior internal state-of-knowledge?
If Alice’s pior internal state is “Known-ignorance of Bob’s bank details” and “Strong-belief that Charles isn’t sleeping with anybody else”, then Bob’s remaining silent causes Alice to maintain a perfectly valid internal state, whereas Charles’ remaining silent causes Alice to maintain an internal state that Charles knows to not match reality (along a dimension about which Alice might reasonably be expected to care).
I’m not claiming Charles is necessarily morally obliged to tell Alice he’s sleeping with other people—just that I think this particular objection might not hold if we’re allowed to factor-in Alice’s prior internal state-of-knowledge.
The most we can say using an argument from bandwidth is “If the ideal moral setpoint (between “true-but-trivial; not morally necessary to share” and “true-and-significant; morally necessary to share”) is low enough a person acting morally would have bandwidth to spare, and if the setpoint is high enough a person acting morally would saturate their available bandwidth”. It can’t actually say anything about where the optimal setpoint actually ought to be.
I think you and I might be in agreement that the optimal setpoint does indeed leave plenty of bandwidth headroom for ordinary communication, but I’m not sure that @Fernand0 is actually arguing for a setpoint so high it would saturate all available bandwidth: the “I had an affair” and “I’m sleeping with other people” examples do seem intentionally-chosen to meet the ‘true-and-significant’ test.
“[Like] Bronze Age peasants attempting to build the Tower of Babel, humanity is messing with forces we cannot hope to understand or control”
To be fair, Bronze Age peasants built some pretty impressive towers, and judging purely from the robustness and longevity of their structures compared to the robustness and longevity of modern buildings, one might suppose them to have had a better understanding of the forces involved than we do...
“why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?”
Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
“They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after”
I think it’s the other way around! People deliberately having children in order to have somebody around to do all the work when they are elderly seem to be the ones “expecting to be looked-after”!
Suppose a terminally-ageing population such that each generation is 50% the size of the previous one: each adult would need to generate an economic surplus of 100% during their working life so that the next generation had sufficient resources to care for them. This seems difficult, I know, and I am glad we have social safety nets for people who fail to do this (paid-for by the people generating more than 100% economic surplus), but:
Firstly, it’s not as difficult as it seems: if the work you do only earns you £20 per hour but your employer generates a profit of £40 per hour of your labour—in other words your £20 of labour generates £40 of goods or services—then you have probably generated the requisite 100% surplus. Note that dividing the annual profits of a medium-sized company by their employee count generally yields a surplus figure of several thousand percent: the fact that only 2 to 8 percent of this 3000-odd percent is typically set-aside by the company (in the form of a pension contribution) to provide for the employee at the end of their lifetime of labour seems to me like a problem with how companies work, not a problem with some other entirely unrelated people not having enough children.
Secondly, no matter how difficult generating sufficient surplus was, intentionally planning to generate less and use the labour of some large number of children to make-up the shortfall seems like an incredibly selfish choice, to me. (Difficult to do “explain, not persuade” on this one, I admit! I think it just seems wrong as essentially a final, non-instrumental value, and I don’t think “it’s natural”, “it’s just the way of the world”, or “there’s no other way” are sufficient justification for inflicting that burden on the beings one is supposed to love and protect above all others.)
Separately: we absolutely have the resources to support our ageing population! The UK’s purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita is just over £50,000. Meanwhile, the highest birthrates and largest family sizes are almost-universally found in regions with catastrophically low domestic product per capita. Speaking for myself, I would prefer solutions involving better distribution of our really-quite-plentiful resources over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.
Okay, it sounds like we’re pretty much in full agreement here. (And for the parts where neither of us know how reality works—we seem to nevertheless agree on what we don’t know and why we don’t know it!)
For what it’s worth I did have a bit of trouble parsing your original message in places, and I clearly misunderstood parts of it (sorry!) - but it absolutely didn’t appear rude or impolite at all to me; just as arguing (politely) for something that, it turns-out, you weren’t actually arguing for. I’m sure it’s my error as much as yours!My own English is, I’m sure, nothing to write home about ..pun fully intended.. but for what it’s worth your writing does seem to include lots of “it’s not X, it’s Y” and other such sentence structures that lots of English speakers interpret as indications of AI-written text. I don’t think it’s fair for people to interpret it like this—cf. “I’m [a non-native English Speaker]: I don’t write like AI. AI writes like me.”—and so long as the author understands and agrees with what is written I don’t think there’s anything wrong with AI-assisted writing anyway, but I just thought I’d mention it lest you encounter such an accusation!
I disagree with many of the Tegmarks’ re-labellings—in that I think in many cases the original label is more fair, accurate, and appropriate than their proposed new label—but I do not think it is obnoxious at all to say “here are the labels you probably currently use; here are some others you might consider”.
“you should always use language which prioritises my particular idea of what the bad results of your actions are and implicitly bakes in my worldview”
I think this is a pretty uncharitable characterisation of what the authors were trying to do. A more fair characterisation would be, “If you agree with our view of the situation, don’t get drawn-in to using language that implies a different situation; that language is chosen intentionally to support that outlook, so if you wish to support our outlook you should be intentional with your language too”.
Even though I disagree pretty strongly with the actual outlook proposed in many of the examples I think this is essentially a form of intellectual honesty, not “obnoxious” or “annoying”, and I could absolutely come up with non-AI-related examples of the same phenomenon I’ve seen in business (for example employees being referred to as “people” when the company is doing something nice to them but as “resources” when the company is doing something unpleasant to them, “pay rise” used when it would be more accurate to say “pay calculation restructuring that’s on net a pay cut for practically everybody”, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen many such examples, too!)It’s explaining a subtle mechanism for manufacturing agreement at a less-than-fully-concious level and showing how you can carefully use language to maintain the position you’d previously arrived at through rational thought rather than being caught-up by the language and allowing yourself to be unconsciously diverted into the other party’s opinion: that’s pretty classic LessWrong!
‘seems to fail one of the three stated requirements for being on the front page, to wit, “aim to explain, not persuade”.’
I don’t read it as trying to persuade the reader of AI harms. I read it as being aimed at readers who are already persuaded of AI harms, explaining how to respond to those harms (showing how responses to other research-level harms worked and where they failed, etc.)
Perhaps the article could have been more explicit about saying this (and, as I say, personally I’m absolutely not persuaded of many of the harms being presented) but I don’t think an objective reader could really mistake it for an article trying to persuade the reader of harms, and I think it’s entirely fair to assume the intended audience (AI capabilities researchers on LessWrong) would have already encountered arguments for and against AI harms and formed a position, without needing the argument re-explained to them from scratch yet again. (Although a few hyperlinked citations would have been nice, of course..!)
More generally, I think it’s reasonable to say “Given problem P, here’s what I think we should do” and it would be impractical and counterproductive to require every such post on LessWrong to first present a full argument for P from first principles.
“Vasily Arkhipov was criticized after vetoing a Soviet nuclear strike against the US”
My goodness, I think this might be the most beautifully understated claim in all of philosophy!
In addition to the “enduring criticism” angle, I think people in large corporations are under social and economic pressure to follow-along with the corporation’s position and are often expected to make moral decisions whilst enduring personal discomforts (lack of sleep, pressure of deadlines, family/life worries, etc.), and Arkhipov also provides an excellent example/inspiration for thinking for oneself whilst under immense pressure (...in Arkhipov’s case literally as well as figuratively...) and despite intolerable personal discomforts (in his case sleep-deprivation, oxygen-deprivation, separation from his family, fear of imminent death, etc.)
“Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil”. arguing that the greatest harms are often done not by malice, but by obedient and conscientious technocrats who don’t think about the bigger picture.”
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”
-- Sir Terry Pratchett, “Small Gods”
(Convergent evolution, or had Pratchett read Arendt..?)
[Edit: What follows has turned-out to be a fairly strenuous disagreement with your position. Sorry—I only noticed how strenuous it was after the words/thoughts were done pouring out of my head! I know you’re new ..I’m pretty new around these parts myself.. so I thought I’d message to apologise in advance and ask you to not take it personally. Even though I do very much disagree with you I’m nevertheless interested in your opinion and glad to have the discussion!]
I think this is false because the premise “muscles are internal whereas morality is external” is:
1) False, in that morality and moral behaviour can be thought of as “applied conscience”, and conscience exists within the mind/brain, which is internal.
2) Irrelevant, in that there doesn’t seem to be any practical reason why being internal or external matters; what matters is whether the thing can be trained and strengthened.
You can strengthen muscles -internal- by going to the gym, and you can strengthen a building -external- by adding extra structural supports, digging deeper foundations, etc. Both are important and it doesn’t really matter whether strengthening morality is more like strengthening muscles or more like strengthening a building.
Separately, I think it is self-inconsistent: in one place you say “morality is external”, and in another place you say “morality is trained since childhood”. Since the stuff we train in childhood must be internal (since we don’t bring our external childhood environments along with us into adulthood, only our internal selves ….my beloved teddy bear obviously notwithstanding....), I don’t think it’s possible to simultaneously claim that we train morality in childhood but that morality is external.
(Sure, the training is external: most moral positions we train-on come from other people, we didn’t figure them out for ourselves. A gym-goer also didn’t invent press-ups and bench-presses and dumb-bells and gymnasia for themself either—but all those external ideas and tools nevertheless improve them internally...)
Despite this, I do think it’s entirely legitimate to ask “Is there an objective, universally-true morality that isn’t just some guy’s opinion?”. Philosophers have been debating that for millennia and it’ll probably be millennia more before we’ve made any headway on this question.
But—if we all acted as though there was no objective morality, it was all just some guy’s opinion, and literally everything was fundamentally equally acceptable… I’m pretty sure that what remains of civilisation wouldn’t last long enough to answer the question either way...
Personally I think that even though it’s difficult to know exactly what is and isn’t moral in a universally true, non-childhood-dependent, non-external-factor-dependent way, it’s nevertheless quite plain to see that an objective universal morality can exist:
Suppose a world full of torture and mutilation and suffering and loneliness and hate and utter, abject misery for every thinking being, all the time, with no respite, for all eternity—a “hell”, in other words. I think it takes an unsupported assumption (or a “leap of faith” if you prefer!) to say that such a world would be bad and that we should avoid it and not create it—but it requires the tiniest, most reasonable and most fair possible assumption in all of philosophy.
Once you make that, it’s possible to (in theory!) measure the distance between this hell-world and any other world in world-space (not physical space but the theoretical parameter-space describing all possible worlds), and assess how similar or dissimilar other possible worlds are to the hell-world, and upon which axes. From that, I think it’s possible to bootstrap an entire objective universal morality.
...in principle! Of course in practice navigating the parameter-space is utterly computationally intractable and the best we can do with our limited tools and intellects is flawed navigation heuristics like “utilitarianism”, “virtue ethics”, etc. that -much like general relativity- work perfectly in some situations but break-down in others. These heuristics being flawed doesn’t mean that there’s no objective morality, even if we can’t yet figure-out what it says we should do in some situation.
(What about any beings that don’t make even the tiniest and most reasonable of assumptions that the hell-world is bad, and would be either supportive of or indifferent to making the real world like that?
On a philosophical level I would say that if they maintain that all worlds are equally acceptable and it literally does not matter what the world is like at all then they don’t have moral patienthood—in other words what they want by definition can’t matter, since everything is equally acceptable to them.
On a personal level, of course, I would say that such people are ☠️the enemy☠️ and must be opposed with every fibre of our beings if we want the world to ever not be a horrible place for everybody!)
I think a great many people have a net negative life, yes, based on how much of our lives we are obliged to spend doing stuff we don’t actually want to do, how much awful stuff vs. good stuff happens in the world, etc.
I think it depends a great deal on how you count it, though, and we can get any answer we like by using a different methodology! For example, if we asked everybody every ten minutes to give a yes/no answer on whether the thing they’re doing right now is something they actually, genuinely want to be doing, then subtracted all the “no”s from all the “yes”s, I think we’d get a huge negative number. The average person spends 90 minutes per day just sitting in traffic, 7 hours per day at work (most of which involves sitting all-but-motionless whilst staring at a screen, which I do not think represents any part of natural human flourishing), 2 hours doing never-ending mundane household chores, etc. etc. When I look at what the people around me (and the people I encounter online) do and say—nobody seems happy. Everybody seems to me to spend almost all their time doing stuff they actually don’t want to do (at every possible level, from childcare duties, to making career-defining promotion-worthy PowerPoint presentations, to whiling away a spare minute scrolling on their
portable mini sadness factoriesphones...), everybody seems angry and upset about stuff all the time, and the world seems full of horrible stuff happening almost everywhere, almost all the time, for almost no legible reasons.Conversely, I think if you were to approach people on their death-beds and ask them to look back on their lives and rate how happy they were, whether they regret anything, whether they were glad they were born, etc., I think most people would report being pretty happy. Even if you were to accost people at random on the street and ask them to look back at their life so far, I think most people would report that it was mostly happy.
This statistic* reports unintended pregnancies, not unwanted ones. That’s lumping-together an “I don’t particularly care to use contraception and if I make a baby then so be it” group, which in my experience includes a fair number of comfortably-off people in stable long-term relationships who are at least partially prepared to raise a child should the need arise, along with an “I actively don’t want to make a baby and it’ll ruin my whole life if I do” group. I would guess the former group and their children may have life happiness close to average—but I would be astonished if the latter group does!
(* Thanks for the source! It’s a pleasure to discuss things with somebody who actually provides citations!)